madskillz8 wrote:Lol, sorry, I definitely mean USSR.
Great post, I'll just have a couple of comments:
I was actually trying to say "western" countries are more influential in IOC decision making vs Eastern. Not going to go into politics but are we really surprised when IOC sees country X attacking country Y as a reason to ban X from the Olympics but when country A attacks country B it never garners an actual ban discussion/voting? It is all about who is X and who is A...
To avoid current affairs discussion, I will just give an example from the past: "In 1920, five countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey) were banned from the Olympics due to their involvement in the First World War. " In the same world war though, Turkey was attacked by troops who were coming allllll the way from Australia/NZ, but Australia competed in the Olympics but Turkey was barred just for defending their soils. This basically provides enough evidence about who was controlling IOC.
So, the whole current affairs aspect of things makes getting more into this as tricky and people aren't going to want a back & forth, but I'll say a few things since you bring it up:
1. Certainly the IOC has always been dominated by Western Europe, and Western Europe's Imperialism makes them utter hypocrites in many ways.
2. I do think that the victorious WWI parties made a lot of short-sited decisions in punishing the opposite side.
3. But I also think it needs to be remembered that the entire concept of the Olympics doesn't make sense for countries at war with each other, and even if the war is over, if it hasn't been that long, it may really not work. People who are used to killing each other in the name of patriotism are likely to keep doing so.
4. Frankly that was a reason to not hold the 1920 games at all, but if you were going to hold it, it makes sense that if the winners blamed the losers for starting the war, you leave the war starters out of it.
5. Of course that's super-rough for the Ottomans because they weren't exactly in a conquering frame of mind. They were a fading power who in desperation allied themselves with the side that would end up losing. (Not that I think that they should be seen as utterly innocent for all that unfolded to be clear, but they really do seem like they just got lumped in with their partners.)
6. So with the Russia-Ukraine thing, I don't think it makes sense to have both nations represented in these Olympics because they are at war. And Russia very clearly began all this with the thought of conquest of a much smaller nation so it's pretty easy to figure out which country should get kicked out if you're only leaving out one.
7. In terms of the US or other western powers deserving a similar fate to Russia right now, I think that's an argument that can be made, but it would quickly move us into extreme political territory with likely no resolution or agreement possible.
madskillz8 wrote:And it is just not sports. Not sure if you like literature and philosophy but Sartre's rejection of Nobel is a good summary of what I am referring to.Sartre declined the prize, saying that he never accepted any official honours and that he did not want the writer to become an institution. Furthermore, regarding the political grounds for his action, Sartre declared about the Nobel prize that it is one that goes only to Westerners "or to rebels of the East". "It is regrettable that the only Soviet work honored was one that was published abroad and forbidden in its own country."
I have no idea if IOC decision making is somehow biased. But as much as we know, IOC was, is, and will be a highly political organization. Again, I don't want to derail it but the discussion regarding boxing has traces of the very same fight all over IOC (IOC vs IBA dispute).
So, on this:
1. I'm actually a big fan of Sartre's existentialist ideas (far more than Camus).
2. But I don't think the reasons for the Soviet Union's lack of Nobel love is hard to figure out because the Nobel Prizes were always on the side of peace, and the reality is that the Marxist-Leninist thinking behind the early Soviet regime was quite up front about world domination through violence if necessary (which they knew it would be). It's understandable why some intellectuals of the time didn't realize this but they were naive. But quite frankly, by the time Sartre writes the quote above, he was well-aware of the conquering nature of the Stalinist regime, and yet still was fuzzy about it - at times condemning it, at times defending it. To classify the man as "a useful idiot", as the Soviets did with those who helped them foolishly, just seems dead-on.
3. I should own up to have a lot of thoughts and feelings on the fact that Marxism and its descendants basically destroyed the credibility of socialism (which people in general now think Marx invented) as a force for non-revolutionary progress. I see Marx as someone who correctly saw many of the issues with the Industrial Revolution, and then made up a religion and called it "scientific" trying to act as if governance was as simple as the laws of physics. I see Marx as someone who, to the extent anyone followed through with his ideas, could only really make the world worse, and that's not just me being a modern observer. Contemporaries like Bakunin recognized the authoritarianism that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would yield, and yeah, the issues are far more glaring when we look at this in the age of the internet where the "means of production" can no longer be even thought of as being tied to a specific patch of land with a factory on it.
But I probably shouldn't even get into that last part because people aren't going to want to have that discussion here. Only to say, the world is more complicated than two symmetrical sides, and what came out 2nd Russian Revolution was something that people were right to see as dystopian. (And in fact, you can argue that the very concept of a dystopia comes from a Bolshevik seeing what the regime actually ended up looking like.)
Thus, seeing USA, Canada, Australia, and France but not Brazil, Turkey, or low avg. income ex Soviet countries at the top of medal standings are indeed expected.
WOW! And until I saw that tweet I hadn't known this was an Olympic sport:
