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The opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris reached the height of bad taste, ugliness and disrespect for the religious convictions and feelings of millions of Catholics, Christians in general.
It was the most absolute woke explosion. The most dignified representation of a society in perfect decomposition where the dignity of the person is degraded to the absolute maximum, with demonic images, apocalyptic references, use of minors, and mockery of the figure of Jesus Christ.
Philosophy has always recognised that Truth, Good and Beauty are inextricably linked. An intrinsically good action or conduct is in itself beautiful. A sensu contrario, immoral or bad conduct is usually lacking in beauty, balance and order. In the same way, lying appears to us as something bad and ugly. Some go so far as to say that there is no aesthetics without ethics; and vice versa, for all beautiful human conduct already hides behind that beauty an expression of good and truth.
The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris was, explicitly, the opposite. Ugliness and distortion. A catwalk of monstrous beings, reminders of the guillotine or nods to paedophilia. The anti-Catholic apotheosis was the culmination.
It conceals this ceremony and the woke ideology that has illuminated it, a cult of ugliness, horror, evil and imposture. Human beings are bodily, social, cultural and spiritual beings. As bodily beings – not only spirit – the exterior is neither independent of the interior, nor autonomous; and therefore all bodily expression is neither innocuous nor neutral.
It is often said – in order to justify any aesthetic or ethical folly – that appearances are deceptive, but that in itself is a deception. Appearance, what appears, what is made to appear, does not deceive, unless the subject in question consciously and voluntarily wants to appear something other than what he really is; but that is no longer appearance but deception or simulation.
If I see a uniformed man with a gun in the street, I deduce from his appearance that he is a military man. If I see a person on the ground begging for money, surrounded by junk, perhaps dirty and alone, I deduce that he is a poor person who needs my help or collaboration. If I see a person dressed as Jesus Christ, surrounded by a dozen people, the appearance tells me that they are recreating the Last Supper, and if they are all dressed in drag, repeat certain gestures, and are positioned in a certain way, the appearance is clear: they wish to mock the hist
orical scene that anticipated the death on the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the most decisive moment in the history of the West.
Ortega y Gasset said that it is wrong to say that ‘the trees do not let us see the forest’, since the presence of a multitude of trees usually foreshadows the existence of a forest. They are the same forest. In the same way, the obscene image, the tawdry gesture, the proliferation of men dressed as women or vice versa, the aesthetic and ethical insults to the Christian religion, are the perfect appearance of an inadmissible circus spectacle.
Macron’s France, ultra-liberal France, progressive France, woke France has shown the world its defeat, its decadence and its rottenness; devoid of beauty and full of anti-Catholic hatred. The spectacle would probably not have been much different had the Olympics been held now in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, or Spain. Although I have no doubt that France takes the cake. Not for martyrdom. The prize for immorality and ugliness.
Yesterday’s event was so grotesque that, I am convinced, it must have the opposite effect to that desired by its promoters and designers. The woke world has shown: 1) that good and beauty are inextricably linked; 2) that the Western world is indeed, to paraphrase Evola, in ruins; 3) that the promoters of this ideology are indeed incapable of creating anything, only of destroying, which shows that they are in clear defeat; 4) that they have nevertheless already demolished much and Western civilisation is now only a smouldering ember of ashes; 5) that, finally, those who decide not to surrender, not to make pacts, not to reach compromises with all these people, will win.
That is why I write in The Conservative.