There they go again. Beating and kicking and punching and fucking whipping. Spraying. Pulling by the hair, spiteful shunts. Trigger-happy security forces, full of resentment and rage at protesters – is that rage personal, or trained? Is it displacement for a whole load of shit they’ve got welling up? We might never know these swine. We recognize them though. That’s why I grew hot watching the video, wanting to tear the world apart and kick vital fluid out of the pricks…
But that’s their answer, not ours.
There’s a different kind of body language you can instantly see in the footage when a person in uniform, In Charge …of security and decency and the narrative… starts to feel Right and Rectified with every blow they hand out to an angry and loud crowd around them. Something seems to snap, and suddenly everything that’s wrong with the protesters’ viewpoint and their method of expressing it needs to be punched, to be made to hurt. Some vague and general sense of impotence has found a definite, easy target. Something in that picture has pushed the officer too far, though we can never quite see it.
It’s the terror and powerless anger of seeing vicious security personnel. Recruited and booted people who are all boiling rage. A different and offensive opinion warrants muscle, kicking colours out of the variation and shutting them and their argument up with pain. Where does the anger come from – the planned anger? Do some people join a force to get carte blanche on dishing out ‘whoops!’ injuries on people they’ve long enjoyed resenting, with group canteen/locker room relish in the aftermath? Planned hatred – can you imagine hating that far ahead, looking forward to feeling hate sometime in the near future, when you’re currently in a good mood?
The Olympic Games. There’s beautiful, crazy cats sailing through the air on boards and skis or perfecting their bodies to the ice or snow and international hopes and personal dreams seen in faces and tears and all that, and you’re still poised ready to boot the argument out of a protester. Insta-rage.
Supporters do it verbally too, of course, resenting the politization of their favourite events and national pride, maybe also resenting being made to feel guilty, or being caught out ‘not thinking enough’ while watching the Games. But that’s debate. Having a debate, arguing the rights and wrongs – that’s the whole point of holding a protest and being human and reasonable and responding to stimuli. But boots in first? Jesus. And every country does it, has done and will do. You’ll see it in Russia and Iran and Uganda and the States and here – smacks and kicks that never quite look ‘self defence’ or ‘tit for tat’ enough to reassure you that things aren’t as bad as the beardie weirdie liberals claim.
Pussy Riot were attacked by Cossacks and other Games security people as they filmed a music video in front of a Sochi 2014 billboard. “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland," a song which took aim at Putin and the Sochi Games [explained English lyrics here]. They’d been filming for days, aggravating the security forces and being detained for various reasons. Cynics might say that the band and any protest they engaged in lost all relevance/news potency as soon as they were freed from prison in December, making their beating at Sochi quite unfortunate for Putin. It was pretty unfortunate for the band, too.
The man using the horsewhip has been indeterminately ‘held accountable’ it seems. But then so were Pussy Riot. The International Olympic Committee feels it’s "a shame if the Olympics is used as a political platform." But come on, maybe if politicians weren’t allowed any involvement in the Games, or were barred from making any mention of it in their speeches, ever (Cameron 2012, Putin 2014…), then perhaps it wouldn’t be a political event. As it is the Games is leaden with political significance. Countries are given political personalities in the coverage. If too many or not enough competitors win for a particular nation, their country is discussed as a homogenized political thing – Chinese athletes don’t do badly at the games; China does [newsreaders and Western audiences implicitly shudder at the imagined brutal, humourless training regime].
And there’s always the semantic battle for the Spirit of the Games. A sense of perfection is often described inside the arena: the perfection of sporting achievement and transnational competitiveness with no political gain or malice, a level playing field for SPORT and sporting brilliance alone. The best trained, the highest physical achievement, the greatest talent. It pits bodies and minds against each other. Ambition and aspiration tethered by nothing more than the evenly distributed physical limits of the world’s competitors. You know, that Daft Punk motto they have: “Faster, Higher, Stronger [Citius, Altius, Fortius].”
Perhaps deliberately offsetting the perfection of the arena are the problems happening off the field. There’s comedy in the Olympic village (stereo toilets?) and the troubled Games preparation (G4S), and the media coverage that will offer a quick nod to wider conditions outside in the host country – Sochi’s terrorism issues, environmental impact, gay laws; Beijing’s evictions and flattened homes, human rights record, air pollution… Enthusiastic athletic coverage from the arena always takes precedent, but everything outside is still fair game. Munich ’72 was shocking because it happened inside the arena – it happened to the athletes.
Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s black power salute in Mexico ’68 is such a powerful image because of the ‘sullied arena’ tension. "The nasty demonstration against the American flag by Negroes" as described by the chief of the IOC, the body that pressured for them to be sent home and banned. There were boos as they left the arena. But what made it so powerful is that they had respected the games and the arena, and their flag. They’d been those perfect competitors, those best athletes in mind and body in their quite literal field, beforehand. This is the sporting perfection everyone’s tuned in for, just with a conscience. The option was there to appreciate both if you wanted. You could have just fucking moved on to lapping up your next event if you really didn’t rate it. It was brilliant because their protest silently said everything it needed to with far less disruption to the Olympics or the evasive Spirit than the annoyed reactions that followed.
There’s always the semantic battle for the Spirit of the Games. The other people fighting for it, or perhaps just countering the aggressively neutral IOC with its own vocabulary, are those who attack the host country’s government over laws and practices that are not very Olympian (snatching at bits of the Charter here: “social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles” … “preservation of human dignity” … “on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise” …). They urge those who are going to be involved in the Games to acknowledge the issues, appealing to sponsors, visiting politicians, athletes…
“These are clear breaches of the anti-discrimination Principle Six of the Olympic Charter,” said Peter Tatchell, referring to the Russian law banning ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’ and the fat chance it gave openly-gay Russian athletes or spectators. He called for the UK government to boycott the Games and send a LGBT delegation instead, like Obama had. More Tatchell: “Gay athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics held in Sochi in 2014 could potentially face fines or jail sentences for affirming their support for LGBT equality" (only if they approach children, Putin later clarified).
Stephen Fry was at a protest in August:
“Just remember that what this is about is not a big abstract thing like the Olympic movement, or a big abstract thing like the nature of totalitarianism, it’s keeping in the head the lesbian being savagely raped and being told by the police go take a walk because it’s not a crime, it’s a corrective thing to make you straight. These things happen daily in Russia; the teenagers being humiliated by their friends, punched and kicked and forced into suicide at an enormous rate. That’s what we have to remember this is all about, it’s about allowing the gay people of Russia to grow up free and proud and happy and with the genuine sense of importance they deserve.”
If you find yourself assigning ‘asking for it’ traits to Pussy Riot, or to other arrogant, inconsistent-sounding cop-pinioned protesters that turn up in the coverage of one of your favourite events, just please try to remember that you can transpose those hate-thumps in the beating video to the bodies of LGBT men and women in Russia (or the bodies of hated and grouped people in many other countries), ordinary citizens who are certainly not conspicuously making nuisances of themselves when the violence happens to them. The background’s what makes protests snag – hopefully for you and certainly for the people deploying the forces.
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