Monday, August 3, 2020
Scottish government prepares to reopen schools as new COVID-19 spikes emerge
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/scot-a03.html
By Steve James
3 August 2020
The Scottish government led by Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced its intention to reopen all schools in Scotland on August 11.
The decision, announced by Sturgeon July 30, once again underscores the point that, presentational differences notwithstanding, SNP policy on the coronavirus pandemic is indistinguishable from that of Boris Johnson’s hated Conservative government in Westminster.
From August 11, primary and secondary schools will begin to reopen. All schools are expected to be fully operational by August 18. Only the most minimal measures will be taken to prevent coronavirus infection rapidly taking hold in schools, endangering the health and lives of large numbers of children, and placing their families, particularly elderly and vulnerable relatives, in danger.
Government advice does not require physical distancing between children and young people of any age, although adults are expected to maintain two-metre distancing. Personal protective equipment (PPE) will not be required unless specified by a risk assessment. Pupils will not be required to wear face masks, nor will they be required to physically distance on school buses. “Enhanced hygiene” measures are required, meaning only more time for hand washing and sanitiser use. Windows and doors are to be left open.
Sturgeon sanctimoniously claimed she was acting on the “moral and educational imperative that we get children back to school as soon as is safely possible.” Her deputy, Education Secretary John Swinney, claimed he was responding to concerns from teachers.
“That’s why we’ve taken such care to gather the evidence, we established a specific expert group to look at all of these questions and to provide us with clinical advice” said Swinney.
A measure of the Scottish government’s “care to gather evidence” was the rebuke issued to Sturgeon by director of the UK’s Office for Statistical Regulation, Ed Humpherson. Writing to the Scottish government’s chief statistician, Roger Halliday, Humpherson noted Sturgeon’s July 3 claim repeated on several occasions that the “the prevalence of the virus in Scotland, right now, is five times lower than it is in England.”
Humpherson complained that “sources used to underpin this claim have been difficult to identify… it is important to recognise that a comparison of COVID-19 prevalence rates is not straightforward. If it is to be undertaken, the results and the uncertainties should be communicated transparently.”
Humpherson noted the comparison was based on groups of statistics that were not directly comparable and with unclear timeframes. He concluded, “We do not think that the sources above allow for a quantified and uncaveated comparison of the kind that was made.”
In other words, the Scottish government chose its statistics to justify the impression that its response to the pandemic was qualitatively better than in England.
Comparing similar statistics, however, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported that Scotland suffered the third worse rate of excess deaths in Europe over the first half of 2020. Only Spain and England fared worse. Of the 25 major European cities with the highest rates of excess deaths, Edinburgh and Glasgow were both in the top 10, along with London, Birmingham, Amsterdam, and Madrid.
The ONS conceded that the fact that Scotland retained its lockdown a few weeks beyond May 10 meant that death rates continued to fall in Scotland. On the week beginning May 23, for example, Scotland had an age-standardised mortality rate 5.11 percent above average for the last 5 years. England’s rate was 7.55 percent, against Spain’s 6.65 percent. The downward trend has continued. In the week to July 26, COVID-19 accounted for less than 1 percent of all deaths in Scotland, compared with 36 percent at the pandemic peak.
But whatever gains may have been made by extending the lockdown in Scotland, they are rapidly being squandered in the rush to make up lost time. Many workplaces are already working normally, but fully returning the schools August 11 is the key to restoring the generation of profit. This will inevitably be accompanied by tragedies reminiscent of the pandemic’s early days.
New infection spikes have already emerged in advance of schools re-opening. Among the most concerning was that reported in Inverclyde, which includes the former industrial towns of Greenock and Port Glasgow. Inverclyde, which has some of the poorest areas in Scotland, has consistently recorded by far the highest infection and death rates.
In May, the region reported a COVID-19 death rate of 12.7 deaths per 10,000 people, more than double Scotland’s rate at the time of 5.1 deaths.
A June report from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde suggested that the coronavirus was circulating extensively in the area long before the lockdown. Talking to Scottish Television of her experiences early during the pandemic, Dr Abby Gunn, a consultant to the Inverclyde Royal Hospital in Greenock, made the same point. She explained, “Every ward and every room that you went to had Covid-19 in the hospital. We saw this coming months in advance, yet we were still doing some of the real-time planning after we had the first positive case.”
