Opening Ceremony 1980 Summer Olympic Games In Moscow, At Central Lenin Stadium, With Brezhnev In The Bleachers: Traditional Dances Of The 15 Soviet Republics "Friendship Of The Peoples"
That Strange Nostalgia One Can Have For Times That Were By No Means Good, But Still, Less Confusing Than Today's World.
My weakness for folk dances…ethnic dances…ethnic costumes…I could study this for years and still not understand how “nationalism” was both elevated and destroyed, within the greater context of the USSR, and today, again, under the EU.
When exactly did the Olympic Games become so decadent?
The more I think about it, the more sense it makes that when the UK had its turn, in 2012, to display national identity, it chose as its central motifs: Monarchy, James Bond, Rock and roll, and most important: The NHS.
What is the NHS? It is the central idol and socialist transfiguration of the UK. (Video at bottom of post.)
“Due to changes made to the Olympic charter in 1969, it became mandatory for the organizing country to demonstrate various elements of its culture during the opening and closing ceremonies. While the Montréal ceremonies were simpler and more austere, Moscow's opening ceremony started a trend which changed the format of the ceremonies. Prior to 1976, Olympic opening ceremonies were truly "ceremonial", consisting of just the parade of nations and rituals associated with the official opening of the Games. The USSR authorities wanted to put on a spectacle to impress the rest of the world, so highly produced artistic performances were included after the protocolar elements finished. Since then, subsequent opening ceremonies had a high level artistic programs, and it is now seen as the main event of the Games.”
There can be no doubt about the heavy hand of, if not the government directly, then at least the power-adjacent big-money elite, in every aspect of the embarrassing spectacle that the Olympic Games has become, and in particular the grotesque bacchanal into which the “opening ceremonies” have metastasized.
And the reason it’s so grotesque is it represents how the elites think we do (or should) see ourselves. Far from being a simple and dignified recognition of all that the athletes have done to get there, it is instead a crude and clumsy, Soviet-style, masturbatory propaganda extravaganza, conceived by a circle of jerks who gleefully fleeced the taxpayer to pay the outrageous cost of staging it and now want to rub their hapless subjects’ noses in it.
"That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along."
MADELEINE L'ENGLE