Left Flank

When I posted about the similarities between the August 8, 2008 opening ceremony of the current Olympiad, the 2007 Mass Arirang Games in Pyongyang, and the Nuremberg Rallies - «After watching a moving opening routine that featured 2,008 drummers performing in a kind of mind-boggling unison I’d only ever seen accomplished in kooky North Korean videos of parades in honor of Kim Jong Il, it was easy to wonder: Could this kind of mass-synchronized undertaking only be accomplished in a totalitarian state?» - I didn't know Albert Speer, Jr., the son of Adolf Hitler's chief architect and Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Nina L. Khrushcheva makes some structural comparisons between the 1936 and 2008 Olympiads.

Indeed, by choosing Albert Speer Jr., the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China’s leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and
mandate to rule.

Speer Jr.’s commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father’s plan for “Germania,” the name Hitler selected for the Berlin that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a mighty central axis.

(...)

While designing the master plan for the Beijing Games, Speer Jr., an acclaimed architect and town planner, also sought, like his father, to create a futuristic global metropolis. Of course, the language that he used to sell his scheme to the Chinese was very different from the words his father used to present his plans to Hitler. Instead of emphasizing his design’s pomposity, the younger Speer insisted on its environmental friendliness. The 2,000-year-old city of Beijing should be transported into hyper-modernity, whereas his father’s 1936 Berlin design was, in his words, “simply megalomania.”

But, a survivor of the Cold War like Khrushcheva should know better.

The realization of Speer Jr.’s Olympic vision, and that of his patrons, marks the end of a welcome interlude. For years following the end of the Cold War, politics had been removed from the Games. A gold medal signified the sporting abilities and dedication of individual athletes, not the supposed merits of the political system that produced them.

She must be talking about the pre-1936 ethos of the Olympic movement, or perhaps just the 1896 Games. Since when have these athletes not been a tool of some interest, corporate or ideological?