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Do the Olympics actually promote sport – or are they just a circus for the rich and powerful?
STEVEN WALKER says most of the claims made about the Olympics turn out to be false on further study – the Games do nothing for the working class or global South
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
NOW that the Olympic circus of money and power has moved on it’s a good time to reflect on what it achieved and remind ourselves that at its heart the Olympic “movement” is nothing to do with fairness, sporting equality or opportunity.
It’s about rich countries competing against other rich countries to gain most medals and use the Olympics to project power and prestige. In the Soviet era the Olympics became a proxy Cold War fight between the USSR and the United States. Tokyo reflected geopolitical shifts so that China now replaces Russia as the US’s sporting enemy.
The motto of the Olympics is Faster, Higher, Stronger, underpinned by the values of Excellence, Respect and Friendship, yet its troubled history shows how capital has eroded and tarnished all those high-minded concepts.
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