Last week, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde confirmed a cluster of cases had again emerged in Inverclyde. Eleven new cases have been reported including a worker at Amazon’s 300,000-square-foot Faulds Park distribution centre outside Gourock, which employs 400. Although some workers were sent home, the entire facility remains operational.
An Amazon worker told the Greenock Telegraph, “The problem is that the person who tested roamed about putting items onto steel shelving, so workers feel the whole plant should have been closed down for a deep clean. Who knows where this person or others who are now isolating touched? People are concerned that management haven’t gone far enough to make sure the whole site is safe.”
Distribution played a role in other cases associated with the Inverclyde cluster. Deliveries by an infected driver to a Port Glasgow pharmacy appear to have resulted in several cases linked to the pharmacy.
Another spike associated with an outbreak at a privately contracted NHS contact tracing centre, run by Sitel near Motherwell, has now been linked to 27 COVID-19 cases. These include workers at the site and cases associated with reopened pubs and cafes across central Scotland.
Five people tested positive last week at the Fullarton Care Home in Irvine, where 22 elderly people died during the peak of the infection crisis. Run by HC-One, which operates 300 care home across the UK, the Irvine care home was criticised by the Care Inspectorate for poor hygiene and infection control, with staff untrained in the safe use of PPE.
Of a total of 4,201 COVID-19 deaths in Scotland, 46 percent, 1,932, have been in care homes. Many were caused by hasty releases of 1,300 untested elderly hospital patients, some of whom later showed COVID-19 symptoms. Most died in extremely difficult circumstances—isolated, frightened, written off by an over stressed hospital system, and left in care homes suffering extreme staff shortages because of the pandemic.
No confidence should be placed in the Scottish government, or its allies and apologists in the trade union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left groups, to do anything but defend the interests of capitalism. To combat the pandemic, and the attacks on living standards being pushed through, workers in Scotland, as in England and internationally, must mobilise independently through the formation of rank and file organisations in every workplace, school, and neighbourhood. They must take up the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society.
The July days of the COVID-19 pandemic wreak havoc on the US
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/pand-a03.html
By Benjamin Mateus
3 August 2020
The first confirmed case of a person infected with COVID-19 was traced back to November 17, 2019 (260 days ago), in a 55-year-old man from Hubei province in China. Since then, 18.1 million people have been infected globally, and more than 691,000 have perished.
It has been 195 days since the first person with COVID-19 was identified in the US, in Washington state. Since then, the US has become the epicenter of the global pandemic, with over 4.8 million cases and over 158,000 deaths, outpacing every other nation without a seeming end to the daily gruesome figures. Two million cases were recorded just in July. The previous high in April had seen close to 900,000 cases.
At the end of May, when the initiative to reopen the country’s economy was in full throttle, the nation had barely brought the pandemic under any semblance of control. The daily cases coming off the spring surge, when the seven-day moving average had reached a peak of 32,471, had barely seen a 30 percent decline when the Trump administration and states were clamoring to loosen restrictions and allow commerce to resume.
As predicted, the number of cases started to rise again in mid-June, especially in the Sun Belt states that were keen on opening up as soon as possible. The decline in fatality rates served to assure governors and state officials that the rise in cases was a byproduct of more testing as well as younger people becoming infected. Again, public health experts cautioned that fatality rates would begin climbing soon. But these concerns were dismissed by the media, touting the declines in death rates as assurance that young people were somehow impervious to the effects of the virus.
The physics of the pandemic has proven that such optimistic sentiments were misplaced. In the first week of July, the seven-day moving average of daily fatalities reached its lowest point, with 521, and began climbing steadily, having now reached a seven-day moving average of 1,129. The curve for new cases peaked nearly 10 days ago, reaching a seven-day moving average of over 68,000, and has been on a slow decline. There have been at least 27,585 people who have succumbed in July. By all accounts, it is expected that daily deaths will continue to increase over the next two to three weeks before reaching their peak.
