Of course!
I've been saying this for years.
No, it's not inconsistent with my positions on other issues because I oppose consumer boycotts directed at deliberately harming businesses because I find most of the time they are politicized and not fact-based not to mention not effective and even counterproductive.
But I don't feel that way about the Olympics. I remember well the boycott of the 1980 Olympics, and even though it cost me a job that I was supposed to have related to the Olympics back then, just when I was hoping to return to Russia after studying there. I supported it because the invasion of Afghanistan really was an awful thing — and it ultimately led to the deaths of more than a million civilians, far, far more than the 10 years that the US and NATO have been deployed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, who are responsible for the lion's share of civilian deaths there now.
I realize there's always this whining about how it disappoints athletes who have worked so hard blah blah. But there you'll simply find my completely unmoved and unsympathetic. The Olympics just feels more and more like a racket to me. A huge business, huge amounts of money spent, huge hype, and the commercialization in various ways ultimately, even though it is supposed to be about high ideals. The Olympics do not bring peace and understanding. Traveling in a jet plane and sitting in an air conditioned stadium with your high-priced tickets and then resting in your Western-style hotel somewhere hasn't done a thing for world peace or cultural understanding.
The Olympics have come to me to feel more and more corrupt because of the Russian factor as well in particular — remember the allegations that they fixed the skating competition?
And now with Sochi, the corruption levels of the Russian Olympics are fantastic — read about it here in an article by Boris Nemtsov which I translated. The sums spent are something like 10 times the amount spent by any other country, because of all the kick-backs and scams. Putin's personal boyhood friends have the main contracts along with his other favourite oligarchs. Workers have been brought in and exploited and are working under awful conditions on a Stakhanovite type schedule. The environmental damage is big. There are all these issues also of the region itself — the Circassian people and their cause and remembrance of the mass crime against humanity against them; the Chechen people and the mass crimes against humanity against them as well in two wars; the fears of terrorism by all these aggrieved people which are very real.
There are human rights problems in Russia itself, of course, ranging from murdered journalists, jailed lawyers like Navalny; tortured and killed lawyers like Magnitsky, and of course thousands of NGOs being raided now and harassed as possible "foreign agents", which some being killed. It's a terrible time in Russia, and going to the Olympics only endorses the suppression of the human rights movement and anti-corruption movement and turns a blind eye to very real crimes of the regime. Yeah, we get it that all countries have some crime or another and no country is perfect and the Olympics are supposed to be about peace and understanding blah blah — but they have long since stopped being that, as they are basically a way for sports channels and tour firms to make money off the masses desire to be entertained by sports. I don't care about sports, so this just doesn't work for me.
I also don't care if athletes are "disappointed," because I think some alternative to the Olympics is probably long overdue and someone should start it even if only on a sand lot in Schenectady.
While there are very real problems and massive human rights abuses, the big human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have not called for boycotts. Instead, they've sifted out this or that issue. HRW decided that the rights of migrant labourers in the Olympic village construction would be their issue. That seemed a bit limited, while important, because there's the entire kit and caboodle of human wrongs, ranging from roads destroying nature in Sochi and the stress on the electrical grid increasing outages to hundreds of people missing in the Caucasus, some of the terrorists, some of them not, tortured and killed by the Putin regime. There was no reason to just pick one issue; the mind can hold 10 when it comes to Putin, surely.
Now along comes the LGBT movement and calls openly for the boycott of the Olympics. Good! LGBT rights have been oppressed with everything else in Russia lately, and more so, as it has not only the backing of the regime but the hatred of the society at large to fuel persecution. There is a new anti-gay propaganda law passed, and scores of assaults on gays, particularly at gay parades, that rightly call for a reaction.
And naturally that splits the gay community, and some will try to convince their fellow gays they shouldn't boycott Russia and will come up with some contrived arguments about all this that will be completely unpersuasive — and the purpose in the end of the active measures operators in the Kremlin will only be to exploit this division — and help it along — to keep everyone off balance.
When there is a LGBT issue at stake, that attracts "progressives" who will piggyback on the issue to show that they are "progressive". And that's okay, the more the merrier. But then they will be split — and the Kremlin will win there, too.
But…here's what else will happen, with the "active measures" crew hard at work. When the only issue the Western liberals are raising regarding the Sochi Olympics is gay rights — because all the careful work for years on this by every group from the Circassians to the labour migrants to environmentalists just doesn't have the pitch and visibility — Putin will seize on this to discredit liberals/the West/the human rights movement/show biz/everything related to it. That's because in Russia, the most common way the regime discredits opposition is to call them "blue" (the slang word for gays in Russia) — thus you get figures like Yavlinsky portrayed as "blue' on TV and others called anti-gay slurs because they can count on that resonating in a hateful public.
