April 13, 2008

• *My son Will has done it again*
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    Please check them out and vote for your favorite!
  They are put up sometime Monday.
  iliveinmycamera
  

  Olympic Torch History???
  

  
  

  I love Greek food and I would love to see Greece and that gorgeous Aegean Sea BUT I am not a fan of ancient Greece and their practices nor am I a fan of classical education (but that is a whole other subject.)   Recently my husband came home telling me about a radio show he was listening to about the Olympics and all the violence going on concerning the torch relay.  I do know all the hoopla that goes on for the torch to get under way in Greece...with a "high priestess"  and all that. So, I don't know where I have been for the last 50 years of my life but he told me something I did not know that just blew me away.  The torch relay was begun in 1936 for the Olympic Games held in Berlin.  Aaaaaa...okay....huh????  And then he told me a little history of this nice little plan of Hitler's and the banning of Jewish athletes etc...and I am thinking....why in the world has this been allowed to continue???   If the high priestess thing is not enough...praying to the Greek gods...(okay....so I am not politically correct)  add to it the whole symbol of the reinstating of the torch relay from Greece to promote the Aryan race and sing praises to the plan of Hitler...WHY is this still going on?  Why didn't I know this?  I am a history buff.... but I get an F for this one.  Am I making too big a deal out of it? 
  Here are some web links and an article to catch any of you up who were in the dark about this with me and for those of you who weren't...how come you haven't spoken up?
  The Lord is bigger than any of this but we sheep must stay in his word  and pray daily for wisdom and discernment, our country, our leaders, our liberty, our freedom to worship, to bear arms and so importantly, to pray for our dear persecuted brothers and sisters all over the world which includes China.  But I am not talking about the Tibet topic.  I am not down playing that at all either but just go to Prisoner Alert and read about some of the faithful who have been beaten and tortured and imprisoned for years.  They remain in Christ.  They are my kind of heros.  Strong in the faith, risking all.
  
  Some web articles I found:

  
  

  *The Olympic torch's farcical progress has reminded us that carrying the
  flame from nation to nation was originally devised for the 1936 Berlin
  Games.

  *The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games had been handed to Berlin before the Nazis came to power but now it was the perfect
  

  opportunity for Hitler....
  
  
  *High Priestess

  
  Article:
  

  

  The Olympic torch's shadowy past

  By Chris Bowlby BBC News

  
  The Olympic torch is being welcomed this weekend in the UK as a symbol
  of the sporting spirit, uniting people around the world in peaceful
  competition.

  But the idea of
  lighting the torch at the ancient Olympian site in Greece and then
  running it through different countries has much darker origins.

  It was invented in its modern form by the organisers of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

  And it was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project
  the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state
  with growing international influence.

  The organiser of the 1936 Olympics, Carl Diem, wanted an event linking the modern Olympics to the ancient.

  The idea chimed perfectly with the Nazi belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich.

  And the event blended perfectly the perversion of history with publicity for contemporary German power.

  The first torch was lit in Greece with the help of mirrors made by the German company Zeiss.

  Steel-clad magnesium torches to carry the flame were specially produced by the Ruhr-based industrial giant Krupp.

  Media coverage was masterminded by Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, using the latest techniques and technology.

  Dramatic regular radio coverage of the torch's progress kept up the
  excitement, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it to create powerful images.

  Beijing relay

  The route the torch takes has always been a matter of careful political planning too.

  This year's route has already proved highly controversial.

  Beijing wanted to take the torch through Taiwan's capital, Taipei, but
  this had to be changed by Olympic authorities due to political tensions
  between the Chinese and Taiwanese leaders.

  And there is now great tension over plans to run the torch through Tibet after recent disturbances there.

  In 1936 the torch made its way from Greece to Berlin through countries
  in south-eastern and central Europe where the Nazis were especially
  keen to enhance their influence.

  Given what happened a few years later that route seems especially poignant now.

  "Sporting chivalrous contest," Hitler declared just before the torch
  was lit, "helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may
  the Olympic flame never expire."

  Yet the flame's arrival in Vienna prompted major
  pro-Nazi demonstrations, helping pave the way for the Anschluss, or
  annexation of Austria, in 1938.

  In Hungary gypsy musicians who serenaded the flame faced within a few years deportation to Nazi death camps.

  Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
  would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but
  with Krupp munitions.

  And Carl Diem, the relay's inventor, ended the war as
  fanatical military commander at the Olympic stadium in Berlin, refusing
  to accept that the Third Reich was over.

  Sparta

  Reinhard Appel, a teenage member of the Hitler Youth based at the
  stadium, described to me a speech made by Diem in 1945 as the Red Army
  closed in.

  "He kept referring to Sparta - the history of how the
  Spartans had not feared dying for their country. He demanded that we be
  heroes."

  Hundreds of the youngsters were killed in a futile attempt to defend the stadium.

  Diem however survived, and reinvented himself after the war as an academic specialising in the philosophy of sport.

  Germans are still debating his reputation today.

  In 1936 itself there was no doubt that the spectacle of his torch relay was judged a great international success.

  As a suitably Aryan-looking German athlete carried the torch into the
  stadium in Berlin the BBC radio commentator was deeply impressed: "He's
  a fair young man in white shorts, he's beautifully made, a very fine
  sight as an athlete."

  Another relay runner was Siegfried Eifrig, who had carried the torch as it arrived in the centre of Berlin.

  Flanked by huge swastika flags, he then lit a fire on an altar -
  typical of the pseudo-religious symbolism Nazism relished.

  Eifrig is still alive, aged 98, and still has his Krupp torch engraved with the route of the 1936 relay.

  But he told me this week that he was saddened by the controversy this
  year's relay has attracted, as it ought to be kept a "purely sporting"
  affair.

  And he is critical of the way the politicians always
  seek to exploit it, seeing the plan to take the torch across the summit
  of Mount Everest as a "pointless gesture" that makes a nonsense of the
  relay as an athletic challenge.

  Having survived the war as a soldier and then a British
  prisoner of war, he now sees the 1936 relay in a more sober light than
  when he was one of its stars.

  No matter how great the emphasis on the torch as a
  bright sporting symbol, he knows better than most that, amid the
  political wrangling and media hype, less welcome historical ghosts are
  running alongside.

  Story from BBC NEWS:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/7330949.stm

  Published: 2008/04/05 07:27:03 GMT

  © BBC MMVIII

  
  

  • 9:11 pm
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