Three states have surpassed New York with total cases—California (513,763), Florida (487,132) and Texas (449,736). Georgia, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, North Carolina, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Tennessee have all passed 100,000 cases. California has the distinction of third place in the number of deaths, with 9,370, behind New Jersey and New York. For July, this represents a 51.6 percent increase, just for fatalities. Texas, with 7,266 fatalities, saw a 155 percent increase in deaths. Florida, with 7,022 deaths, has seen a 97.6 percent increase.
Despite the downturn in new daily cases, previously staunch supporters of rapid reopening are now raising the alarm and acknowledging that the pandemic in the US is deeply entrenched in communities throughout the Midwest. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, speaking on CNN, said, “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal to urban areas. To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.”
COVID-19 daily cases seven-day average in the US
Dana Bash, CNN’s chief political correspondent, followed with the question, “People are panicked, people are worried, people don’t understand why this is seemingly completely out of control. Is it time to reset?” Dr. Birx, uneasy, barely managed to defend the administration’s response to the pandemic and essentially deflected the question.
On July 29, a coalition of health experts urged the federal government to step back from their push to reopen the economy and move to close nonessential businesses. A letter drafted by Matthew Wellington, public health campaigns director, US PIRG, and signed by more than 1,000 health professionals, reads, “Hit the Reset Button—of all the nations in the world, we’ve had the most deaths from COVID-19. At the same time, we’re in the midst of ‘reopening our economy,’ exposing more and more people to coronavirus and watching the number of cases, and deaths, skyrocket.”
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published a report over the weekend titled “Resetting Our Response: Changes Needed in the US Approach to COVID-19.” They, too, are advocating a shutdown of nonessential businesses, explicitly calling for the closure of high-risk activities and settings “in jurisdictions where the epidemic is worsening” and to “reinstitute stay-at-home orders where health care systems are in crisis.” Additionally, they are demanding bolstering supply chains for personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing equipment, as well as establishing a robust ramping up of contact tracing.
Dana Bash, CNN’s chief political correspondent, followed with the question, “People are panicked, people are worried, people don’t understand why this is seemingly completely out of control. Is it time to reset?” Dr. Birx, uneasy, barely managed to defend the administration’s response to the pandemic and essentially deflected the question.
On July 29, a coalition of health experts urged the federal government to step back from their push to reopen the economy and move to close nonessential businesses. A letter drafted by Matthew Wellington, public health campaigns director, US PIRG, and signed by more than 1,000 health professionals, reads, “Hit the Reset Button—of all the nations in the world, we’ve had the most deaths from COVID-19. At the same time, we’re in the midst of ‘reopening our economy,’ exposing more and more people to coronavirus and watching the number of cases, and deaths, skyrocket.”
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published a report over the weekend titled “Resetting Our Response: Changes Needed in the US Approach to COVID-19.” They, too, are advocating a shutdown of nonessential businesses, explicitly calling for the closure of high-risk activities and settings “in jurisdictions where the epidemic is worsening” and to “reinstitute stay-at-home orders where health care systems are in crisis.” Additionally, they are demanding bolstering supply chains for personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing equipment, as well as establishing a robust ramping up of contact tracing.
COVID-19 daily deaths seven-day average in the US
The US economy’s contraction in the second quarter of 2020 was the worst ever recorded. Gross domestic product fell nearly 10 percent, shrinking by $1.8 trillion. The only comparison to such a collapse in historical reference is to the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II. Every week in July, the number of unemployment claims exceeded 1 million.
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told reports last week, “The path forward for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain and will depend in large part on our success in keeping the virus in check.” Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has expressed concern over the toll the pandemic has taken and suggested a short-term lockdown to get control of the health crisis. The end of July saw US unemployment supplements expire for tens of millions of people. And still, like their response to the pandemic, Washington continues to bicker over the relief package.
The pandemic is shifting to new locations, rapidly moving into Midwest states like Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, predominately due to summer travels. Government officials in some of these states are attempting to reimpose restrictions again, warning residents that a surge could overwhelm their limited hospital capacities. Yet a lack of a real coordinated effort and comprehensive strategy by the Trump administration has led to widespread social resentment and frustration.
