Boston 2024 hasn’t been having the best PR lately, and today (or, now, yesterday) was no different.
At 2:20 in the afternoon, Boston 2024 tweeted out a link to a list of the “10 best” Olympic movies, telling supporters to watch them and “get inspired.”
The first movie on that list was Leni Riefenstahl’s movie about the 1936 Olympics Olympia. You may recognize Riefenstahl as the director the famous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
The Nazi connections of Olympia are deeper than just that:
While official documentation ascribes “Olympia” to a company named Leni Riefenstahl Productions, the film’s finances were in fact controlled by Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda (Berg-Pan, 1980). Furthermore, a frank assessment of Riefenstahl’s possible complicity must not ignore her work for the National Socialist Party (prior to “Olympia”) making a film titled “Triumph of the Will.” In “Triumph of the Will,” the power of the National Socialist Party is clearly exhibited, and everything the German government believed good about Nazism is on display.
(h/t universal hub)
Although the Evan Falchuk replied shortly after the tweet went up to question the Riefenstahl inclusion, the tweet stayed up for another 8 hours before Boston 2024 deleted it–without ever acknowledging doing so or doing anything wrong.
To make matters worse, the USOC Communication Director Patrick Sandusky defended the inclusion of Olympia, downplaying the Nazi ties. He then said–in what is hilarious either within or outside of context–that Boston 2024 is not “deliberately promoting the Nazi agenda.”
The list of “inspirational” movies also included Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich, which is based on the Israeli operation to assassinate the members of the PLO responsible for killing 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
One has to wonder whether they even read what they tweeted out……
Godwin’s Law is in full effect.
I’m not sure Godwin’s Law actually applies to situations where the one who starts the conversation mentions an actual Nazi in doing so…
Someone obviously just typed in “olympics” into Netflix and picked the top results without bothering to even read the descriptions.
This level of laziness and inattention to detail does not bode well for their abilty to pull the Olympics off with or without massive infusion of public funds.
… vanity politics.
It’s actually two movies, but in their entirety both are available (in sections) on youtube and in full at other places. You should watch it before uncritically declaring it either ‘Nazi’ or ‘propaganda’. It won’t hurt you nor turn you into a Nazi. I think you’ll be surprised and — yes– inspired.
As documentaries go it was groundbreaking in both artistry and technical brilliance. Time Magazine named it one of 100 all time greatest movies.
Richard Corliss, writing for Time magazine about Riefenstahl had this to say:
A film which celebrates the individual, and individual effort, is not –indeed, cannot be– fascist propaganda. If Goebbels paid for a piece of propaganda (and there remains debate on that) he didn’t get it. Olympia stands in contrast to Riefenstahls mythologizing of Hitler in “Triumph Of The Will and the mass ecstasy of a Nuremberg rally in which the individual was annihilated. As an aside, Riefenstahl always claimed that Triumph Of The Will was not shot as propaganda (there is little doubt, however, that it was used as propaganda) as nothing was staged or created or otherwise masking a sinister under-reality (as, for example, something like the well known ‘Potemkin Village” was) but shot as document of actual, unscripted, events. This is, if you think about it, even scarier than propaganda.
Regardless of Triumph‘s politics and context , Olympia is a brilliant film. it takes place in Nazi Germany but celebrates athletes from all over the world. Adolf Hitler is prominent but the hero of the film is, if anyone, Jesse Owens. If you are, at all, interested in either sports or the Olympics, you should watch it.
Sometimes I fear we are so dominated by Hitler’s villainy that we lose sight of the reality of pre-Hitler Germany and the genuine enthusiasm with which Germany embraced his changes.
I think you highlight a crucial point when you write “This is, if you think about it, even scarier than propaganda”. Indeed. In my view, there are important lessons for America in this observation.
One of my concerns about the relentless fear-mongering of today’s right wing is that it makes America more vulnerable to present-day villains. It is a grave error to believe that Hitler-era Germans were cruelly forced to accept the tyranny of a crushing and oppressive dictator (at least in 1934).
Just as most murderers don’t “look like” murderers, I think it is very unlikely that a present-day American villain would be easily-recognizable as a “bad guy”. In my view, it is the unquestioning adoration of a fearful public kept ignorant by a captive (to right-wing extremist individuals) press that truly rattles my cage.
It doesn’t matter to me whether that individual’s name is “Barack Obama” or “George W. Bush” and the claimed party affiliation of that individual is irrelevant. The combination of fear-mongering, intentionally-created ignorance in our body politic, and right-wing ownership of substantial portions of our news media is a witch’s brew likely to produce far more harm than good.
It was at a film festival screening, and the cinematography is stunning.
But I do NOT think it fills an ‘ambassadorial’ or advocacy role, and presumably that is what was intended.