So if the only reason the West is seen to be boycotting the Olympics is gay rights, that will suit Putin just fine, he will gloat about it, and point to it on TV slyly as a reason why everyone should hate the West — and gays, too. That message will be absorbed, especially by the victims of other human rights violations like labor rights, minority rights, etc.
And I could add that in Russia, anti-gay sentiment doesn't work in the same way as in the West, where it has mainly a conservative cultural and religious foundation. In Russia, there is the horrible legacy of the GULAG and even the prisons today where male rape of other males is an instrument of the regime to use to humiliate and control prisoners. The GULAG rape epidemic has not been recorded so well but there are some books and papers on it. Any former political prisoner will have very keen memories of the role of rape in the population, and that is why for them — the natural opponents of the regime — anyone who has been demeaned by being raped or anyone who would do that demeaning evokes only contempt. The visceral hate of males you see in Russia toward gays — really out of proportion and out of control — is a direct function of the role of rape in the prisons — and a misperception that all gay life is somehow related to this specific circumstance of prison rape. Massive numbers of Russian males have been through the prison system, and this is indelibly imprinted on their consciousness and carries over into the next generations. This issue should be tackled more — but let me tell you something, if you take it up, you will be beaten black and blue.
So Putin will have a lot of fun with it, as will his AM (active measures) shop.
Although I support gay rights and LGBT marriage and equality, I have absolutely no use for Dan Savage. I find him a loathsome provocateur who uses dirty and coercive tactics against his targets. What he did to Rick Santorum with his obscene Google bombing is despicable. I think Savage also slyly gaslights and manipulates these issues like gay marriage for another agenda which I call "fuck you hedonism" and which he calls "good, game and giving" — we just don't agree on the issue promiscuity and his notions of "open marriage".
Not surprisingly, Savage has savagely picked up this issue because it's hot, and now is calling to boycott Stolichnaya, the Russian vodka, which is popular in bars and at parties so he can get his readership. (BTW, isn't it telling that Dan Savage and his "advice to the lovelorn" column is still at the Village Voice, but gay writer Michael Musto, who was 10 times more cultured and interesting, was canned recently along with some other good Voice writers).
So — this is all sort of like Pussy Riot. Nothing would get the global hipsters' attention to protest anything in Russia — murders of human rights activists, lawyers, humanitarian workers, Muslim clergymen, etc. etc. — crackdowns on thousands of NGOs of every type, control of the Internet — but this got them to pay attention because they saw it as "theirs". When old men in black frocks seemed to be getting in the way of their sex lives in particular or anything about their cultural expression, they could get on board right away. Intricate issues about due process and minority rights just don't get the juices flowing in quite the same way.
Well, that's how life and politics are, so good! Whoever wants to boycott Sochi for whatever reason should go for it. I don't expecte Human Rights Watch is going to come running now, "leading from behind," and get people to make a whole platform of issues, from workers' rights to LGBT rights to environmental destruction to corruption in contracts all on the menu to really put the pressure on the Kremlin big-time. I expect them to possibly up their coverage of gay issues a bit more but continue not to call for a boycott because "they don't do that".
And possibly a really hard-core gay boycott of the Moscow Olympics will show Russia and the world the power of the gay travel and sports event dollar, and they will start trying to make this work. There might be some sort of quiet arrangement made but I really doubt it — I don't think the Kremlin can bend on this. In fact, Putin doesn't need tourist dollars — he already squeezed all Russian and regional railroad passengers and freight transporters for extra fees to pay for the Olympics, and passed it on to his cronies.
It's a sad situation when only boycotts work for human rights attention — but they do! — and the event of the Olympics does not change the world — and that's why those soppily calling on people not to boycott and "change the world" by going are completely unpersuasive. Nobody can really believe that by waiting hours — days — in line to get a special additional Olympic passport on top of your Russian visa which was already hard enough to get, riding on late and rickety buses to hotels where the concrete blocks are probably already falling out of place, to struggle with epically bad service and snarls of traffic and logistics problems, to see athletes compete in a setting that distracts from real problems and doesn't inspire — they will be changing the world in any way.
Maybe some people will manage to unfurl a rainbow banner or get up a little picket somewhere — but security will be HUGELY tight due to fears — realistic — of terrorism — and it will be nearly impossible to organize effectively to get a message visible at the Olympics.
Even so, people should try, and think creatively how they can appeal to the Russian public on LGBT and other issues.
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