The Ambassador of Sports
I’ve been meaning to write about Jesse Owens since Henry mentioned him on page 79. With the Olympics in full swing in London right now, it seemed like a good time to finally get around to it.
The 1936 Summer Olympics were held in Germany. This was just three years before WWII started, and Hitler and the Nazi party were ascendant. The Nazis hoped that a strong showing at the Olympic Games would show the world the superiority of the Aryan race. And in fact, the Germans did win quite a few medals that year, but there was one decidedly non-Aryan blemish on their record.
Jesse Owens, an African American from Ohio, won four gold medals that year, for the 100 meter sprint, 200 meter sprint, 4×100 meter relay, and the long jump. This was the record number of gold medals in men’s athletics until Carl Lewis matched his performance in 1984. Not bad for a guy without blond hair and blue eyes!
Hitler handled the whole thing about like you’d expect, claiming that those of African descent are physically more powerful than whites because they are jungle primitives, and should therefore not be allowed to compete in future Olympics. He basically said that black people weren’t human. And yes, I realize that that’s pretty much the Nazi ideology in a nutshell, but it’s still hard to wrap my head around the idea of someone thinking like that.
What’s even more disturbing is the way that Jesse was treated back home. Granted, this was nineteen years before Rosa Parks helped to launch the civil rights movement, but even so, blatant racism is blatant. FDR did not acknowledge his wins or invite him to the White House. And following the ticker-tape parade in his honor, Jesse had to ride the service elevator up to the reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. When he tried to turn his Olympic wins into endorsement deals, officials revoked his amateur status, which was the end of his athletic career. It was astoundingly shoddy treatment for a man who would be treated like a hero today.
Jesse experienced a lot of ups and downs later in life, and was eventually granted a little of the respect he deserved when he was appointed a US goodwill ambassador. He may not have received his due in life, but he will always be remembered as the man who ruined Hitler’s big Olympic show and tell.
(The excellent webcomic Zen Pencils recently adapted a quote from Jesse Owens. Check it out.)
This is one of the major reasons that then and now some people wonder why the USA didn’t join the Axis—and some of them wanted to. And today they want to start a new Axis with the Holy American Empire (as they may fancy it) will be the main axle of such an organization. The US has enough bases around the world and growing and expanding under our first African-American president! A terrible way we have been trodding since 1980.
If Cheney and Rove had been running things back then, you’d better believe the U.S. would have joined the Axis.
Say what you will about George H.W., at least he (unlike his limp-d**ked son and those who pulled his puppet strings) had the guts to sign up and fight and go into harm’s way (his plane was shot down over Ichi Jima in ’44) in the battle against fascism – despite the fact this father Prescott had been doing business with Hitler before the war. I guess he must have had some ideals and selflessness before hejoined the CIA…
The bunch of traitors and whores and cowards we have in D.C. today (from BOTH parties, who – IMHO – differ only in degree) have taken a royal dump on the sacrifices made by that “Greatest Generation”…and I say may the gods damn the lot of them.
Riiiiight, never minding they come from the same demographic that back then was cracking the whip to go after the Nazis long before Pearl Harbor. It was the Western and Southern “Jacksonian” Democrats who supported FDR’s military buildup against Germany. In the North, most Democrats were opposed and the Repulicans isolationist. Only the Jews, then just an emerging Democrat block who really made things work for FDR.
That was doubly true after the war started under the Nazi-Soviet pact. Stalin ordered all his agents, of which there were many, plus easily manipulated “useful fools” to interfere with support for the Western allies (Stalin wanted the Western war to bog down as in WWI.) The Stalinist were surprising effective especially those in the unions who struck war industries repeatedly. Policy influence was significant especially by those Stalinist disguised as supporters of the naive vice-President Herbert Wallace.
George Bush the younger didn’t get special treatment in the Vietnam draft. That is a myth. It was in 1965 before the war really became a big deal. It is simply that he wanted to be a pilot but that required a two year full time commitment. Since most people seeking to avoid the draft were doing so because they didn’t want to spend the time (you only had a 1 in 10 chance of ending up in Vietnam) few volunteered for reserve pilot training. Bush did, served two full years just like he would have if he’d gone into the active military and then served another IIRC 5 of 8 because cutbacks related to the end of the war (and the Democrats slashing of defense budgets.)
If you want to look at someone who has “taken royal dump on the sacrifices made by that ‘Greatest Generation'” look at John Kerry. He based his career on claiming in sworn testimony before congress that he had huge amounts of evidence that US service personnel were guilty of “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command”.
Those officers at the upper level of command were the officers who as 2nd Lts. in WWII had liberated the death camps of Europe and Asia and seen the worst. Somehow, Kerry and his cohorts hallucinated, they had by some mysterious process turned into de facto Nazis themselves. It was all lies and Kerry and all the rest couldn’t wait to forget all about it the minute they had the power after the Democrats took over sweeping power in the wake of Watergate. They claim they didn’t because they wanted the country to “heal”.
Although, what could have been more important than purging de facto Nazis from the heart of the world’s powerful military, I can’t imagine.
It still gobsmacks me that the Democrats just didn’t see anything wrong with what Kerry did even though it meant he was either:(1) Politically amoral and willing to say anything, (2) so stupid he easily fell for Soviet propaganda or (3) (worst case) he was right and didn’t have the stones to do something about it.
All three disqullified him for president.
In truth, while WWII was the war the Greatest Generation fought on the ground as young men, Vietnam was the war they directed as leaders as they came to their maturity. JFK himself is the perfect distillation of that. He fought in WWII and thought America could save Indochina as well from the even more dangerous Communist.
How could they know they would be stabbed in the back by their own children? Those spoiled entitled children didn’t want to serve as their parents had and invented a perverted fantasy in which their parent’s generation had gone mad and turned evil. But the minute the draft ended, it was goodby anti-war movement and hello discos and cocaine.(Just like the anti-war movement ended with Bush even though the exact same war continues.)
Just think, some of the characters in this comic would live to be reviled as Nazis themselves by their own children if their timeline followed ours. They might go fight in Vietnam if still able, witness the horrors of the Viet Cong mass murders in the Tet Offensive and then come home to be told by their children what heroes the Communist were and how vile the Americans.
That’d make you hang up your cape.