On this day, 40 years ago, a couple of hundred thousand troops from five Warsaw pact countries, including my native Poland, invaded Czechoslovakia to crush Dubcek’s experiment (”socialism with a human face”). We lived in Wrocław in south-western Poland, and my parents and I spent our evenings listening to Radio Free Europe to try to get some accurate information about what was going on in our southern neighbour.
Of course the Czech army and popular resistance was no match for the USSR and its cronies, and after a few weeks the situation in Czechoslovakia was “stabilized”, with a new reactionary Communist government. The invading troops went home, and on one sunny September day we children from the city’s schools were commandeered out onto the streets of Wrocław to greet our returning troops who had overcome the counter-revolution in Prague. I was in 2nd grade then, almost 8 years old, and I hated every minute of it. It is one of my earliest childhood memories that I remember reasonably vividly. Even at that age, I understood that something very bad and very important had happened and that there was no hope for meaningful reform of the dictatorship under which we too were living.
In January 1969 the young student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest the Soviet occupation and oppression. Later that winter, the Czechs beat the Soviet Union during the World Hockey Championships. That was one small way in which this peaceful, small country could avenge the rape of the preceding year.
In retrospect, 1968 was the beginning of the end for Communism. In Western Europe, many of the remaining “useful idiots”, i.e. the naive people who still believed in Soviet-style Communism, realized the error of their ways and went on to found other left-wing parties. And in Eastern Europe itself, things did not just die down. In 1970 there were workers’ protests at the same shipyard in Gdansk where ten years later the Solidarity trade union would be born. The Polish army was sent out to quell the unrest and actually fired on Polish workers, killing a number of them (today a large monument stands in front of the Gdansk shipyard to commemorate the victims of 1970). Whatever remaining flicker of legitimacy the system may have had was extinguished that day. It did take another two decades before Communism finally collapsed, but for me personally it ended just two years later. On the 4th of May 1972 my parents and I emigrated to Denmark and left all that misery behind us.
I find myself in the terminal at Düsseldorf airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to Spain. We are on our way home after a brief vacation in Berlin. On the TV in the lounge they are blabbering about the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics which is about to take place later this afternoon. I shall not be watching this, nor shall I watch any of the Olympics. It is a disgrace that a dictatorship like China was awarded the games. Just like the Nazis in the 1936 Berlin games, the Chinese regime will attempt to use this to present a clean, modern, sanitized face to the world, abetted by its corporate sponsors and the corrupt old men who dominate the International Olympic Committee.
I will boycott the games. I will also very much reassess the sportspeople who participate. While no country has had the guts to boycott the Beijing games, I had hoped that at least some individual sportsmen/women would look at bit further than the top of their sneakers and make an individual decision to stay away. Apparently not. I can understand that some goat herder from Kenya who happens to run well over long distances sees the Olympics as his great chance to improve his life and that of his entire family. But why the hell does a football player like Leo Messi or the Wibledon champion Rafa Nadal participate in these fascist Olympics? What do they have to prove in what is a minor tournament in their respective sports? It is simply disgusting. The same goes for the heads of state who attend the opening ceremony. It is not surprising that the Russian semi-dictator Putin attends; but what is the president of the “land of the free” doing there?! Why did Spain, my newly adopted country, send its Crown Prince to Beijing? And what happened to “liberté, egalité, fraternité”–evidently, Sarkozy too forgot what his country is supposed to stand for. A few leaders, like Angela Merkel, did stay away. Good for her.
So, I will institute my own private Olympics boycott. Further, I hope that something will go seriously wrong: some marathon runner not being able to run because of the pollution, a hastily built structure collapsing (preferably when there is nobody inside), or, best of all, a serious protest of some sort erupting on live TV despite the efforts of the ruling dictatorship. And I really really hope that the games are a flop in general, both commercially and from the point of view of sport.
Fortunately, the English Premier League and the Spanish Primera Liga both start later this month, providing me with some meaningful sports to watch on weekends.
Pox on these games!