{"id":16451,"date":"2012-08-14T08:22:22","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16451"},"modified":"2012-08-14T08:22:22","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:22:22","slug":"oneill-london-outdid-beijing-in-politicizing-the-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/14\/oneill-london-outdid-beijing-in-politicizing-the-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"O’Neill: London outdid Beijing in politicizing the Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> says that the London Olympics were far more politicized than the Beijing games in 2008:<\/p>\n

From the flurry of fanboy commentary that followed Danny Boyle\u2019s am-dram opening ceremony to the insistence that the Games represented the coming to fruition of the post-Diana dream of a new, less stuffy Britain, the urge to politicise the Games has been intense. That the political classes have sought so shamelessly to usher in \u2018another kind of Britain\u2019 on the back of the Games speaks volumes about their desperate need for a new national narrative, and their disillusionment with the democratic route to social overhaul.<\/p>\n

Normally we frown upon elites that heap their political obsessions on to mass sporting events. We think of Hitler turning the Berlin Games into an advert for Aryan superiority (a vision shot down by Jesse Owens) or of the Beijing opening ceremony\u2019s thousands of fantastically coordinated drummers and boastful history lesson, described by one British hack last week as \u2018crypto-fascist\u2019. And yet, Britain\u2019s ostensibly liberal observers thought nothing of turning 2012 into an advert for their own allegedly superior way of life and thinking.<\/p>\n

The tone was set by Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt, who described Boyle\u2019s opening ceremony as the \u2018march past\u2019 — that is, victory parade — of his side in the Culture Wars. The ceremony was proof, said Hunt, that \u2018the left took victory in the Culture Wars\u2019, and moreover that a New Britain was being born: if the Queen\u2019s Jubilee celebrated a \u2018staid and nostalgic national identity\u2019, this ceremony \u2018offered an attractively contradictory, complicated, and above all creative conception of these Isles of Wonder\u2019.<\/p>\n

There has since been a concerted effort to turn the \u2018bonkers\u2019 opening ceremony into a new national narrative. Somewhat defensively, the Guardian<\/em>\u2019s Jonathan Freedland insists that it is \u2018not just Guardian<\/em> types\u2019 who are exalting in the new political vision provided by both the ceremony and the multicultural message of the Games that followed — the whole nation is, apparently, recognising that \u2018we have glimpsed another kind of Britain\u2019, and that we should \u2018love the country we have become — informal, mixed, quirky — rather than the one we used to be\u2026 reactionary\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill says that the London Olympics were far more politicized than the Beijing games in 2008: From the flurry of fanboy commentary that followed Danny Boyle\u2019s am-dram opening ceremony to the insistence that the Games represented the coming to fruition of the post-Diana dream of a new, less stuffy Britain, the urge to politicise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,22,18],"tags":[733,350,314,269],"class_list":["post-16451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-china","category-sports","tag-beijing","tag-london","tag-olympics","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4hl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16452,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16451\/revisions\/16452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}