25/03/2023 strategic-culture.org  9 min 🇬🇧 #226085

Minsk, Moscow & The Moral Olympics

Declan Hayes

Lofty ideals that were an integral part of the ancient Olympics and that underwrite the founding of the modern Olympic games are not for NATO.

In assessing NATO's ongoing efforts to terrorise Russian and Belarusian athletes, we must include Minsk sparrows, Muscovite goalkeepers, Nazi paratroopers, African Americans and many more in our calculus to make sense of this latest bout of naked NATO fascism.

Let's start with the late POTUS Nixon, who had the singular honour of welcoming the Soviet Olympic gymnasts , Olga Korbut, the Minx Sparrow included, to the White House. Those young Russian and Belarusian women revolutionised gymnastics and, though the pint-sized Korbut was far from their best performer, she stole the hearts of the world, mine and POTUS Nixon's included because of her demeanour in both victory and defeat. Not only that but Nixon made the critical point that whatever political and other differences existed between the Soviet and NATO political elites, those differences had nothing to do with young athletes like Korbut (or Valieva), whose waking hours are necessarily dedicated to finessing their chosen craft.

Korbut's gravity-defying stunts on the uneven bars entranced the world, as did her tears when she lost the gold medal through basic mistakes that form part of the grit of such high octane contests. The importance of Korbut's tears is they were replicated by figure skater Kamila Valieva, when an unprecedented bout of bullying by the BBC and other thuggish NATO outlets caused the young Russian teenager to slip up at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. In one of a number of such stupid propaganda whoppers, NATO wants us to believe that Korbut's trainers consoled their young athlete, whereas Valieva's attacked their own young prodigy.

The global importance of Russian Valieva is that, had she not been so unscrupulously terrorised by NATO's media thugs, she might have taken the Beijing games by storm, much as Belarusian Korbut took the 1972 Munich Olympics and, just like Korbut, who inspired literally millions of young girls to make gymnastics their sport of choice, so also might Valieva have done the same not only for figure skating but for all that is good in sport and in life itself.

But such lofty ideals that were an integral part of the ancient Olympics and that underwrite the founding of the modern Olympic games are not for NATO. Far better to exclude and bully young girls like Valieva for the crime of being Russian, for being, in short, untermensch.

On the subject of untermensch, NATO likes to lie how Jesse Owens defied Hitler at the 1936 Olympic by winning four gold medals. Not only did Hitler not care a whit about that or, if truth be told, about sport in general, but Herr Hitler himself had an excellent 1936 Olympics, as Germany topped the medals' table (101 medals to the Americans' 57 and 14 for Great Britain) but the legendary film director Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia was universally acclaimed, something that Owens never enjoyed, especially not in his native U.S.A.

Although Owens pipped Germany's  Nazi saluting Luz Long for gold in the High Jump, Owens credits his victory to tactical advice Long gave him in the preliminary rounds. Although Long's friendship with Owens is captured in both Riefenstahl's Olympia, and in Owns' own accounts, it is worth recalling how both Long and Owens fared after Berlin.

Long was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but was captured in Sicily July 1943 by the sporting British, who bled him to death over the following four days. Olympics godfather Avery Brundage, meanwhile, forced Owens to race all over Europe, in a scam that enriched Brundage and his crew but did not put a single, solitary dime into the pockets of Owens, who was ostracised thereafter and forced to run races against horses to put bread on his table. When Black Power protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos did their 1968 protest, Owens was wheeled out, Uncle Tom style, to make them behave. Both Carlos and Smith, along with Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, who helped their protests, were persecuted by the top brass of their respective countries for decades after their peaceful protest; they were the Valievas of their day.

As, of course, was Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, who won gold in the 1960 Rome Olympics in the light heavyweight division but whose toughest fights were not against fellow boxers but against the same dark forces that tried to crush Smith, Norman and Carlos when they were not slaughtering Vietnamese children .

