Version imprimableLike many other states that also trample human rights underfoot... Like China with the Uighurs, like Iran, like Burma, which murders its opponents. Like Russia, whose athletes are treated differently.
Some get the honours, others don’t! That must be the Olympic spirit! We didn’t understand. For the duration of a spectacle, rigorously orchestrated and skilfully costed, we should therefore, as Macron urges us, call a ‘truce’.
And yet there is no truce for exploitation, social cleansing and generalised population control. No social truce either! The dancers have come to remind us of this. They have contracts that don’t respect labour law, and they can’t get decent pay... for lack of a budget. In fact, the CGT-Spectacle has called a strike.
When you remember that six preliminary investigations linked to the Olympics are underway for suspicions of ‘illegal taking of interests’, ‘favouritism’ and ‘influence peddling’ - the latest of which concerns the remuneration of Tony Estanguet, president of the Organising Committee for these Olympics - the show seems less meticulously prepared.
There was no truce for the society of the spectacle, for sport as a commodity, for the chilling hypocrisy of the International Olympic Committee, which asked the Russian and Belarusian athletes only to take part under a neutral banner because of the invasion of Ukraine, and checked that none of them had actively supported that invasion.
While many of the participants are formidable athletes, we cannot turn a blind eye to this hypocritical political instrumentalisation of variable geometry, which rightly denounces the invasion of Ukraine, but is silent on the genocidal war, the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and the possible participation of Israeli athletes in the execution of Palestinian children! A spectacle that Jupiter Macron never tires of, since he wants to do it again for the 2030 Winter Olympics...
