Back to the Romans
The question is often asked: what did the Romans ever do for us? I guess you don’t have to live in a region like the North East with its strong connections to ancient Rome, through the remains of Hadrian’s Wall and other fortifications, to understand that even today in the 21st century Ancient Rome is important.
As part of that, Ancient Rome has given us certain phrases which we still use today such as “fiddling while Rome burns” or “where there’s life there’s hope”. There is one particular phrase I want us to consider and that is the Roman idea of bread and circuses.
It has been noted: “”Bread and circuses” (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE, and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts.”
This idea was of course based around the concept that the elites of the Roman world could get away with almost anything, any level of cruelty and debauchery, as long as they provided bread and circuses for the masses. It is here that we perhaps see the origins of sports washing, in the idea that people are distracted from the truth of what powerful elites are doing by the simple provision of food and entertainment. We can see the roots of sports washing in the circuses, in the games that Roman emperors put on to divert attention away from what they were really doing.
Italy, 1934
It is therefore appropriate that we can trace the origins of modern sport washing back to that same city of Rome as the 1934 football World Cup in Italy was able to paint a gloss over the cruelty of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.
Germany, 1936
This time brings us to what is seen by many as the real start of modern sports washing two years later in Nazi Germany. The Germans had been awarded the Olympics before the Nazis came to power, and Hitler became chancellor on the 30th of January 1933 when: “on May 13, 1931, the International Olympic Committee, headed by Count Henri Baillet-Latour of Belgium, awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice signalled Germany’s return to the world community after defeat in World War I”.
However, the Nazis were quick to understand and appreciate the propaganda value of hosting the Olympics and used it cynically to spread Nazi propaganda and to attempt to, well, sport wash the discrimination and the suffering that was going on in Nazi Germany in 1936.
It is true of course that the attempted Nazi propaganda did backfire somewhat as the American sprinter and jumper Jesse Owens won four gold medals and so single handedly challenged Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy well the Nazis looked on.
Protests
Protesting against sportswashing has a long tradition in itself and indeed there have been attempts to organise protests and boycotts against countries using sporting events to improve their image since at least the 1936 Olympics. Back in 1936 Owens himself was urged by the NAACP to make a statement saying that the United States should boycott the Olympics that year. “If there are minorities in Germany who have been discriminated against, the United States should withdraw from the 1936 Olympics”.
However, the President of the American Olympic Committee at the time , Avery Brundage, denounced these actions saying they were taken by what he described as un-American agitators and therefore the United States competed in the 1936 games. Brundage has been said to have distrusted any challenge to the “established political and social order he cherished and garnished.”
Propaganda
Hitler’s notorious propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels argued that the games would be a “perfect opportunity to showcase the superiority of Aryan athletes”. Despite this, it has been argued that this early attempt at sportswashing may well have done more harm than good to the Nazi cause.
Indeed, this notorious example of sports washing is now sometimes pejoratively called the Nazi Olympics. As we have seen there were calls for a boycott against the 1936 games, which were unsuccessful with the International Olympic Committee being assured that qualified Jewish athletes would be part of the German team and that the games would absolutely not be used as a way of promoting Nazi ideology.
However, when the games actually took place only one member of the German team was of Jewish descent while the games themselves were turned into a forum for Nazi propaganda and ideology. The Nazis made full use of the opportunity to try and portray Germany to both foreign visitors and the international mass media as a tolerant and peaceful country.
To help facilitate this the Nazis made sure that the ubiquitous anti-Jewish street signs and shop signs came down for the duration of the games. Meanwhile the Roma and Sinti were treated appallingly, being picked up on the streets and put in concentration camps.
At least for a while this tactic of pulling the wool over the eyes of the world seemed to have worked. The New York Times was reported as praising the 1936 games as” the biggest athletic games ever held, the most largely attended. The best organised the most picturesque on the most productive of new and startling records.”
The newspaper seemed to be impressed by what it described as a “good humoured, happy crowd”. Furthermore, it added, “that is the picture that foreign visitors will take home to the undoubted improvement of world relations and general amiability” . Two years later, Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, before adding the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then invading Poland in September of that year. By 1945 and the end of the Second World War six million Jews and upwards of one million Roma and Sinti and many, many others had been brutally murdered in the Holocaust.
The Nazi games are a very good example of how Nazi Germany used sport to cover up its intended aggression against neighbouring countries and its repression of people at home. Hitler even had what would we now call his own personal public relations director in the form of Leni Riefenstahl. She made a film about the majesty of Nazi Germany and how wonderful it was through the lens of the Olympics and the torch relay through countries that the Nazis later intended their tanks to roll through. This was the first time that the torch relay was used in the modern Olympic games and was purely a propaganda stunt by the Nazis.
We can see then that the history of modern day sportswashing really begins with the 1936 Olympics when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis cynically used them, inviting people from around the world to see what they wanted them to see of Germany; how majestic and how peaceful it was.
The pattern for sports washing was now clearly set; using sport to make your regime look harmless and peaceful and distracting people’s attention, while in the background carrying on with your cruel and brutal policies.
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