KEVIN MCCALLUM: Olympic torch shines some small hope in a troubled world

The Paris Olympics began under a cloud this week, a lot of clouds. Helios or Apollo, depending of which of them was supposed to be on duty as the Greek god of sun and light this Tuesday, were overruled by Zeus the boss, head honcho of the skies and weather and thrower of lightning.

Clouds sat stubbornly over Olympia, where the choreographed ceremony featuring actors ready to use a parabolic mirror to light the flame that will be carried 17,000km to Paris was to take place. Except that they couldn’t. No sun. So, they didn’t flick a Bic, but, as luck would have it, here’s one we prepared earlier. They always light a backup during their rehearsals. So, they used Monday’s flame.

Paris will have their flame from Olympia, just not the one from the live TV show, but the edited version. An understudy flame to the lead actor. No-one will notice.

“A priestess prays to a dead sun god in front of a fallen Greek temple. If the sky is clear, a flame spurts that will burn in Paris throughout the world’s top sporting event. Speeches ensue,” reported the Associated Press.

The ceremony and torch relay were created by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics. The Games were to be “a means of furthering Adolf Hitler’s ethnic and nationalist messages, a tool of Nazi soft power”, as Arnd Krüger and William J Murray put it in their book The Nazi Games. 

“Hitler hadn’t wanted to host the Olympics,” wrote Max Fisher in The Atlantic. “They were ‘an invention of Jews and Freemasons’, he’d said, a celebration of the internationalism and multiculturalism he loathed. But he loved propaganda, the lavish shows of German power and prestige, and by 1934 propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had convinced him of the Olympics’ value in the greater Nazi mission.

“Few aspects of the bizarre and highly political ’36 Games exemplified Hitler’s propaganda mission better than the Olympic torch relay and ceremony. Though propagandists portrayed the torch relay as ancient tradition stretching back to the original Greek competitions, the event was in fact a Nazi invention, one typical of the Reich’s love of flashy ceremonies and historical allusions to the old empires.”

The Nazis so loved the idea of ancient gods and being associated with them that they paid for the excavation of the “original Olympic game sites in Olympia, further reinforcing the image of Germany as heir and caretaker of the ancient powers”.

Then they sang the Nazi anthem, Die Fahne Hoch, which includes the lines, “Clear the streets for the brown battalions. Clear the streets for the Storm Division man”, which contrasts with IOC president Thomas Bach’s speech on Tuesday, when he said, “In these difficult times ... with wars and conflicts on the rise, people are fed up with all the hate, the aggression and negative news. We are longing for something which brings us together; something that is unifying; something that gives us hope.”

Over to you, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, the US, China and Ethiopia, who all feature in the International Crisis Group’s list titled, “Ten conflicts to watch in 2024”. Think a list of “ten athletes to watch in 2024”, but with hatred, guns, greed and desperate need for power. 

All of these conflict countries, save for Russia, feature on the IOC’s official site, which also tells us that “there are no countries participating in the Olympic Games, but rather athletes from national Olympic committees”. 

There are probably going to be a lot of Jews and possibly some Freemasons competing in the Olympics from July 26 to August 11. And also some homosexuals, blacks, Poles, Slavs, people of Roma and Sinti origin (gypsies, to use a generic and tricky word), Jehovah’s Witnesses and maybe a few asocials (beggars, alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes and pacifists) will hang around Paris. The disabled will bring us joy at the Paralympics from August 28 to September 8. All these groups were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust reminds us.

Millions will flock to watch the torch go past. Those who carry it will speak of honour and pride at doing so. The history of the origins of the relay and ceremony remain unsettling, but things change, moments and symbols are repurposed and adapted, sometimes for the good. While the torch may shine some small, temporary hope on this troubled world over the next months, the frightening and never-ending rise of racist populists and bullies leaves me with the fear there are Nazi clouds building around the world.

A few minutes after the “head priestess” had used the backup flame on Tuesday, the sun came out. Perhaps that was a sign, a message from the universe that we aren’t lost as a world just yet. Hope. Unity. Peace.