As the Paris Olympic Games have ended, it is worth looking back and assessing them – this time, not in terms of the athletes’ sports results, but from a broader, kind of cultural perspective which takes us as far as naming LGBTQ rights as a new soft power tool.
Paris Olympics, including the opening ceremony and its events, was undoubtedly extremely memorable: both grandiose and truly divisive. What was the point of all this?
Right on day zero, the organisers successfully sparked off a global outcry. One of the first criticisms came from the Council of Bishops of the Catholic Church in France, which described the ceremony’s artistic performances as ’scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity’
The French far right has also strongly criticised the performances at the opening ceremony. ’To all the Christians of the world who are watching the Paris 2024 ceremony and felt insulted by this drag queen parody of the Last Supper, know that it is not France that is speaking but a left-wing minority ready for any provocation,’ far right French politician Marion Maréchal posted.
Her sentiment was echoed by religious conservatives internationally – Christian groups and conservative leaders worldwide criticized the opening ceremony as tasteless and blasphemous. Some US politicians and Christian bishops called it a gross mockery and emblematic of a ’deeply secularist postmodern society’. An American conservative commentator claimed the Olympics have ’gone full Woke dystopian.’
After the opening ceremony, Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Tomáš Taraba, the Slovak Olympic team rep said he will skip the closing ceremony of the Olympics on 11 August due to the ’repellent symbols of deviant decadence’ he witnessed during the opening ceremony.’The organizers of the event had prepared a disgusting exhibition full of LGBTI ideology and insults to the symbols of Christianity’, he posted on Facebook.
The Holy See may have been shocked by the performances, as a reaction from the Vatican took a couple of days. ’The Holy See was saddened by certain scenes during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games’, the statement reads ’and can only join the voices that have been raised in recent days to deplore the offence caused to many Christians and believers of other religions.’
Global stars such as Lady Gaga and Céline Dion, who appeared on stage at the opening ceremony, could not even have dreamt of an attention that the shining drag queens and a tableau reminiscent of The Last Supper were able to attract.
This particular scene has drawn the strongest criticism from some Christians, including Italy’s deputy PM Matteo Salvini who called it it insulting and sleazy.’Opening the Olympics by insulting billions of Christians across the world was a really bad start’, he wrote on X.
French President Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, praised the audacity of both France and the opening ceremony and defended artistic freedom. ’The French were very proud of this ceremony’, he claimed.
Socialist Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo was also delighted with the scenes of the opening ceremony. Fuck the reactionaries, fuck this far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all’, she said in an interview with Le Monde. In addition, Hidalgo blamed the far right for stoking divisions in French society. She also said she was proud of the way the opening ceremony presented Paris to the world. ’Paris is the city of all freedoms, the city of refuge for LGBTQI+ people, the city where people live together,’ she emphasised.
The Olympics opening ceremony was intended to trigger a reflection while using a global audience to promote diversity and freedoms in France, Paris 2024 organisers said. They claimed they worked with the International Olympic Committee on the topics they wanted to reflect in the show, including promoting LGBTQ+ rights.
The opening ceremony, however, has not been the only notable case of ’biodiversity’ that could have been observed in Paris. Transgender boxer Imane Khelif (Algeria) won an Olympics gold medal after beating actual female boxers to a jelly with deadly masculine punches, without the organisers being concerned at all. The International Olympic Committee supported the transgender athlete as she complained about ’immoral verbal attacks’ on her but was not ready to show the smallest sympathy for Italian boxer Angela Carini who stopped the fight with Khelif after only a few punches were exchanged – the game lasted only 46 seconds when Carini quit out of fear for her life.
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics and the participation of transgender athletes in certain sports, including non-binary athletes like middle-distance runner Nikki Hiltz and soccer star Quinn, clearly showed the potential impact that can be generated, anywhere in the world, by putting the LGBTQ community in the spotlight in such an offensive way. The very same community, together with its ideology, has also proved to be an effective tool for turning the world upside down.
Under the guise of soft power, violence has suddenly surfaced and those who are offended by this phenomenon have been stripped of the right to express any criticism. In Paris, surprisingly enough, the majority have become oppressed when it came to freedom of speech and opinion. Normality has clearly ranked second to diversity.
As far as Europe is concerned, it is important to note that, as history has repeatedly shown, artificially created divisions greately contribute to a weaker Europe. In this respect, one should not forget that what was witnessed in Paris was Emmanuel Macron’s liberal reality. After being weakened in his home country, he changed tactics and decided to weaken Europe himself. Macron has not only found an ideal partner in Socialist Anne Hidalgo to bolster his ’swan song’, but the two of them have found the perfect tool to create global discord, which is the misusing of the LGBTQ community for political purposes, as the incidents of Paris 2024 suggest.
