More Rights For the Olympic Animals?

As I find myself explaining almost every time the history of the modern Olympic movement is not one of sporting excellence. Instead it was dreamt up in the late 19th century to provide an excuse for nations to meet up and discuss the main issues of the day at a time when international travel was both difficult and extremely time consuming. This political role enjoyed a massive resurgence during the Cold War when the Olympics provided one of the few opportunities for people from the Capitalist West to meet up with people from the Communist Soviet Bloc.

As a result rather then simply trying their hardest to win Olympians often found themselves asked to instead perform little stunts in order to provide a talking point about a certain issue. The most recent and extreme example of this came during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Here rather then trying to complete the course in the fastest time possible Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was instead asked to crash dramatically. The idea being that this crash would provide a metaphor for all of Georgia's critics as Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili tried re-integrate himself into the international community - particularly NATO - following his insane war with Russia in 2008. The problem was that Kumaritashvili mis-calculated and crashed with such force that he was killed.

Another method that nations have traditionally used to have discreet bilateral discussions with each other is through animal welfare and wildlife protection. So in 2013 alone we had Rihanna the Rhino that South Africa gifted to Israel, the pregnancy watch over Tian Tian the giant Panda at Edinburgh zoo and the death of the Tiger cub at London Zoo. The problem is that because they are using humans and animals to perform the same task sometimes the people in charge get to thinking that they can treat humans just like animals and treat animals as commodities that can be discarded once they've outlived their usefulness. During the Cold War the Soviet Union was particularly bad in this regard even going so far as to strongly suggest that successful athletes breed with each other in the hope of genetically engineering a special breed of super athletes.

As a civilisation our attitudes towards human and animal rights have improved significantly since those dark days. That coupled with the fact that globalisation means that it is now much, much easier for nations to communicate with each other - for example if a Russian politician wants to insult the US President these days they merely need to send a Tweet - has meant that the Olympic movement is evolving with many suggesting that it should become more about the sport rather then politics. This shift has become an issue at most recent Olympics and this year there seems to be a concerted effort to discuss it at the Sochi games using animal rights as a metaphor. So for example on the day of the opening ceremony there was a concerted - I think US - effort to discuss animal testing in scientific research with each side being asked to Tweet either the hashtag #NotoAnimalTesting or #YestoAnimalTesting to make their views known. Although it is hard to know which side won this 'debate' both of the hashtags were trending globally throughout much of the opening day of the Sochi games including during the opening ceremony.

This was rapidly followed up of the weekend with the decision by Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark to slaughter an 18 month old Giraffe named Marius and feed the carcass to the Lions despite what was apparently a very large Internet campaign against. Primarily this provoked international debate about how zoos look after the animals in their care which provided a metaphor for the Olympics with the games being the 'zoo' and the competitors being the 'animals.' However the narrative of an animal being shot in the head, chopped into little pieces and then fed to the Lions was also intended to act as an examination of the US' Rihanna operation which is widely regarded as a complete failure. Even the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) have been talking about people being fed to the dogs recently. Although the seeds of the Rihanna operation were planted in the 2012 para-Olympic closing ceremony making Rihanna part of the Olympic family whether she likes it or not the Diamonds World Tour was the US' single big diplomatic effort of 2013 and it is that context it is being discussed.

As I was there every step of the way breaking things down into bite-sized chunks it is all to easy for me to take all the credit/blame for the failure of the operation. However I think that significantly downplays how weak the operation actually was to begin with. I don't mean to insult Rihanna by saying this because she is extremely good at what she does which is popular entertainment that obviously must have mass appeal. The problem is that the role Rihanna's CIA handlers were forcing her to take on is normally performed by opera houses, symphony orchestras and classical theatre companies. For want of a better word these are elitist by nature all striving to find the most abstract and inaccessible way of getting their message across. As a result people who are used to operating in this environment would not have found anything in anyway difficult about Rihanna's artistic expression. In fact by continuing to cover the final stages of Rihanna's tour during the opening week of the COP19/CMP9 Summit I actually slightly increased the tension by giving people the impression that I thought they were idiots.

Therefore I actually saw my role within the Rihanna operation as keeping her fans up to date with what was going on. That's because while I never thought that, say, the South African government was going to have any trouble following what was going on a semi-literate Rihanna fan living in a shanty town might struggle a bit. My other main role of course was to keep Rihanna informed about what was going on in her life in order to reduce her stress levels in order to prevent her from having a full blown mental breakdown in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That is an aspect of the operation that I think the planners could have achieved but with no-one believing that Rihanna was responsible for the Arab Spring I am at a loss to think of what they were hoping to prove by using the full weight of the CIA to drive an emotionally immature 25 year old to madness. It was also an aspect of the operation that I was certainly not prepared to allow.

Copenhagen Zoo's reason for destroying Marius - to prevent inbreeding - was supposed to be interpreted as an insult to the British Monarchy who are frequently accused of being inbred. However in reality what the Danish Monarchy were trying to do was help the British Monarchy out by helping to publicise the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade 2014 that is being hosted on Thursday (13/2/14) by UK Prince Charles and Prince William - both of whom will theoretically become British Kings.

As I said wildlife protection has long been used as a way for nations to meet up and discuss other issues. For example ahead of this conference much has been made of a possible link between animal poaching and Islamist terrorists in East (the Horn of) Africa. While I don't doubt that people who smuggle Ivory and other illegal animal products will also be more then happy to smuggle weapons, drugs and people I think that this link has largely been overstated by often maligned environmentalists who are trying to get governments to act. I think that Islamist in East African nations such as Somalia and Kenya have much more reliable sources of funding and the European Monarchs led by the UK are very interested to find out what every one else knows about those terrorist funding networks.

The Rihanna link to the London conference comes from the fact that in the days running up to the conference Prince William has been on a hunting trip in Spain where he no doubt destroyed an awful lot of wildlife. This hypocrisy is supposed to be a metaphor for the UK's hypocrisy in the Rihanna operation. You see in private the UK was giving its full support for the US operation through things like Rihanna's River Island clothing line and the frequent trips to London that provided. However in public the UK was being very critical of the US' operation for example holding the inquest into the death of Mark Duggan which sparked the 2011 August riots for Rihanna was blamed during the tour and assisting with the Kenya shopping mall attack in the hope that Africans would assume that was just another aspect of the US operation.

By hosting the conference during the Olympics the UK seems to be trying to increase its own popularity by hoping that people will pick up on the wildlife/Olympian overlap with the UK showing that is in favour of reform. Of course by doing it like this the UK seems to be declaring itself to be somehow superior and therefore responsible for the fate of all the lesser mortals. That along with the strange Illuminati-style logos on Team GB's uniforms demonstrates that the UK is still very much rooted in the old authoritarian mentally of the Olympics and that attitude is not going to win them any friends - especially not in modern Russia.

20:40 on 11/2/14 (UK date).