More and more, I think that the Olympic Games do actual harm. Yes, perfectly pleasant and honourable people take part in genuine contests which give them joy and which are honestly conducted. But I am sure this could be done, just as well, somewhere else.
I believe the Olympics are a twisted, pagan and increasingly immoral festival. I think we know, in general, that there has for many years been a lot of cheating. The human body can achieve amazing feats, especially in competition, but there are natural limits to how much it can do and I suspect that they were reached long ago.
Governments interfere in the supposedly free and independent worlds of sport and athletics. Revolting tyrannies, such as the old USSR and the Chinese People’s Republic, use them to polish their images.
Olympics in Paris, 2024: The opening ceremony included a parody of the Last Supper, with French DJ Barbara Butch (centre) surrounded by drag queens
The real painting that inspired the controversial scene during Olympics opening ceremony, Leonard Da Vinci’s The Last Supper
The strongest example of this was in Berlin in 1936, the Nazi Olympics. The Nazis invented the ‘torch relay’, the carrying of the flame from Greece to the chosen stadium by runners.
The original 1936 torches were actually made by Krupp of Essen, the notorious German merchants of death. This is why I call the Olympic Torch ‘Dr Goebbels’s Candle’. I mistrust this sort of pseudo- mythical bilge precisely because Hitler and Goebbels liked it so much.
Olympics 1936 in Berlin: The Nazis invented the ‘torch relay’, the carrying of the flame from Greece to the stadium by runners – pseudo- mythical bilge enjoyed by the likes of Hitler and Goebbels
The Nazis were Christianity-hating pagans who preferred the crude and violent Norse Gods. And that element of the Olympics has resurfaced this year.
Britain’s 2012 Olympic opening ceremony was pretty bad, a multicultural soup mixed up with a very dubious version of our national history. Unlike so many, I was never seduced by it and still see it as the point at which NHS worship went quite mad.
As for the Queen’s James Bond stunt, I thought it was pandering to the crowd and a lasting mistake. If the tawdry Bond films symbolise our nation, then we have truly had it.
French entertainer Philippe Katerine was served up on a platter – the singer was meant to portray Dionysus, the god of wine, festivity, religious ecstasy and theatre
But it was nothing like as bad as the French Olympic festival of diversity and the teenage parody of the Last Supper to which they treated us. Christ was mercilessly mocked and taunted in his last hours before the Crucifixion so, in my view, Christians must take mockery and sneering in their stride.
But I will not praise those who do the mocking and sneering – especially a French establishment which claims to be neutral on such matters.
In 2018 when the seriously Christian police officer Arnaud Beltrame consciously and deliberately sacrificed his life to save a hostage from an armed maniac, the official events that marked his bravery made no reference to the Christian faith which drove the action. This was secular France.
London Olympics 2012: The Queen’s James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) stunt pandered to the crowd
Yet the same ‘secular’ France included – as a central part of the Olympic ceremony – a rendition of the grisly atheist anthem Imagine, with its drivelling illiterate rejection of religion and eternity, its brainless scorn for nations (such as France herself), and its dopehead communist fantasy of a world without possessions.
Why and how is a sporting event repeatedly hijacked as a vehicle for cultural and sexual revolution, even – especially – when it takes place in free countries?
What sort of city would Paris be if it was built in the image of the yahoos who inflicted this tripe on us? A mass of sordid plastic tents shivering beneath the rain, I’d guess. The ideas behind this ceremony couldn’t have designed or built a decent public lavatory, let alone the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.
More doubts about ‘weak’ Letby trial
Doubts about Lucy Letby’s conviction continue to grow (though I have yet to see or hear any mention of them on the impartial BBC). I suspect she was convicted precisely because the case against her is so weak.
It is now 349 days since Lucy Letby was sentenced to die in prison. If, by any chance, she is not guilty, how is that fact bearable?
Yet doubts about her conviction continue to grow (though I have yet to see or hear any mention of them on the impartial BBC). I suspect she was convicted precisely because the case against her is so weak. It is easy to defend yourself against specific charges. You can prove you weren’t there, if you weren’t, etc. But the whole case against Ms Letby is based on theorising.
The prosecution only ever said: ‘This is what might have happened.’ They could never say: ‘This is what did happen.’
They have no such evidence. So her defence was left trying to dispute a theoretical crime. I blame this on a creeping presumption of guilt in our system, helped by the terrible slowness of the courts. By the time her trial began, she had been arrested three times (and released twice) in four years.
Her garden had been very publicly dug up (what for?) by the police, as if she were Rose West.
By that time, every action she had ever taken, viewed in this grim light, could point to her guilt.
The Americans openly behave like this, forcing suspects to take part in televised ‘perp walks’, clad in orange jumpsuits and loaded with chains, as if already condemned.
But we do not, and we should be more careful not to let such things grow up here.
I’m still waiting to hear from Al ‘Boris’ Johnson about the debate on Ukraine I’m hoping to have with him.
Talking of which, if this country is really as broke as Rachel Reeves claims, could we spend a little less on maintaining the slaughter in that country?
I’d prefer to see my tax money spent on rebuilding our railways than on prolonging a foolish war.
Railway announcements are to stop talking about trains ‘terminating’. I have no objections. Why have on-train announcements at all?
In the jolly days of steam, when there were no ‘train managers’ and no onboard loudspeakers, I somehow got from one end of the country to the other without difficulties.
I’d make one exception. On Thursday evening, my Oxford-bound train simply failed to stop at Oxford station, though it had, as tradition dictates, stopped at the cemetery just outside, presumably to let the sad ghosts of former commuters on and off.
A hundred or so passengers had to trundle on to Banbury because a signalman (or ‘signaller’ as we must now call them) had switched the train on to the freight line, which avoids the platforms.
The terse, dismal honesty of the guard’s confession of this foul-up was some recompense for having to slog miles up the line, then wait for ages for a train back.