Although Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, is credited with giving Hitler's Aryan ideology a black eye by defeating Germany's Max Schmeling in their 1938 bout, it is worth noting that Schmeling financially supported the Brown Bomber in later life and that Schmeling was drafted as a paratrooper into Hitler's Luftwaffe, before being incapacitated by hostile fire during the Battle of Crete.

After fellow Luftwaffe paratrooper Bert Trautman ended up as a prisoner of war in England, he became a professional goalkeeper, before ending up as Manchester City's man between the sticks where he starred in the 1955/6 FA CUP final, despite having a broken neck.

Although Trautman eventually became a Manchester City legend, he had to endure massive protests for being a "Nazi" at a time when NATO's media were slamming the West German team ( 1954 World Cup winners) and Germans in general for not being human. Russia's legendary Lev Yashin dissented and claimed, rightly, that only Trautman was in the same class as himself. Given what a force of nature Yashin was and given his own tribulations during the Battle for Moscow, no higher praise could be lavished on Trautman.

As regards the average English football supporters, they just wanted to see brilliant goalkeeping, the type Yashin and Trautman epitomised. Indeed, when COVID closed down their own English leagues, the more diehard supporters switched to following the  Belarusian league, which continued business as usual. Were that to happen today, God knows what rough justice NATO would demand for England's armchair football supporters for collaborating with Belarusian athletes.

Then take Russian tennis icon Anastasia Potapova's  massive crime of wearing a Spartak Moscow top. As Potapova is only 21 and a brilliant athlete in her own right, it is only natural that she would have a passing interest in one of Russia's most successful football franchises rather than, say, Poland's far right ultras Iga Światek knows a thing or two about. If Poland's Iga Światek had instead concentrated on her own game, instead of denigrating  Potapova's sartorial choices, she might not have so ignominiously lost her own tennis match to Kazakhstan's  Elena Rybakina. But then, when Polish and Ukrainian Nazis cannot differentiate a Russian flag from a French flag, folk like Potapova are best just getting on with improving their own game and letting clowns like Światek cackle on.

For cackling and brown envelopes is what all NATO's sporting enforcers are all about. Barring Valieva and her fellow athletes does not serve Olympus. Rather, it serves the needs of NATO's minions assigned to destroy sport, all while hiding behind Owens, who was allowed shine in Berlin and Ali, who was discriminated in his own American home town, before being jailed for being, with Valieva, Korbut, Potapova and Comănechi the truest of Olympians by sacrificing himself for Vietnam which has only won a relatively modest five medals, as it sees the Games for the circus of NATO doping and cheating that it is.

And, though Vietnam will send another modest crew to Paris 2024, Afghanistan (a total of two bronze medals to date) might also be barred, along with Russia and Belarus. Afghanistan's crime is they have so far refused to  send a women's volleyball team to Paris just to make up NATO's numbers. Although Afghan women would no doubt enhance the Games, the Afghans who, like the Vietnamese before them, have suffered from decades of NATO war crimes, have understandably other priorities, not least because NATO has stolen their financial reserves on some trumped up charge Russians would be all too familiar with.

Whether we are talking about Afghanistan, Belarus, Russia or Vietnam, NATO show themselves to be awful sports, fixated as they are on attacking Afghan and Russian women for their respective sartorial choices. Valieva, Potapova and others can, however, take solace in that they are not in Kiev, whose mayor, former heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko, aka Dr Ironfist, would most likely have them, Olga Korbut and all of Russia's other perfectionists, strapped to lampposts, painted in the Ukrainian flag and whipped for not being Polish or  Ukrainian ultras.

Although Valieva, Potapova and others were born for nobler destinies than that, they and all women like them in all sports can take solace in that the true Olympic spirit they, Ali, Schmeling, Yashin and so many others epitomise will prevail and that, like Korbut, Smith, Carlos, Norman and other true Olympians before them, future generations will salute them and call them blessed.

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