Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Olympic Torch Relay History, Nazi Origins - Beyond Carl Diem
Share:
by Sudha Krishna | October 30, 2009 at 09:24 am
4342 views | 2 Recommendations | 3 comments
Videos
As the Olympic torch relay begins its 100 day journey through Canada, with over 12,0000 Canadians receiving an opportunity to carry the symbol of "peace, goodwill and athletic vigor" it is worth acknowledging that the Olympic torch relay was a brainchild of Nazi Germany.
Simply put there was not an Olympic Torch Relay before the Berlin Games in 1936, so in a remarkable act of collective forgetting the Olympic torch and the relay have become magnets for corporate sponsorship, and accompanying national "warm fuzzy feeling" - all of designed for easy media consumption.
In the lead up to the torch relay few have paid any attention to its history. John Allenmang, of the Globe and Mail eloquently documented the story of the torch relay.
Without the propaganda artists who staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics in all its triumphant glory, lovingly recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's mesmerizing documentary film Olympia, we wouldn't have the government-supported cross-country relay that is bringing the flame to Vancouver.
"The torch relay is a total fabrication," says Ira B. Nadel of the University of British Columbia, who has studied the techniques Riefenstahl used to aestheticize the Nazi cause. "The Germans invented it for the 1936 Olympics. There was nothing like it in the ancient Olympics."
The idea for relay came from the Nazi Sports Minister Carl Diem and was seized as an opportunity by Joesph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda minister to present a friendly face to the world.
So 3,000 freshly scrubbed German males were picked to run the two week relay in a carefully orchestrated route.
Their route looks suspiciously like a plan for later Nazi domination, as it wound its way through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia and finally into Germany over a mere 11 days.
"They were rehearsing the nazification of Europe and ceremonially visualizing what a new Europe might look like," says John Hoberman, a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Texas and author of The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics and the Moral Order. "Their goal was to leave behind a certain inspired fraction of the population who would act out a form of submission to Nazi rule."
The culimination of the relay was the lighting of the torch in Berlin's Olympic Stadium captured to dismayingly brilliant effect by Riefenstahl.
Now, the Olympic Torch is on Canadian soil for the third time. The news will tell stories of those who will carry it, you know, those feel good stories off some kid in some small town getting that chance of a lifetime, the celebrity who says the all the right words. It will package and designed - easy to swallow.
But what if those Olympic Torch Relay stories started something like this: "The Olympic Torch Relay touched down in Canada today. A brain child of the Nazi's, the torch will be carried by 12,000 Canadians from coast-to-coast..."
Hmmm..That doesn't exactly feel right does it?
But then in our hyper-now media age, history and its unpleasant finger pointing have been defeated - replaced by enthusiastic, well meaning, torch bearing fabricators of nostalgia .
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Crowd Power
Sudha Krishna
Vancouver, Canada
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (3)
at 08:48 on December 18th, 2009
Bravo ! The telling the truth will not change the general outcome. But it prevents lies changing US. One Olympian who had the privilege to observe the mechanism from inside, refferred to the Olympic circles as "the chains on Mankind".
at 10:42 on January 7th, 2010
Who cares?That's not what the torch is seen as by most people, so why try and taint the vision of what most people think is great. Let's look at this the other way, using a very close example to what you're saying in this. The swastika. So, when anyone in the modern day sees a swastika it means bad, it is a logo for evil essentially. But let's look at the history of it; The swastika used to be a symbol of good. The name swastika even translates to "To do good". HOWEVER since the nazis used it it is perceived as something terrible. But since you're saying we should cling to what the original meaning of something was then the swastika means to do good, right? So we should put swastikas on our city transit, on our police cars, all homeless shelters should have a big swastika on their doors right? By no means do I agree with the swastika, or nazis or anything. In fact I believe very strongly against it. What I'm trying to put light on is the fact that what the olympic torch means now, and what it originally meant are two VERY different things. Why ruin what it is now because of what it started with?There are hundreds of examples of this very situation. Think about it.
at 10:40 on January 26th, 2010
The problem is that it still means the same thing... while the torch was being carried, a mezmorizing and captivating spectacle (propaghanda), Hitler was able to forge on with his regime.. people were being swept into concentration camps, unbeknownst to the rest of the world. In the same fashion, although currently not to the same level of direct brutality, the Olympics are helping to facilitate the new facists of today and develop a hidden agenda: What are the G8 and SPP? The G8 are the eight most 'advanced' industrial nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US, and Russia). These countries dominate & control the global economic system. The G8 summits enable these governments (along with their partners in crime: the corporations) to further their control & exploitation of the global system. The G8 Summit will occur in June 2010 in Ontario. The Security & Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is a plan to integrate the economic and security systems of Canada, the US, and Mexico. It is an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and includes plans for a North American Union (all in the interests of state-corporate power).