The Insanity of the Sochi Olympiad
Filed under: Russia
If you're anything like the author of these words, you sometimes reflect on the history of World War II and ask yourself: How did they ever let things get so far? Why couldn't they see how dangerous Hitler was and nip him in the bud? It almost seems like you are looking back on a different species of being, one with substantially lesser intelligence and character than the one that exists today. When you hear about a book like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, you can't decide if you should weep from pity or simply burst out laughing. It seems impossible that anything like that could happen in our modern day and age.
And then you look at Russia today, and you begin to understand. As we've previously reported, Vladimir Putin's dictatorship has been awarded the 2014 Olympic Games despite having the lowest scores for fitness of any of the three finalist cities. Not only that, but Sochi is located right in the backyard of the war-torn Chechnya region. Putting the games there is like an open invitation for a bloodbath (that's if the spectators and athletes even survive travel to the site on Russian airplanes, judged among the world's most dangerous, to the point that passengers are left to rescue themselves after crashes).
And now things have gone from the shocking to the simply surreal. Russia has announced that it plans to install a missile defense system around the Sochi Olympic village to protect it from what it has suddenly recognized as a serious threat of attack. It's definitely a new Olympic record, but perhaps not the kind Russia should be pursuing. The next thing we know, Sochi will have become an armed concentration camp, a little USSR from which nobody can enter or exit without Kremlin permission (perhaps a good practice run for what the Kremlin has in store for the whole country in a few years).
Now let's put aside the question of why we can't stop ourselves from rewarding a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin from using the Olympics, as Hitler tried to do, as a propaganda weapon. Let's just focus on the simple threat to the personal security our athletes and spectators. How is it possible that the world could award these games to Russia even if it were qualified in terms of facilities and infrastructure, much less when it actually isn't, given the obvious threats presented? If we can't meet this challenge, how can we possibly hope to deal with a problem like Bin Laden?
Was the International Olympic Committee bribed? Simply stupid? Threatened or blackmailed? Worse, why is the world sitting silently as plans are made to send its young athletes into a meat grinder?
Has the world gone mad?
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