It probably took them about 20 minutes to make that sign. They couldn’t spend 20 seconds checking Wikipedia? Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics in 1936. That’s the year Jesse Owens, a black Olympic athlete from the US, won four gold medals and here’s a surprise for you:
Owens was cheered enthusiastically by 110,000 people in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and later ordinary Germans sought his autograph when they saw him in the streets. Owens was allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, an irony at the time given that blacks in the United States were denied equal rights. After a New York ticker-tape parade in his honor, Owens had to ride the freight elevator to attend his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Americans are protesting the Olympics being held in China because of human rights violations in Tibet. Should the US not host it because of human rights violations in Guantanamo?
I don’t even care about the Olympics. The only Olympic sport I ever watch is hockey. I only got into this because of this ignorant protester. But I’ll let Jesse Owens have the last word:
A few months before his death, Owens had tried unsuccessfully to convince President Jimmy Carter not to boycott the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow, arguing that the Olympic ideal was to be a time-out from war and above politics.
It’s boggling to see a sign like that, but I guess Nazi is like saying 100% bad, which is why invoking Godwin’s Law becomes so cartoonish.
To make the whole issue seem even more absurd and contradictory, the 1936 Berlin Olympics were the start of the Olympic Torch rally, it might have even been Speer’s idea, I’m not sure. But it just illustrates that good things can come from any source.
I’m not much of a sports fan myself, but I agree, the purpose of the Olympic games was to rise above politics and the abuse of that ideal is reflecting poorly on the western world. This is the wrong avenue to show support for Tibet or Darfur or whatever other human rights issues, because all these protests are doing is dividing our cultures when we both need to show more goodwill.
Yes, all olympics should be boycotted.