There is perhaps no fury quite like an inconvenienced journalist’s. The prevalence of stories regarding the seemingly primitive hotel accommodations in Sochi — more scathing and numerous than reports on recent evidence of possible government corruption — only demonstrate this notion’s veracity.
Yet, if there’s reason to look critically on any aspect of Russia’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics, it’s the honor and validation given to a nation whose appalling human rights record should preclude it from any such international recognition.
The Olympics bring merit to a global scale — the best compete against the best for international glory and personal recognition.
The Soviet Union represented the complete antithesis of this. Collectivistic sentiment brutally repressed the hopes and dreams of untold millions and termed individual interest the enemy of some mythological national consolidation of soul. This kind of forced altruism, codified in the constitution with the tawdry platitude of “From each according to his need, to each according to his ability,” made a profane sacrifice of human spirit which is written in large, bloody letters in the annals of history.
Could anything be more contrary to the meritocracy embodied by the Olympics?
Modern Russia obviously isn’t accountable for the sins of the past. This kind of thinking is reprehensible for exactly the same reason as communism — it assigns blanket guilt en masse, without regard to actual contextual differences.
But ideas are incredibly resistant to eradication as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, who persist in their flagrant disregard for individual rights, continue to demonstrate. Only last year, they unilaterally assumed each other’s positions.
As cameras record the Olympic opening ceremony, media coverage of Russia’s ongoing repression of protesters in the Ukraine is virtually nonexistent.
More alarmingly, the receding of communist regimes has softened the world’s outrage at the horrors of its epistemology. During a report on the opening ceremonies in Sochi, NBC, while showing the infamous hammer and sickle logo of the Communist Party, termed the Red Revolution a “pivotal experiment.”
By some estimates, 94 million people were killed by communist regimes during the 20th century. The best way to serve those unfortunate souls who met their deaths at the hands of such monsters as Stalin and Mao is to never allow another such system to actualize. To do anything else is to denigrate their memories.
But this is exactly what has happened. In Cuba and Venezuela, dictators oppress dissidents. And in America, once a refuge for those displaced by violent despotism, 11 percent of respondents to a 2011 Rasmussen poll thought communism was a better system than republicanism.
Modernity has betrayed the ghosts of the millions murdered by totalitarian and centralized governments. Collectively, of course, guilt cannot be assigned to every living being. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who fell victim to Hitler’s national socialism, famously said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
This sentiment should be in the forefront of every mind that participates, passively or actively, in the winter Olympics.