Olympic Racism and Fascism

COLONIALISM, FASCISM, AND THE MODERN OLYMPICS

Thanks to our indoctrination into Western European society, many people know that the ancient Olympics were held by the Greeks every four years, between 776 BC and AD 393 (lasting some 1,000 years, the latter part being run by the Romans until the empire switched to Christianity and banned paganism).

The Olympics were elite events even then, at which only the nobility, the wealthy, and professional athletes could attend. Slaves and women (other than prostitutes) were prohibited. These ancient games served important political and economic purposes for the ruling class, and were carried out under the pretext of religious ceremonies.

Considering their Greek origins, and the role of ancient Greece in the history of Western Civilization, the establishment of the Olympics as a global phenomenon should be seen as part of the overall process of European colonization. How else could a relatively obscure, ancient, European sport & religious festival become a global event-- except through colonization?

The much celebrated founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a member of the French nobility, who established the IOC in 1894 (President of the IOC from 1894-1925), stated clearly his belief in colonialism:

“Colonies are like children: it is relatively easy to bring them into the world; the difficult thing is to raise them properly. They do not grow up by themselves, but need to be taken care of, coddled, and pampered by the mother country…”
(The Olympic Crisis; Sports, Politics, and the Moral Order, p. 39, quotes from Coubertin’s Pages d’historire Contempiraire, Paris 1901, p. 4)

“In 1912, Coubertin published his advice to colonial regimes on how they could best make sport an instrument of administration. It is a great mistake, he says, to assume that a victory by the ‘dominated race’ over the dominating one constitutes a dangerous temptation to rebellion. On the contrary, the example of British India shows that such incidents actually legitimize colonial rule in the eyes of the ‘winners’ [the colonized].”
(The Olympic Crisis, p. 39, quotes from Coubertin’s Essais de psycologie sportive, Paris 1914)

Today’s modern Olympics are an affirmation of Western Civilization and the global empire it has constructed. They are a means to expand its ideology & culture. Coubertin himself was very clear about this. The clearest Olympic endorsement of racist & fascist white supremacy, however, was yet to come.

In 1929, the American industrialist & real estate businessman Avery Brundage became president of the US Olympic Committee (USOC). In 1932, the IOC awarded the 1936 Olympics to Germany. In 1933, the Nazis, under Adolf Hitler, were voted into power.

Backed by powerful business interests in both Germany & the US, Hitler had used political as well as violent means to gain power. Nazi ‘stormtroopers’ were used to terrorize all opposition, while the Nazi Party was well-funded to carry out political campaigns. An important part of its politics was anti-Semitism; Jews were demonized and came to symbolize the corrupt global system that kept Germany weak and impoverished.

As the 1936 Berlin Olympics approached, and as the oppressive, racist and brutal policies of the Nazi regime became well known, Jewish groups and others began to call for a boycott. In the USA, a vocal campaign to boycott the Games and to not send a US team, began.

Brundage, a well-known racist and fascist supporter, actively undermined the boycott campaign and succeeded in having the USOC reject it in a committee vote. He dismissed it all as a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy.” Brundage also stated,

“Some Jews must realize that they cannot use these Olympics as an instrument in their boycott of the Nazis.”
(quoted in “The Politics of Sport & Apartheid,” by Peter Hein, in Sport, Culture and Ideology, p. 233)

Notice how Brundage worded this so that the Jewish ‘boycott of the Nazis’ appears totally unrelated to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In fact, Brundage would repeat this mantra that the Olympics were ‘non-political’ throughout his later career as president of the IOC.

While Jewish and anti-fascist groups continued to oppose the 1936 Games, the Nazis prepared for a massive celebration of German fascism using the Olympics as a propaganda platform. This was made all the more successful by new forms of mass communications then being perfected, such as films and radio. In order to do this, the most blatant aspects of Nazi terror and violence were temporarily concealed:

“In August 1936 the Nazis audaciously achieved a propaganda triumph by staging the Olympic Games. Massive efforts had been undertaken to camouflage the evil nature of the regime… anti-Semitic slogans were removed from walls and roadsides… Every sign of racial, religious or political persecution was temporarily hidden… even as the Olympics were taking place, the concentration camp at Oranienburg, scarcely half an hour’s journey from the splendid new Olympic Stadium, was jailed with Jews, socialists… and other anti-Nazis.”
(Hitler’s Games, jacket cover)

Yet, this ‘white-wash’ of the Nazi regime was merely a pretext under which Olympic officials could say there were really no problems in Hitler’s Germany. This helped undermine protests & boycotts, and cast doubts over the validity of reports concerning Nazi repression (just as it began to gather momentum in its preparations for war). However, the Nazi’s racist & oppressive policies were well known, even at this time. IOC President at the time, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour,

“…knew as well as anybody else, that by 1936 Nazi Germany had become a police state… They knew that Jews had fled from Germany in tens of thousands, and that hundreds of their less fortunate brethren had been rounded up into concentration camps, where they were being humiliated and tortured.”
(Hitler’s Games, p. 10)

As it was, the 1936 Berlin Olympics were a huge propaganda victory for the Nazis. They served to legitimize the Nazi regime in the eyes of the world, and to mobilize German citizens even stronger behind the Nazis. The Olympic torch relay, running from Olympia, Greece, to Berlin, Germany, was another propaganda triumph, and was initiated by the Nazis themselves as a means to popularize fascism throughout Europe and within Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, understood the significance of the success of the Berlin Games, stating:

“[The Olympics are] a victory for the German cause… The result is a renaissance of national ambition I am so pleased about. One can once again be proud of Germany.”
(quoted in Berlin Games, quotes Goebbels 1936 Diaries)

The Nazis commissioned Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker who had made Triumph of the Will (at the time, a powerful propaganda film about the 6th Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress), to make a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Games (Olympia).

