Save me from a not so ‘sporting’ summer.
Posted by Big John on June 11, 2012
Well I survived all that ‘Jubilee’ crap. Now I only have to summon up my strength to somehow see out the Olympics.
In the meantime it’s the Euro 2012 football (soccer) taking up hours of TV viewing time and pages of newspaper coverage; and this ‘sporting’ competition is making the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
What idiot decided to make Ukraine a ‘host’ nation when it has a well documented history of racism, with the ‘Human Rights Watch’ recently reporting that “Racism and xenophobia remain entrenched problems in Ukraine” ?
You don’t have to look too far back in history to see that 80,000 Ukrainian Nazi supporters volunteered to join the infamous Waffen SS in 1943, and to see that anti-Semitism has far from disappeared in that part of the world.
I won’t go on as the subject is more than well covered in the press with plenty of pictures of swastika flags and “Sieg Heiling” so called ‘fans’. However I have noticed that Ukraine is sending a team to the London Olympics …
… Now that could be interesting !
Ginnie said
When I hear of swastikas and people shouting Sieg Heil it makes my blood run cold. It seems that, other than greed, the main emotion expressed in our world today is hatred.
SilverTiger said
The feature of the Olympics that I am looking forward to most is that its duration is finite, so it will eventually come to an end and allow life to return to some semblance of normality. Then all we will have to endure will be the politicians trying to tell us that the massive debts incurred as a result of the Games are really some sort of profit…
Racism, like ignorance and superstition, their siblings, are basic human foibles, I’m sorry to say. It grows and spreads like a noxious weed wherever positive efforts to combat it are not deployed. While condemning other nations for displays of racism we should remember that Britain has a far from clean record itself on this issue and that there are still ongoing concerns of entrenched racism in some of our most important public institutions. While it is comforting to lambast others for their sins, to ignore our own would be both hypocritical and short-sighted.