The US economy’s contraction in the second quarter of 2020 was the worst ever recorded. Gross domestic product fell nearly 10 percent, shrinking by $1.8 trillion. The only comparison to such a collapse in historical reference is to the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II. Every week in July, the number of unemployment claims exceeded 1 million.
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told reports last week, “The path forward for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain and will depend in large part on our success in keeping the virus in check.” Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has expressed concern over the toll the pandemic has taken and suggested a short-term lockdown to get control of the health crisis. The end of July saw US unemployment supplements expire for tens of millions of people. And still, like their response to the pandemic, Washington continues to bicker over the relief package.
The pandemic is shifting to new locations, rapidly moving into Midwest states like Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, predominately due to summer travels. Government officials in some of these states are attempting to reimpose restrictions again, warning residents that a surge could overwhelm their limited hospital capacities. Yet a lack of a real coordinated effort and comprehensive strategy by the Trump administration has led to widespread social resentment and frustration.
European economy collapses as EU bails out the super-rich
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/euro-a03.html
By Anthony Torres and Alex Lantier
3 August 2020
Eurostat economic figures for the second quarter of 2020 show that Europe saw its deepest and most sudden economic collapse in history.
Already before the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe was sinking into recession. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Germany was stagnant, while France (-0.1 percent) and Italy (-0.4 percent) were falling. The collapse in business confidence due to the pandemic and the effects of lock-down measures have now triggered an unprecedented economic disintegration.
Workers, the self-employed and small businesses are seeing a historic collapse in living standards. Eurostat indicated on July 31 that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 12.1 percent in the euro zone and 11.9 percent in the European Union (EU). In the first quarter, the contraction was 3.6 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. In Germany, Europe’s leading economic power, GDP fell by 10.1 percent; the contraction from April to July was 10.7 percent in Austria and 12.2 percent in Belgium.
Italy, which was severely hit by the pandemic, saw its economy fall 12.4 percent. Jack Allen-Reynolds of Capital Economics said: “Italian GDP has in fact fallen to its level from the beginning of the 1990s.” Elsewhere, the collapse was even steeper. France, Portugal and Spain saw falls of 13.8, 14.1 and 18.5 percent, respectively. According to currently available projections, the British economy likely contracted approximately 15 percent in the second quarter.
If European economic activity remains at similar levels for the rest of 2020, Europe will see an economic crash more severe than any year in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Leading European corporations have suffered record losses in virtually every branch of industry and are now dependent on multi-billion-euro, state-funded bailouts. Among Europe’s major automakers, Volkswagen reported having lost €1.4 billion as its revenues collapsed by 23 percent, while the Renault-Nissan alliance suffered a devastating €7.3 billion loss. European aerospace firm Airbus saw a net loss of €1.9 billion.
Major European oil firms were devastated by the collapse of oil prices driven by the halt in travel and industrial activity during the lock-downs. Total and Royal Dutch Shell reported net losses of €7 billion and $18.1 billion, respectively. The net profits of French luxury conglomerate Hermès collapsed by 55 percent in the first half of the year.
Major airlines also face disaster. Air France-KLM published its profit report on Thursday, reporting an 83 percent collapse in its overall revenues. Lufthansa, for its part, had already reported a €2.1 billion loss in the first trimester. IAG Group, which owns British Airways, as well as Aer Lingus and Iberia, reported a net loss of €4.2 billion in the first half of the year.
Millions of workers have no longer been employed during the pandemic, and companies relied massively on state funding to pay their part-time wages. As of last month, 9.3 million workers depended on such programs in Britain, 4.5 million in France (down from 8.8 million in April), 6.9 million in Germany, and 3.7 million in Spain. Italy, for its part, spent approximately €5 billion monthly on such part-time work arrangements.
An explosive class confrontation is brewing between the working class and the financial aristocracy in Europe and internationally. Having advocated a politically criminal policy of “herd immunity” on COVID-19, calling to end lock-downs and let workers catch the deadly virus to try to acquire immunity, the ruling elite is now proceeding with as much contempt for workers’ jobs as for their health and lives. While grabbing trillions of euros in public funds for the banks and corporations, they are moving to slash wages and jobs.
