Lessons from the 2024 Paris Olympic Opening Ceremony

If the planners of the Paris Summer Olympics hoped to garner global attention for the opening parade, they succeeded even beyond their expectations, though perhaps not quite as they anticipated since the reaction was mixed to say the least, with a large number of governments, institutions, religious dignitaries, politicians and common citizens the world over voicing negative or even outraged comments and criticisms while most impressions were ambivalent or only cautiously appreciative. The Left-of-Centre mainstream media, generously fed by the Globalist Western Establishment mostly gave ecstatic coverage while other, more independent platforms expressed reservations or gave mocking or mildly critical reviews. Rather than describing yet once again the good and the bad in that 500 million Euro floating Euro extravaganza on the Seine, I will make a few comments on the image of the modern Euro-American situation that the carnival-like spectacle presented and on the lessons that India might draw from it.

I wrote Euro-American because the USA’s contemporary influence in that French ‘national’ event was pervasive, if not dominant, whether in the presence of Lady Gaga or in the Rap tunes. The organisers claimed they had wanted to tick all the boxes of the DEI agenda. It was obvious that for them, as for the other promoters of those now mandatory guidelines, DEI means primarily giving maximum exposure to the LGBTQ ‘community’, its ‘pride’ (a buzzword in that context) and its practices, including sexual promiscuity, threesomes, homosexuality, transgenderism, drag-queen shows, public nudity and debauchery involving children (there was a little girl among the drag queens in the ‘Last Supper’ satire involving a naked Bacchus-like figure).  The mass beheadings of the French Revolution were also evoked when the old Conciergerie building was shown dripping with blood, and when the decapitated Queen Marie Antoinette appeared, holding her head in her hands and singing ‘ça ira’, the sinister revolutionary anthem that promises death to all ‘Aristos’. 

The designers of the show managed to mock a sacred scene and celebrate mass murder in the same event, in an unabashed celebration of revolutionary terror, apparently viewed by them as part of the identity of the country whose national song La Marseillaise incites its citizens to ‘irrigate our furrows with impure blood’.

Under the ensuing storm of protests, the organisers and ‘artists’ tried to backpedal, arguing that it was all a misunderstanding and claiming they never intended to offend anyone, according to the familiar hypocritical stratagem of ‘shoot and scoot’.

One wonders what happened to the vision of universal concord, respect and unity, supposed to be the message of that festive function. What of equity and inclusion? It looked as if diversity was only about skin colour, and about sexual practices that some leaders of Macron’s France personally espouse, but not about ideas, religions, and cultures.  Those who felt offended by some of the paraded exhibits were blatantly ignored: “If you don’t like us displaying and celebrating our mores, too bad. You have no say anymore’ was their implicit proclamation.

The notion that certain minorities enjoy the right to provoke and insult the majority at publicly funded mega-events in the name of inclusion, social justice and freedom, leads us to examine the ideology that is usually described as wokism, invoking several sources such as the Frankfurt Critical Theory, Trotskyism, nihilism and libertinism, all under the convenient label of secularism even though that concept is not anti-religious in origin.

In a recent speech the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban took up his favorite topic, the spiritual vacuum of the modern West that leads, according to him, to the death of that civilisation. Citing the specific case of the French Olympic ‘parade of prides’, he diagnosed the cause of the crisis as a loss of the transcendent values enshrined in Religion, Motherland and Family that build national (and supra-national) societies. Orban notes that in the modern West, traditional values founded on transpersonal, higher ideals have been replaced by individualistic desires and requirements that brook no limitations or controls and therefore create a wanton, selfish, and self-obsessed ‘market society’ in which God is dead. He relates it to ‘John-lennonism’, as expressed in the famous song ‘Imagine’ that has become an anthem for anarchical utopianism. 

In the name of abolishing constraints and ‘patriarchal’ oppressions the modern ruling ideology puts physical appetites and yearnings, above all sexual gratification, at the top of the agenda by declaring them to be fundamental rights. 

The latter (‘human rights’) are continuously expanding beyond the possibilities of satisfaction so that more and more people become frustrated and angry narcissists, convinced that they are not getting what they feel entitled to from birth and therefore easily turning into psychopaths or sociopaths. 

The breakdown of social bonds leads more and more isolated individuals to express their rage in explosions of homicidal violence against random fellow citizens (mass shootings and stabbings in the US and some other countries are becoming frequent).

In Orban’s view, the most glaring symptom of the collective decline is the obsessive promotion of the LGBTQ ‘mind virus’ which propagates the theory that most people don’t belong to a single gender and find their real selves in sexual practices that become the determinants of their identities. This view that replaces the definition of ‘homo sapiens’ by ‘homo copulans’ denies all differences between men and women on grounds of equality and replaces the two sexes by an infinite number of genders (diversity and inclusion demanded) tacitly expected to find satisfaction in group sex. The woke LGBTQ doctrine embraces transgenderism as a way to correct the ‘errors’ of the natural and social order and promotes satirical depictions of femininity  embodied by drag queens, often sent to primary schools and kindergartens to ‘educate’ children about ‘non-conventional identities’  defined as the new norms. In several countries, puberty blockers are offered to kids who feel ‘gender-dysphoric’, often without telling the parents who are divested of their prerogatives under the pressure of what must be called a state-sponsored pharma-surgical mafia. 

This diametrical shift in values requires a change in the vocabulary. While the word ‘normal’ has been made controversial, people who stay in the gender of their births are defined as ‘cisgenders’, just as persons who have relations with those formerly designated as belonging to the ‘opposite sex’ are ‘heterosexual’ to underline that there is no biological mandate for what is only one of various available choices and perhaps not the best. That reversal of definitions has led to other semantic inversions. One should no longer say ‘mother’s milk’ since men are supposed to lactate as well (is it not all a matter of equity as a right?). In the Paris Olympics, biologically male boxers were allowed to fight and beat true females. No more fathers and mothers, only numbered parents or ‘folks’ in American jargon. In the realm of morals, sins no longer exist and, unsurprisingly, the values invoked in this contemporary global subculture apart from pride include greed, lust, drug-use and hatred (of all dissidents) that also happen to be among the seven deadly sins of Abrahamic creeds and of most other religious traditions.

The dominant, increasingly  tyrannical ideology is described by Orban and other conservative thinkers and statesmen, including Vladimir Putin, as the source of the West’s self-destructive orientation that will lead to its suicide if the course is not reversed right away. Although the woke craze was born in the United States out of a left-wing revolt against the capitalist conformism of the Cold War era, the French celebration of its symbols is rooted in various chapters of the national history, from the terrorist phase of the French revolution to the moral turmoil of the 1968 student agitations, inspired by   the deconstructionist Parisian Left-Bank philosophers of the sixties. 

Wokism in its various versions ends up as a continuous quest for gratification that ends up destroying the society it pervades. The mind virus kills its host. The far right is said to signal its presence with a ‘wolf whistle’, the new anarchical left instead noisily reminds us that the Devil apes and mocks the Sacred. Rene Guenon called the modern materialist social system the Great Parody. The Paris Olympics proved him right. India must, in contrast, unfurl and wave the kapidhwaja and blow the shankha of the Dharmayuddha. There lies Bharat’s ability to make a difference.