NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Black/Red View
Olympics and capitalist crises
by John Alan
While media coverage of the Beijing Olympics was filled with the quest of swimmer Michael Phelps to win eight gold medals to surpass Mark Spitz's seven in the 1972 Munich Olympics, it is impossible to comprehend how it did not include even a mention of the Munich massacre. Within a 24-hour period on Sept. 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists invaded the Olympic Village resulting in the murder of 11 Israeli Olympians and one German policeman, and the deaths of five Palestinians. Mark Spitz was himself immediately taken out of the country because he is Jewish and an assassination attempt was feared. Here are excerpts from my column on that horrific event that appeared in the October 1972 News & Letters.
The Olympic Games, just concluded in Munich, Germany, were another bloody political episode in the inhuman mess that world capitalism perpetuates. It has shown how very short the distance is between the Olympiad's eternal flame and the burning villages of Vietnam; it focused the continuing racism in America and Africa, and the cretinism of individual terrorism...
The goal of the XX Olympics was a "festival of peace, in the spirit of Olympic ideals, characterized by understanding, reconciliation, and the brotherhood of all peoples," so declared the Lord Mayor of Munich, Hans Hocken Vogel. In the face of the realities of the world situation, the sentiments expressed by Dr. Vogel reveal the unspeakable depths of hypocrisy by the ruling classes, rejected by sane people all over the world.
At this very moment the American imperialists in Vietnam are pursuing the most barbarous war in the history of the human race, babies and the elderly are indiscriminately cremated alive with napalm and bombs....
Some naive sportswriters are lamenting that the Olympics are becoming "politicalÉand politics and sports do not mix." Modern Olympics have been a political expression of national chauvinism from its very beginning in 1896.
General Douglas MacArthur in 1928, when he headed the American Olympic Committee, could not rise above this type of nationalism. And in Hitler's Germany of 1936, the Berlin Olympics were tailored to fit the needs of Nazi imperialism, and the U.S.'s Avery Brundage (still on the I.O.C.) helped to stifle the strong American movement to boycott.
As long as the political power of the Olympics remained firmly in the hands of the I.O.C.--a faceless autonomous organization, composed mainly of old, wealthy men--little or nothing was said about Olympic "politics."
MEXICO--THE TURNING POINT
The 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico City, was a political turning point--it was there that the revolutionary Black consciousness, born out of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, was symbolized by the action of the two Black American athletes, who, while awaiting their awards on the victory stand, gave the Black Power salute of a raised clenched fist while the U.S. National Anthem was being played.
The generally apolitical quietism of athletes had shifted to a new awareness which challenged the sham internationalism and individualism which the waxen men of the I.O.C. had been touting for 64 years. The implications of the challenge were immediately grasped by the I.O.C. They immediately shipped the two winners back home.
Despite the slaughter at Munich, it was in Mexico, 1968, where the bloodiest of all Olympics took place. The pre-game student demonstration--which threatened to jeopardize the profits of the Olympic backers--was put down by the Mexican Government with such ferocity that hundreds of students were shot dead and hundreds more arrested. Many of them are still incarcerated after four years.
In Munich, two Black U.S. winners, Vince Matthews and Wayne Collett, chatted during the award ceremony and the playing of the U.S. National Anthem. For this "unconcern," the I.O.C., with concerned hypocrisy, expelled them for life from future Olympics! Collett said he "would not stand at attention because he did not believe the words of the Anthem represented the true attitudes of whites toward Blacks in the U.S.A."
Olga Connolly, now an American citizen, and the U.S. standard bearer in Munich, was winner of a gold medal in 1956 for Czechoslovakia. This year, she tried to organize a peace movement in the Olympic Village but her efforts were thwarted by officials. She aptly summed up what modern Olympics are all about--"Olympic officials speak the words of brotherhood and peace, this is political mouthwash. From the inside you become disgusted to see that the Games, a kind of Circus Maximus, are not conducted for anything else but commercialism, medal counts and for political profit."
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