While the European Central Bank (ECB) has agreed to a €1.25 trillion bailout of European banks, the EU has agreed to a €750 billion bailout package for European states and corporations. These vast sums of public money are being plunged into stocks and the financial markets to bail out the super-rich. However, state authorities and the trade union bureaucracies are not demanding that billionaire investors and major corporations that receive these massive sums in state aid give any guarantees that they will not sack workers or cut their pay.
Instead, dozens of bailed-out corporations are announcing mass layoffs, while governments across Europe and worldwide move to slash social spending and living standards. Already in Britain, plans have gone into effect to cut furlough programs by October, and payments in Spain are to be cut from 70 to 35 percent of workers’ wages by the fall. Yesterday, the IG Metall union announced that it expected 300,000 metalworking jobs to be destroyed in Germany.
This social onslaught is proceeding with the complicity of the European trade unions, which are actively helping to design these policies with state officials and corporate management. The German and French unions, in fact, signed a joint statement hailing the EU bailout designed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The ruling elite is pursuing the most parasitic, selfish and reckless policy since the French feudal aristocracy refused to pay any taxes to resolve the fiscal crisis before the 1789 revolution.
What is being prepared is a new, international eruption of the class struggle outside the corrupt framework of the unions. The most explosive situation is emerging in America, where support payments for workers are being suspended this month, threatening tens of millions with hunger and eviction. In Europe, the EU Commission has estimated that unemployment will reach 9.5 percent in the euro zone, with southern European countries the hardest hit. They foresee unemployment rising to over 20 percent in Greece and Spain, 11.8 percent in Italy, and 10.1 percent in France.
These horrific figures mean the loss of millions of jobs and the bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses, in order to bail out a corrupt financial elite that is plundering massive amounts of public money. It must be added, however, that these estimates are likely over-optimistic. They depend on employers agreeing to rehire tens of millions of workers currently paid by the state, due to a quick recovery in economic output.
Thus, ING economist Bert Colijn told Le Monde: “This recession is like no other. We have never seen such figures, such a dizzying collapse linked to the pandemic and the lock-down, which will be followed inevitably by a rapid upswing which we will see in the statistics for the third quarter.”
Such a scenario seems increasingly unlikely in the longer term, however. The ending of lock-downs has led to a collapse of social distancing measures and now a rapid resurgence of the virus across Europe. The number of daily new cases has risen to 1,000 in France and soon in Germany, over 600 in Belgium, and 3,000 in Spain. Thus, since late June, when the daily number of new cases was at its lowest, just after the lock-down, this number has gone up by a factor of two in France and Germany, seven in Belgium, and 10 in Spain.
While EU states insist they will not impose further lock-downs or only impose regional lock-downs, a policy that in fact accelerates the spread of the disease, their dithering may ultimately leave them no choice but to take drastic measures if the virus explodes out of control. Given the failure of EU governments to implement proper testing and tracing facilities and boost health care spending, such a scenario—entailing a new, drastic contraction in economic activity—is a growing possibility.
Already, the Spanish government re-imposed a “voluntary” lock-down in Barcelona, affecting over 4 million people in an economically vital region of Spain.
Workers cannot stop the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy through nationally-oriented protests organized by the trade unions, which are at the same time negotiating austerity with EU banks and governments. As the pandemic exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, it is essential for workers across Europe to take up a political struggle for state power against the EU. Their best allies are workers around the world fighting against austerity and reactionary back-to-work orders.
The trillions of euros spent to bail out the wealthy must go to fighting COVID-19, safeguarding the salaries of workers and the self-employed, while major corporations relying on public bailout funds are nationalized across Europe and beyond, to be run under workers control as public utilities. This is essential to ensure the health and safety of workers despite the horrific impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting blow to the economy.
International Olympic Committee promotes Olympics with Nazi propaganda
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/rief-a03.html
By Stefan Steinberg
3 August 2020
On July 23, the public relations department of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) posted a video on its Twitter Olympics channel featuring clips from the propaganda film Olympia, made by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Olympic games held in Germany three years after the takeover of power by Hitler and the Nazis.
