Lessons for Global Peace from the 33rd Olympiad

This year’s 33rd Summer Games in Paris were as usual notable for the fabulous performances and achievements of the 10,714 athletes involved and the extraordinary stories, achievements, resilience and courage that were behind so many of them.

Beyond such obvious triumphs, this year’s Games also taught some striking lessons about the nature of our 21st century world – and the principles and policies needed to restore peace and stability in it.

First, the overall medal count of the Games taught the basic principle of a unipolar world: Once again the United States dominated the overall medal count as it has in all the Games since the collapse of communism before the 1992 Barcelona ones. But China tied the United States for the number of gold medals won. China dominated the diving and was a superpower in gymnastics just as the US dominated Track and Field.

In other words, our world in Sports as in everything else is diverse and multipolar.

Should China be banished from the Games because it poses a greater challenge to the United States than anyone else? Of course not! China’s rise needs to be celebrated. This positive Reversal of Fortune for the Chinese people compared to the miseries they endured for three quarters of the 20th century is an extraordinary achievement. It is reflected and given just tribute before the eyes of the world in celebration of humanity every four years now and it is right that this should be so.

The crucial lesson that needs to be further drawn from China’s sporting achievements in Paris by US policymakers is that the most populous nation in history (and yes, India is now challenging for that distinction too) cannot and must not be relegated to pariah status.

Since China has also been for the past quarter century the greatest concentration of basic industrial and manufacturing power on the planet, the true “Workshop of the World,” such an insane goal is impossible to implement anyway.

However, this is a simple, basic lesson that those Arkham Asylums of the Clinically Insane, the foreign policy think tanks of Washington DC and their eager, tamed hamster-counterparts in London have yet to learn.

Second, the banishment of Russia from these Games because of the ongoing tragic war in Ukraine is obscene, unjustifiable and a shameful stain on the honor of and principles of the entire Olympic Movement.

For Russia’s opponent in the war, Ukraine, armed to the teeth by the United States and NATO with the express aim of killing Russian soldiers and draining the lifeblood of the Russian people, was granted honorable participation in the Games. It was right that this should be so. But Russian athletes should have been there as well, just as Israeli, Arab, Iranian and Palestinian athletes and those of all other Muslim nations rightly participated too.

Third, woke nutrition and green theories of sustainability simply do not work and are a menace to human wellbeing in the short term and to possible survival in the longer term.

Outgoing International Olympic Committee Chairman Thomas Bach, after a previously well-meaning and honorable 13 years of leadership, fell for the absurdities of sustainability and other Politically Correct myths hook, line and sinker. In so doing he made a mockery of both Christianity and the best of the ancient classical Greek and Roman traditions on which the Olympics were founded in or around 776 BC and under which they continued for the next 1,200 years.

Under Bach’s eager approval, “sustainable” recipes devoid of meat, eggs and other animal proteins were force fed to the young athletes in the Olympic cafeterias. Thousands of young athletes needlessly suffered in what should have been the definitive inspirational experience of their lives. 

Athletes and national organizers from the wealthier nations like the United States, Britain and Australia as well as France itself recognized the problem. They had the resources to move fastest to satisfy the nutritional needs of their national teams as did China. The dominance of a handful of other countries in the medal listings reflected this. Once again, high minded liberal environmental fairy tales inflicted disproportionate suffering on the poor and the weak nations and elements of society who could not afford to escape their crazed commands.

For this reason, times and records slumped disappointingly during the opening days of the Games and menus had to be urgently revised amid humiliating bungled chaos at the last moment. The myths of sustainability were exposed as a procrustean bed of torture and humiliation on which the literal biological needs of young athletes from around the globe – meant to symbolically as well as in actuality represent the bright future of the human race – were shamelessly sacrificed.

We already have seen on the macroeconomic scale, the economies of Britain, France, Germany, Canada and the United States itself being shamefully and contemptibly sacrificed on the myth that wind, solar power and other unreliable or plain worthless technologies can replace oil, gas, coal and solid engineering. 

Indeed, we see the extraordinary insanity that nuclear fission power which produces as its side effect plutonium – an artificial element so lethal and dangerous it nowhere exists in Nature outside of Mankind’s devilish and worst ingenuity – is now touted as au supposedly “clean” alternative far superior to all the natural fuels based on the chemistry of the carbon cycle. Thus, the crazed and drunken fantasies of the environmentalists and their terrified, cowardly obsession with imagined dangers of global warming transmute effortlessly into a war on the carbon cycle on which all human, animal and flora organic life is based.

It is right and proper and within the great Olympic traditions of inclusiveness that gay young male and female athletes be included in the Games too. There is also a case for including the handful of genuine transgender participants as well. But they should have their own events just as male and female athletes do. The pummeling and almost killing in an Olympic ring of brave young lady Italian boxer Angela Carini by Algeria’s Imane Khelef was a case in point. Khelef went on to “win” a gold medal. But her /his precious medal will be as worthless and devalued as the International Olympic Committee whose rulings permitted her/him to pulverize genuine young women with impunity.

In the end, the Olympics celebrated and taught the wisdom of the great traditional values of ancient Classical Greek and Roman – and also Christian – civilization. They have more than fulfilled the hopes and vision with which the great Pierre Baron De Coubertin and his colleagues founded them in 1896. 

The Olympic movement failed to prevent the catastrophic outbreak of World War I and World War II: That was not its responsibility or its goal. Nor should it be expected to avert the imminent threat of World War III that now hangs as the greatest ever Sword of Damocles over the survival of the entire human race. 

However, the Olympics do offer us endless lessons, in hope, fair play and human decency: The crucial tools we will need to navigate, recover from and learn from all the crises and catastrophes ahead and to eventually restore the world.

May the Olympic Flame never die and the Light of the Games Shine Forever!