Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

“In the Olympic Games,” the 2004 Athens XXVIII Olympiad website proclaims, “what matters most is to share the common vision of promoting peace and friendship among all the people of the world, through the noble competition in sport.”

The sentiment is derived, ostensibly, from the spirit of the original Olympics. In ancient Greece, each Olympiad was accompanied by a truce among all the warring city-states of the region, and for the duration of the games, the known world would limit the competition of nations to the confines of the athletic stadium. The Olympic flame, in the modern pictorial lexicon, is a symbol of our inheritance of what our nostalgia leads us to believe was that ancient spirit, bringing to our modern world the wisdom of antiquity.

As in those ancient times, one of the most defining characteristics of the modern human condition is a state of perpetual international conflict, and today it’s hard to imagine even contemplating anything like a ritual truce. Indeed, even the simulacrum is a challenge to maintain. In addition to serving as a showcase for the unity of mankind, the modern incarnation of the Olympics has become the largest soapbox in the world, easily exploited to advance the divisive nationalistic ideologies of both the most and the least powerful peoples on the planet. Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to espouse the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial supremacy. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in an effort to secure the release of 200 Arab prisoners, and provoked a standoff with the German police that ended in a bloodbath. In 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States used the games to strike a calculated posture of indignation, leading an international boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The U.S.S.R. responded in kind in 1984, when the games were in Los Angeles. Though the Olympics are meant to celebrate the best of humanity, what is best is routinely outdone by what is worst. Between the cosmopolitan Olympic ideal and the parochial prerogatives of political actors, the contest is all but preordained.

This year has proven no exception. Thanks to the Bush administration, the United States has entered the global arena in Athens with as close to a pariah status as it has ever been accorded. As if to celebrate the honor, the Bush campaign has refused to concede to the demands of the U.S. Olympic Committee to pull off the air a political television advertisement that uses the games to tout the dubious record of the Administration’s intervention in Iraq. "Freedom is spreading throughout the world like a sunrise,” the Bush campaign ad’s announcer proclaims. “And this Olympics there will be two more free nations. And two fewer terrorist regimes." Flags of Iraq and Afghanistan wave in the distance.

The U.S. Olympic Commission is not alone in its disapproval of the campaign’s opportunism. The players for one of the two “free nations” are outraged, and the Iraqi soccer coach has wondered aloud, "The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?" The Bush administration’s invasion and continued occupation of Iraq stands among the most internationally divisive acts of world history. The campaign’s choice of the Olympic Games as a vehicle to sing the war’s praises says nothing about the solidarity of the community of “free nations” competing in Athens, but is another example, as if we needed it, of the Administration’s absolute indifference to the opinions of any other member of that community.

The cynical irony of the Bush campaign’s appropriation of the Olympic ideal of international solidarity to espouse an unapologetically unilateralist and militaristic foreign policy conforms to an almost formulaic pattern of Republican propaganda making. It is the same Alice in Wonderland algorithm that has produced such absurdities as a draft-dodging deserter casting doubt upon the credentials of a Vietnam War hero; a campaign commercial that morphs the face of a Vietnam vet triple amputee Democratic Senator with that of Osama bin Laden; and a public relations campaign that associates the heroism of first responders on September 11th with the foreign adventures of a trigger-happy administration, shortly before that same administration guts federal support for firefighters all over the country and slashes war veterans’ benefits.

One might be tempted to ask is nothing sacred, if not for the fact that the Olympics have never been spared such cheap political maneuvers. But as the strategic misfire of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has begun to show, while disinformation can well serve the purposes of distraction and obfuscation, you can’t build a viable campaign out of it. Nor can you make a fact out of the fiction of a “free Iraq” merely by pronouncing its name. The lie is simply too stark to be packaged as anything but a lie.