The Nazi dictatorship had already commenced with its vicious persecution of leftists and Jews and the Games in Berlin provided an ideal opportunity for the regime to win support from an international audience. The significance of the 1936 Games and the role played by film director Leni Riefenstahl in promoting National Socialist ideology are dealt with in the article “Leni Riefenstahl—propagandist for the Third Reich.”
The IOC video, with the hashtag #Strongertogether, showed the cheering crowd at the 1936 Games, the entry of teams into the arena and the traditional torch relay which commences the games. The text accompanying the video read: “Berlin experienced the first torch relay before the Olympic flame was lit. We can’t wait for the next one.”
The IOC initially defended its publication of the video but following a storm of critical tweets was forced to take it down a day later. A tweet from the Auschwitz Museum read: “For two weeks the Nazi dictatorship hid its racist, militaristic character. It exploited the games to impress viewers with the portrait of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. Later, Germany accelerated its expansionism and its persecution of Jews and other ‘enemies of the state’.”
Another tweet read: “This shows a total lack of respect for all those German Jews oppressed at that time!” The Games took place just one year after the regime had passed its anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg laws.
Another tweet criticised the use of the film sequences. “It is always controversial to use footage from a Nazi propaganda film (Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’) to express #Strongertogether. How many Jewish athletes were allowed to start for Germany at the time?”
The inclusion of clips from Riefenstahl’s two-part Olympia film makes clear that attempts to revise German history and sanitise the crimes of the Nazis is not limited to the spheres of politics and academia. It is also taking place within the world of sport. This development, however, does not come out of the blue.
A closer look at the history of the IOC reveals that for long periods of time leading positions within the organisation were occupied by former Nazis or sympathisers of the Nazi regime.
Following World War II, a number of top Nazi sports functionaries were able to return to leading positions in West Germany’s sports administration. Three of the most prominent ones were Carl Diem, Guido von Mengden and Karl Ritter von Halt. All three men occupied positions of power within the Nazi sports administration.
Carl Diem was the secretary general of the organising committee for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and collaborated with Riefenstahl in presenting the Games as a propaganda coup for the Nazis. After the war, Diem was appointed a member of Germany’s National Olympic Committee and made a consultant to the German interior minister.
Under the Hitler regime, Guido von Mengden was a member of the German Olympic Committee and editor of the National Socialist sports magazine, which was sent to every soldier at the front. After WWII, von Mengden took over as secretary general of the German sports federation and played a leading role in promoting the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Karl Ritter von Halt joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1932 and rapidly advanced his career in sport to become the president of the German Track and Field Association. After the war he was held in custody by the Soviets and declared to be a war criminal. Nevertheless, he was able to return to the IOC and became president of the German Olympic Committee and honorary president of the German Field and Track Association.
Leading politicians also played a role in this process. The IOC was only able to show clips from Riefenstahl’s film because it had acquired rights to the film from the social democratic chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder. Schröder secretly sold off the partly state-owned film to the IOC in 2002 as part of his government’s bid to host the Olympic Games in Leipzig.
The transition of prominent supporters of National Socialism to leading posts in sporting organisations after WWII was not limited to Germany. One of the most passionate defenders of Germany’s right to hold the games in 1936 was the American sports official Avery Brundage.
Brundage fiercely opposed efforts to boycott the Berlin Games and was elected to the IOC that year. In October 1936 he gave a speech to the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden and declared: “Five years ago they [Germans] were discouraged and demoralised—today they are united—sixty million people believing in themselves and in their country.”
The millionaire construction mogul was a leading member of the right-wing America First organisation and was elected president of the IOC in 1952, serving in that role until 1972, when the summer Olympics was once again held in Germany.
Since the departure of Brundage, the IOC, located in the city of Lausanne in the allegedly politically “neutral” country of Switzerland, has remained a hotbed of right-wing extremism. From 1980 to 2001 the organisation was headed by Juan Antonio Samaranch, former sports minister in the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco in Spain.
For the first time since the war, the IOC is currently headed by a German, Thomas Bach, a member of the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party. Bach, who against all IOC rules holds a German diplomatic passport, has been at the centre of a series of corruption scandals since taking over as president in 2013. As IOC president, Bach is ultimately responsible for using the Riefenstahl video.
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