The United States wants to destroy the Olympic Games through unjustified boycotts, though it has nothing to gain from it. They did it in 1980 and they are doing it again in 2022, according to a false narrative promoted by Sputnik.NEWS: “Announcing the boycott of the 80th Olympics, the White House knew it all too well that the Moscow authorities would respond symmetrically. Thus, the Olympic cycle, barely restored after World War II, was interrupted.
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So let's see where the boycott and the use of Olympic sports as a political weapon come from.
Forty years ago, the Democratic President Jimmy Carter's administration boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.In this way, Washington decided to "penalize" the USSR for the fact that Moscow, intending to defend its own southern borders, had introduced a small-sized military contingent into Afghanistan.Today, obviously, this boycott, against the background of a chaotic and bloody withdrawal of the United States from the country, looks like a comic declamation, but then the athletes from the countries that tacitly followed the American ideological line didn’t feel like laughing. The hard work during the entire Olympic cycle, when in competitions the athlete would reach the top of their condition, was thrown into the trash at the stroke of a pen.
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Today, all sorts of political perverts, by virtue of their own pettiness, laziness of soul, and, finally, their own stupidity, are trying to destroy these traditions, which they did not create, and which should outlive (theoretically) these temporary masters.
History brings us optimism: the boycott of the 1980 Olympics did not allow Washington to accumulate any political bonuses.
Instead, in an attempt to oppose the Soviet military presence, the United States raised Osama bin Laden with its own hands and money.
Everybody remembers how that ended.
As if this tragedy was not enough, Washington came up with another (just as bloody) prank by […] and just fled Afghanistan.[…]”
NARRATIVES: 1. The USSR did not invade Afghanistan, it just introduced a "small-sized military contingent" into that country. 2. The USSR behaved impeccably in Afghanistan, and the United States destroyed that country. 3. The boycott of the Olympics is a fruitless unilateral political action of the US. 4. As in 1980, the US is now trying to destroy the Olympics, but this time the goal is to impose transgender athletes.LOCAL CONTEXT / ETHOS: The United States and several of its allies (UK, Canada, Australia, etc.) have decided to diplomatically boycott the Winter Olympics. This basically means that officials from those countries will not attend the opening ceremony of the Games, but the Olympic teams will be present. Likewise, the decision to boycott the Games diplomatically has no impact on the companies that sponsor the participating athletes.The decision to diplomatically boycott the Olympics is a reaction to China's severe misdeeds in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Human rights organizations and Western governments have for years denounced the Chinese campaign against Muslims in Xinjiang, where re-education camps have been set up and massive human rights violations have been reported. The United Nations has sounded the alarm and is about to release a report on the abuses commited there. Beijing is also behind a strong campaign to curtail the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong citizens, which should have been respected under the "one country, two systems" agreement that has underpinned the province's governance since it returned to China.Beijing rejects any criticism of its abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, invokes the principle of "non-interference in domestic affairs" and threatens retaliation against the boycott.The attention that liberal democracies pay to respect for civil rights and freedoms also irritates Russia, which too has an authoritarian regime, so the Kremlin's propaganda focuses on the "non-interference in internal affairs” principle as well. The boycott of the Olympic Games is nothing new. The most famous example dates back to the Cold War when, following the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, more than 60 countries chose not to participate in the Moscow Olympics. In retaliation, the USSR responded with its own boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but only some of the socialist countries (with the exception of China, Romania and Yugoslavia) and a few USSR client states joined it. There are other examples of boycott, including on China’s part, which refused to attend the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.PURPOSE: To shift attention from the real causes of the boycotts - the invasion of another state in 1980, the violation of human rights in 2022.WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The 1980 Olympics were boycotted by dozens of Western states led by the United States in response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR did not "introduce a small-sized military contingent into Afghanistan" to defend its southern border; it invaded an independent state after the pro-Moscow communists who had staged a coup (and triggered a riot of the national forces and moderate Islamists) lost power.In fact, long before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was one of the targets of Russians’ imperial ambitions, and the country was at the center of the so-called "Great Game”, the Russian-British confrontation that lasted for most of the 19th century and which started from the idea that whoever controlled Afghanistan, controlled Central Asia. The Soviet invasion caused a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan, with 5 million refugees and up to 2 million dead, and the Soviet withdrawal took place following the loss of the war and was soon followed by the collapse of the USSR.Mujahideen groups in response to the Soviet invasion entered the civil war after the collapse of the Najibullah regime, a client of Moscow’s, and amid that chaos, the Taliban emerged and succeeded, later hosting Al Qaeda. The United States offered support to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in the context of the Cold War (but the money was directed by Pakistani intelligence), but after the Soviet withdrawal the flow of money ceased; It can therefore be said that much of Afghanistan's problems, including the emergence of the Taliban, are directly related to the Soviet invasion.
The false narrative of the founding of Al Qaeda by the Americans is old and has no factual basis; bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan as a money provider for Abdullah Azzam's network, which he later took over and turned into Al Qaeda.
The 1980 Moscow Olympics was boycoted by dozens of countries, not just the US, and one of the most vocal supporters of the boycott was the Soviet dizident Andrei Saharov; his pleas played a decisive role in imposing the boycot. Politically, that massive boycot was a hard blow to the USSR, which would collapse just a decade after the Olympics.
The 2022 diplomatic boycott has nothing to do with gender ideology or the issue of transgender athletes, and is just a reaction to China’s abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
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