“That the success of the [Olympics] gave Hitler an enormous boost, both moral and political, nobody could deny… It is tempting to speculate on what might have happened if attempts to boycott the Games had succeeded. If… the IOC had moved the Festival to some less rebarbative country, Nazi prestige would have suffered a serious blow, and the rest of the world would have been made to think much harder about what was happening in Germany.”
(Hitler’s Games, pp. 228-229)

“If the world had boycotted Hitler’s Olympics, the course of history might have been different, asserts Rolf Pauls, the West German NATO representative…”
(The Olympic Crisis, p. 16)

Former IOC President Coubertin, who had opposed any efforts to boycott the ’36 Games, came out of retirement to endorse the Nazi Olympics, later rejecting the idea that they had somehow been used to promote fascism:

“The Olympic idea sacrificed to propaganda? That is entirely false. The imposing success of the Berlin Games has served the Olympic ideal magnificently.”
(The Olympic Crisis, p. 42)

Just three years later, in 1939, the Nazis launched their Blitzkrieg (‘lightning wars’) into Western Europe, initiating World War 2, the most destructive war in history. Over 50 million people are estimated to have been killed, with some 6 million in Nazi concentration camps. Although not a cause, the 1936 Berlin Olympics were certainly a contributing factor to World War 2.
In 1941, Brundage was expelled from the America First Committee for his Nazi sympathies, and he remained a staunch defender of Germany during and after World War 2. In 1945, he was elected a vice-president of the IOC, and in 1952 became President, a position he would hold until 1972.

Under Brundage’s presidency, the student massacre in Mexico City 1968, and the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes in Munich 1972, occurred. In both cases, he ordered the Games to continue. In Mexico ‘68, his response to the ‘Black Power’ salutes given by two African-Americans was to order their immediate expulsion from the Games and to strip them of their medals.

At the conclusion of the ’72 Games, in his closing speech, he famously regretted “the lost battle for Rhodesia” (see The Games Must Go On, p. 74), at that time an African country fighting a fierce anti-colonial liberation struggle (now Zimbabwe). He also opposed efforts to ban S. Africa and Rhodesia from taking part in the Olympics due to their racist and brutal apartheid regimes (although the IOC was eventually forced to concede, due to widespread boycotts launched by African countries, to ban Rhodesia; S. Africa had been banned from competition in 1964 following the Soweto uprising & massacre).

Brundage was not the only fascist to be a member of the IOC, nor its only fascist president (in fact, a far more blatant fascist IOC president was yet to come). Other notable IOC members, including those on the executive board, included: German General Karl von Halt, who became an IOC member in 1929, who was an accused World War 2 war criminal, was elected to the IOC board in 1957; Marquise Melchior de Polignac, became an IOC member in 1914, served six months in a French prison as a Nazi collaborator during WW2, remained an IOC member until 1950; the Italian fascist Count Paolo Than di Revel, IOC member in 1932, member of the executive board in 1954; Count Albert Bonacossa, a supporter of the Italian fascist Mussolini, IOC member in 1925, voted to the board in 1952; General Giorgio Vaccaro, an Italian fascist and member of IOC after WW2, despite attempts by the Italian Olympic Committee to have him removed; the German Adolf Friedrich Mecklenburg, one of the closest assistants to top Nazi official Joseph Goebbels, remained in the IOC after WW2.

The most well-known and openly fascist member of the IOC was the Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch. He had been a long-time member of the IOC and President from 1980 to 2001. He is today an honorary lifetime president of the IOC, and in 2007 still actively involved with IOC activities.

Besides being a long-time IOC member & President, Samaranch was also a long-time fascist, serving under the Franco regime in Spain as an official, and at one time governor of Catalonia. During this time, Samaranch publicly wore the fascist uniform. He was a strong supporter of Franco, who died in 1975 after maintaining power since 1936. During this period, Spain was an oppressive police state, in which torture, imprisonment, and executions were commonly used to counter political opposition.

Not surprisingly, the fascist backgrounds of many IOC members, including some of its presidents, are completely ignored by the IOC, official Olympic histories, and the corporate media, which maintain that the Olympics have nothing to do with politics.

In reality, the modern Olympics have always had a strong association with pro-colonial and fascist elites, from its ‘founding father’ (Coubertin) to recent IOC presidents (Samaranch). The Olympics themselves are an ideological and cultural tool for imperialism, involving powerful political and economic forces. In addition, the Olympics have been used to strengthen & legitimize fascist, military & authoritarian regimes, including the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Mexico 1968, Seoul 1988, and China in 2008.

Sources

Berlin Games; How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream, by Guy Walters, John Murray Publishing, London 2006

Hitler’s Games; the 1936 Olympics, by Duff Hart-Davis, Harper & Row Publishers, New York 1986

Hitler’s Olympics; the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, by Christopher Hilton, Sutton Publishing, England 2006

The Olympic Crisis; Sports, Politics, and the Moral Order, by John Hoberman, Caratzas Publishing, Co., Inc., New York 1986

Sport, Culture and Ideology, Edited by Jennifer Hargreaves, Rutledge, London 1982

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