Perhaps the first thing to know: ‘be better’ is a term better off deleted regarding how FIFA and the International Olympic Committee conduct business.
This reading of “The Olympic Army” by Westbrook Pegler is part of finding a critical path, where one can zero in on the sports and games we love, and be clear-eyed about how governments use these events. Perhaps it is the Mark Twain aphorism ‘borrowed’ for this video… a patriot supports their country at all times and their government when it deserves it. And it’s about keeping a cool head.
There is a lengthy history of massive international sports events being given to the absolute worst psychopathic governments. You likely know the term “sportwashing.” Pegler wrote the definitive takedown of it at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Perhaps, as I read it, you might pause, and see the parallels… the drug-aided boner for militarism, the cultish devotion to The Leader, the shows of force when there is no threat whatsoever.
For me, a Canadian Xennial, Pegler came into view when it was printed in The Best American Sports Writing Of The Century (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), edited by Glenn Stout and the late great Pulitzer Prize earner David Halberstam (1934-2007). The chain bookstore where I bought it on Princess St. in Kingston, Ont., is still there, but alas, the par-3 golf course behind it is long gone.
Pegler didn’t get everything right during his writing life, but he hit the Nazis on the head. When this column was published and the Germans got all große Wut about it, he did not grovel or bend the knee, or pretend sports is apolitical. He trolled them with a tongue-in-cheek column entitled ‘A Correction’:
‘Those weren't troops at all but merely peace-loving German workmen in their native dress, and those weren't army lorries but delivery wagons carrying beer and wieners and kraut. They don't really march at all. They just walk in step in columns of four, because they like to walk that way. And it is an old custom of theirs to form cordons of military appearance along the curbs and just stand there by the hour for pleasure. When thousands of men seem to march but don't in clothing and tin-hats which seem to be military uniforms but aren't and carry harmless utensils which appear to be bayonets any stranger is likely to make the same mistake.’1
Points being, using irony to call out overreach and bullshit is how people fight back. And, when it comes to the sports, you enjoy, as Shutdown Fullcast’s Jason Kirk averred on my former podcast last year, ‘they don’t own your enjoyment of it.’
Anyway, as a reader with an extensive sports library, it helps to pull something down for a pick-me-up and a reminder that this has happened before, and this too shall pass when people say enough is enough. Obviously, I don’t own the material, and I have no intention of profiting from it.
Fortsätt skriva (continue writing). Cha Gheill (never surrender).
Friendly reminder about resistance
I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
June 6-13, 2025
Hamilton, Ont. : traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
See the blog “Olympic Century.”
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