Walther Tröger is an 83 year old German with arthritis. He was an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee. In 1972, he was part of the negotiating team that tried to free the Israeli athletes who had been kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Games. He reportedly offered himself as a hostage in exchange for saving the life of those athletes. He has dedicated his life to sporting causes, and worked hard under difficult circumstances.
Still don’t know who he is?
This guy.
This guy, whose arthritic arm meant, if you were stuck in a certain 70 year distant mindset looks “a bit like a Nazi salute, hur hurrr”. This guy, who was – like so many dignitaries around him – was greeting his own countries competitors as they walked into the Olympic Stadium.
And we had to take the piss, because, he’s German, he waved, and therefore must be ripe for being called a Nazi.
I despair sometimes, I really do. Notice Camilla and Boris Johnson looking on and laughing. This has been explained away by them supposedly laughing at the Germans Olympic uniforms (which were, in fact, hideous) but even if they were, that is no excuse. They should be polite.
It surprises me how many people were out of touch. David Cameron watched a celebration of the NHS he is so desperate to wreck. Jeremy Hunt watching clips and music from a BBC that he would dearly love to sell off to please his puppet masters at News Corp. Ed Miliband had to watch a celebration of the Jarrow Marchers, the Suffragette movement, the things that gave birth to a Labour Party unrecognisable under his leadership. Mitt Romney, who said “England [sic] is just a small island that doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy” and then had to sit there and watch an entire segment celebrating Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented something that changed the world more than anyone else and then gave it away for free. NBC are under a hail of criticism for not knowing who TBL was, not allowing their country to watch the ceremony live and then being arrogant enough to cut out an entire segment honouring those who had died because “it wasn’t relevant to our audience”. The Daily Mail has run not one, but two hugely offensive articles. One complaining about the multi-cultural aspect of the ceremony which was so shamefully racist that even they decided to delete it, and another calling a competitor “some bitch from Holland”.
Never have the people in charge looked further away from the citizens they purport to speak for. And never have we looked so powerless to do anything about it.
Out of My Tiny Mind 