politics, polemics, poisonous English journalists

Few things disgust me as intensely as people praising the rich as a class. There is no clearer evidence of a slave mind. Of course, rich people who actually have done something to deserve their wealth do deserve admiration - like anyone who works at something and succeeds. But is there anyone stupid enough to believe that they are the totality, or even the majority, of rich people? And yet there are morons around who have convinced themselves that to be concerned about the large and increasing slice of wealth and power going to a tiny and statistically irrelevant section of society means to practice "the politics of envy". Let us be clear: there is such a thing as the politics of envy. It can be found in any demagogue who tells people they have been abused and places all the blame on the dreadful word "they". But to be concerned about the increasing power of a tiny, deracinated, irresponsible, and cohesive new aristocracy in a society that ought to be egalitarian and democratic - whose founding statement is that all men are created equal - that is not "the politics of envy", it is common sense.

It would be absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing the bare definition of natural inequality answers the question: it would be more absurd still to enquire, if there might not be some essential connection between the two species of inequality, as it would be asking, in other words, if those who command are necessarily better men than those who obey; and if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always to be found in individuals, in the same proportion with power, or riches: a question, fit perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but unbecoming free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.

It won't make much difference my saying this.

But I might as well. The Olympics have some kind of quarter-century murderous tyranny drive. 1936, Berlin. 1968, Mexico City (with hundreds of students slaughtered on the main square for extra entertainment). 1980, Moscow. 2008, Beijing. And the Seoul Olympics were awarded before the military tyranny in South Korea was overthrown. And the 1972 Munich Olympics were stained by the blood of Jewish athletes and should have been abandoned. I was ten at the time and I was furious that they continued, and I haven't changed my mind since; only I did not realize then that this massacre of Jews took place within a few miles of Dachau concentration camp. The fact alone that Jews were once again butchered in Germany ought to have raised ugly echoes everywhere; the fact that this was only one Olympic after the Massacre Olympics of Mexico City made it even worse. But I am afraid that the Olympic movement and shame are two altogether separate and alien concepts.

I love sports. And other games have had their shameful moments - the World Cup was held in Fascist Italy in 1934, in Mexico City in 1970 two years after the Massacre Olympics, and in Jorge "20,000 desaparecidos" Videla's Argentina in 1978. But the Olympics seem especially reckless with their supposed moral authority.