Obama and Stephen Fry speak - Sochi

Obama has finally uttered some words in regard to Russia and it's anti-gay laws. Although it looks like a bit of an afterthought the way he sad it, he has never the less made it clear what he thinks of these laws:

Obama canceled a planned September meeting in the city with Putin in a diplomatic rebuke over Russia's harboring of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, having also said in a television interview hours earlier that he had "no patience" with countries that discriminate against gay people.

"I think they [Putin and Russia] understand that for most of the countries that participate in the Olympics, we wouldn't tolerate gays and lesbians being treated differently," Obama said Tuesday to host Jay Leno on NBC's "The Tonight Show." more

Do they understand President Obama? There's been no signs that they do, whatever you may "think".

To add to this the call for the IOC to FFS do something about Sochi has now become like a dull roar. Stephen Fry has written an open letter to the IOC, delivered by All Out to the IOC along with a petition of 320,000 people who want the IOC to FFS do something about Sochi. Here's some of Fry's letter (which is, incidentally, extremelly well written I thought):

I write in the earnest hope that all those with a love of sport and the Olympic spirit will consider the stain on the Five Rings that occurred when the 1936 Berlin Olympics proceeded under the exultant aegis of a tyrant who had passed into law, two years earlier, an act which singled out for special persecution a minority whose only crime was the accident of their birth. In his case he banned Jews from academic tenure or public office, he made sure that the police turned a blind eye to any beatings, thefts or humiliations afflicted on them, he burned and banned books written by them. He claimed they "polluted" the purity and tradition of what it was to be German, that they were a threat to the state, to the children and the future of the Reich. He blamed them simultaneously for the mutually exclusive crimes of Communism and for the controlling of international capital and banks. He blamed them for ruining the culture with their liberalism and difference. The Olympic movement at that time paid precisely no attention to this evil and proceeded with the notorious Berlin Olympiad, which provided a stage for a gleeful Führer and only increased his status at home and abroad. It gave him confidence. All historians are agreed on that. What he did with that confidence we all know. 

Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law. Any statement, for example, that Tchaikovsky was gay and that his art and life reflects this sexuality and are an inspiration to other gay artists would be punishable by imprisonment. It is simply not enough to say that gay Olympians may or may not be safe in their village. The IOC absolutely must take a firm stance on behalf of the shared humanity it is supposed to represent against the barbaric, fascist law that Putin has pushed through the Duma. Let us not forget that Olympic events used not only to be athletic, they used to include cultural competitions. Let us realise that in fact, sport is cultural. It does not exist in a bubble outside society or politics. The idea that sport and politics don't connect is worse than disingenuous, worse than stupid. It is wickedly, wilfully wrong. Everyone knows politics interconnects with everything for "politics" is simply the Greek for "to do with the people". 

An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential. Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillehammer, anywhere you like. At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world. 

He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, "the banality of evil." A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milanov but his instincts are the same. He may claim that the "values" of Russia are not the "values" of the West, but this is absolutely in opposition to Peter the Great's philosophy, and against the hopes of millions of Russians, those not in the grip of that toxic mix of shaven headed thuggery and bigoted religion, those who are agonised by the rolling back of democracy and the formation of a new autocracy in the motherland that has suffered so much (and whose music, literature and drama, incidentally I love so passionately). 

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian "correctively" raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself. more

Although in debate to drop the Hitler bomb is often very troll-ish, on this occasion these are legitimate comparisons. I've seen two other pieces now that both do the same comparison. 

Do the IOC have any fuckin idea WTF they're doing? Will they simply stand by and watch what we all know is happening behind the scenes? Behind the glitz and glamour of the games? 

There is one comparison though between now and when Hitler was around. Back then he was able to do much of his shit behind closed doors in Germany without the world watching. Indeed when local Germans saw what was happening in the concentration camps after the allies invaded, some of them were shocked at what they saw had happened so close to their homes. Today however, there's this thing called the internet.............