BERNARD HENRI-LEVY: PULL OUT OF SOCHI-STOP PRETENDING THERE ARE TWO PUTINS ****
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579392821615729590?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Pull Out of Sochi to Protest the Kiev Massacre
It is absurd, if not obscene, to pretend that there are two Putins.
Two images from Wednesday compete for space in people’s minds.
The image of the immaculate snow of Sochi crisscrossed by the world’s top skiers to the cheers of the international crowd. And that of the bloodied snow around the barricades of Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, after special units of the Ukrainian government, with Vladimir Putin’s seal of approval, attacked the protesters there. At least 26 people were killed, and hundreds were injured—yet the international response has been indifference.
Telling ourselves that we’re used to this sort of thing doesn’t do any good.
It’s no use reminding ourselves of the abandonment of the 130,000 Syrians put to death through the murderous madness of Bashar Assad, backed by the very same Mr. Putin; of the innumerable Chechens “kicked into the crapper,” in the elegant phrase used by the same master of Russia and its borderlands. It’s no use knowing, as we have for some time now—since republican Spain was abandoned in the 1930s, since Central Europe was sacrificed in the 1940s, and since the Polish revolt in the early 1980s was kept at arm’s length—that democracy never defends its values.
Anti-government protesters amid debris and flames in Kiev on Wednesday. Getty Images
There is in this overlay of images, in the nearly perfect concordance of the two ceremonies—that of the Olympic celebration in full swing and that of the funeral of the European dream for one of the peoples who still believed in it—something that insults the intelligence and breaks the heart.
A question for the leaders of the European Union— Catherine Ashton, José Manuel Barroso, Martin Schulz and others—whose emblems and flags fly in Sochi and are, at this very moment, being trampled underfoot in Ukraine: Is your place not there in Kiev, in the flaming Maidan, a place that the protesters, for a long while now, have been calling Europe Square?
A suggestion for François Hollande and Barack Obama, the presidents of two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: An urgent convocation of the Security Council should be prompted by these deaths in Europe, these hundreds of wounded people hounded by special troops who, as we know from observers on the ground, will stop at nothing. Does not this provocation, this cold crime so confidently committed, justify at least a formal notice to the Ukrainian regime and its Kremlin patron?
And finally, a plea to the Olympic committees of the nations present in Sochi, who plod on as if nothing were amiss, deaf and blind to the tragedy unfolding a few hundred kilometers away: At these Games, where the flame symbolizing the Olympic ideal has been purloined by a thug, when the winning athletes playfully bite their medals, this time will not the gold, silver and bronze have the metallic taste of blood? Do you have a thought for that other snow, the bloody snow, the snow that, make no mistake, is front and center in the thoughts of your host?
Do you not see the absurdity—not to say the obscenity—of pretending to believe, up to the last minute of the last day of this ruined Olympiad, that there might be two Putins: Putin the Terrible, who earlier this week issued $2 billion to prop up the regime of his valet Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who then unleashed his forces on the Maidan protesters; and the other Putin, strutting across the stage and through the stands, greeting you with the munificence due those who used to be called the gods of the stadium?
These Olympic Games will be over in a few days. Precious little time remains to stop collaborating in what now more than ever seems a grim masquerade.
Precious few hours remain to preserve at least your honor before returning home crowned with a glory that will carry a whiff of abasement.
For those who care about democracy, can we, by pulling out of Sochi—or at least by boycotting the closing ceremony on Sunday—ensure that the XXII Winter Olympics will not go down in history as the Games that were the shame and defeat of Europe?
Mr. Lévy’s books include “Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism” (Random House, 2008). This article was translated from the French by Steven B. Kennedy.
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