Let’s play a game of lies.
Ten thousand athletes will swear this Friday to participate in the Olympic Games for the honour of their teams and to make the world a better place. That’s what they will say. A century ago they swore for the honour of their country and for the glory of sport. Country and glory: dangerous words that should be watered down. Verdun, Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, Saigon.
Let’s continue with the lies.
This Friday, someone will remember the origin of ancient Olympism: that truce of peace that the Hellenic peoples gave each other every four years to lay down their arms, stop killing each other for a while and send their best athletes from distant lands to the city of Olympia. There, next to the sanctuary dedicated to Zeus, the enemies on the battlefield would then face each other in races, chariot races, the pentathlon, jumping, and discus and javelin throwing.
There was love of country, of course: everyone was amazed to see how the Calabrian polis of Crotona was able to export so many champions of the main event, the stadion, a straight 192 metres long, equivalent to 600 Hercules’ feet. From Crotona came the runners Glaukias, Lykinos, Hippostratos, Diognetos, Ischomachos, Tisikrates and Astylos, who won the event twelve times in just one century.
There was a fascination with glory, of course: everyone admired Milo of Croton, a super athlete married to the daughter of Pythagoras who managed to win five consecutive Olympic titles in freestyle wrestling. Milo won from the age of 25 until he was 41. At 45 he tried again. He wanted one more victory. Who can refuse another dose when the drug is laurel, veneration? The chances of winning were slim. But sport is not mathematics; it is much better: it allows contradiction, the most logical rule in the realm of dreams, freedom and escape. That is how Pythagoras’s son-in-law, the great Milo of Croton, was defeated by a countryman and never won again in Olympia. So much the better. A great ending. Borges wrote: Defeat has a dignity that noisy victory does not deserve.
Let’s play truth games now.
Ten thousand athletes will fight in Paris. Even if they don’t say it, the homeland and the glory will be there: atavistic impulses sucked out and channeled by sport. There was a time – it was another world – when something different was attempted. Something less capitalist and bourgeois. Something red and revolutionary. The workers’ Olympiad in Frankfurt in 1925. The international Spartakiads of 1928 and 1931 in Moscow and Berlin. The People’s Olympiad that Barcelona was to experience in the fateful July of 1936. That world didn’t work out. Another one won: Long live evil, long live capital. And the Olympic Games grew fat on the basis of homeland, glory and that sweet amniotic fluid that protects them so well from reason and that, at the same time, sustains their unreason. It’s the epic.
The epic as ideology. This is the title of a chapter in The silence of waran essay written by Antonio Monegal, a scholar from Barcelona with a PhD from Harvard. In his book he says something fundamental to understanding what we will see these days from the sofa.
He says that the epic tradition, with which Homer sang in the Iliad The Trojan War has shaped our way of conceiving war and has also provided a decisive ideological component for the construction of our cultural imagination about war.
You have to die to be sung.
More precisely: One must risk one’s life to save oneself from oblivion, so that names and deeds may survive.
More poetic: One must die in order not to die.
That is why it is not neutral to sing about war in an epic way. It is ideologically biased. It inflames future warriors. It motivates new wars. It perpetuates what is honored: heroism, sacrifice, the romanticization of death. Dulce et decorum est pro patria diewrote Shakespeare.
The epic framework breeds ideology: in the trenches of the Somme and at the Stade de France. And here the framework is winning or losing. The framework is extreme competitiveness. The framework is the homeland. The framework is individual glory. No matter how much they pretend before playing the anthems. No matter how much they talk about an inclusive and better world before handing out medals.
Let the war begin. We can’t wait.
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