Olympics’ Opening Ceremony Captures Decay Of The West

The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games provides the opportunity for the host country to revel in a sense of national pride and celebrate its unique history and traditions.

Any jokes about cowardice or cheese-loving aside, France undeniably occupies a position as one of the pillars of Western civilization, with monumental contributions to literature, art, and science. Drawing upon a rich history and culture, it had the chance to show the world a vibrant and resilient nation ready to thrive in the 21st century, especially after a chaotic election earlier in July.

Instead, France decided to showcase the gender madness and degeneracy that are slowly but surely eroding the West.

Last week’s opening ceremony in Paris subjected tens of millions of people to a freakshow version of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” featuring transgender performers and a Blue Man Group version of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and debauchery. Some viewers quickly pointed out the inexplicable presence of a child amidst this gender bacchanal.

The lesbian DJ and activist who occupied the same position as Jesus in the iconic painting, aptly named Barbara Butch, called the scene the “New Gay Testament.”

After global backlash, Olympic officials have scrambled to gaslight the audience, insisting that any similarity to “The Last Supper” was “completely unintentional” and that “there was never any intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief.”

Not only are those excuses obviously false to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Christian symbolism and LGBT activists’ obsession with subverting it, they’re undermined by the fact that other parts of the ceremony featured the same wanton disregard for morality.

To complete the vulgarity, the performance cut between a parade and three people (two men and a woman) heading upstairs to engage in a ménage à trois. Once inside an apartment, they begin to indulge in their appetites before one of them shuts the door on the audience. Thankfully they stopped there!

As my colleague John Davidson pointed out, “Why did the organizers do this? Put bluntly, they did it because they hate Jesus Christ and Christianity, which they consider their most dangerous enemy. They are quite open about this now.”

That blasphemous display represented a naked expression of the power they now hold over Western culture. They know they can mock the very cornerstone of our entire civilization in front of an audience of tens of millions and they’ll receive applause for doing so.

“The best the queer Paris Olympics ‘artistic director’ and sex performers could come up with is badly deforming others’ artistic triumphs. They didn’t think up their own world, symbols, and referents, they just sabotaged others’ then pretended what any three-year-old can do is brilliant,” my colleague Joy Pullmann wrote.

They can’t do anything but mock and deface and corrupt that which is sacred, meaningful, and beautiful. They’re utterly incapable of creating anything of worth because of their own twisted and unnatural view of the world. So in their self-loathing they have to tear everything else down in order to free themselves from reality and morality.

In one of its videos of a segment depicting the French Revolution (complete with a decapitated Marie Antoinette), NBC Sports described the ceremony as celebrating “liberation.”

To these people, “liberation” doesn’t mean the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch or the creation of a free civil society, even though they constantly frame their own struggle in those terms. “Liberation” means a state of total exemption from societal norms and a license to indulge in any and all sexual whims — aka, narcissism in its most decadent form. They have no qualms about destroying or desecrating civilization if it achieves their radical sexual freedom. In fact, for many it has become akin to a fetish.

God, tradition, history, and even the concept of civil society place restrictions and expectations on their behavior, and they can’t stand it. They share the same vision as a long line of French thinkers from Rousseau to Foucault — a blinding hatred for what they consider “inequality” but what the rest of us see as the pillars of a functioning civilization.

Any nation with as much of a hand in forming the modern world as France has should commemorate it at every opportunity. But to the leftist elites of Europe and the United States, any sense of national pride or identity threatens their power and agenda. If Western countries begin to think of themselves as sovereign nation-states again, support for unfettered Third World immigration, globalization, and single currencies will decrease.

Of course, the left would also cry that any opening ceremony that sincerely honors the history and greatness of a Western host country would evoke “problematic” aspects of that nation’s history or conjure up uncomfortable parallels with the jingoistic bravado of fascist regimes.

But the retort is simple: It works.

The Beijing 2008 opening ceremony represented a propaganda triumph for the Chinese. That opening ceremony featured all of the grandiosity and confidence one would expect from a rising global power. That opening ceremony opened people’s eyes to the fact that the very real economic and geopolitical threat from China had arrived, especially as the rest of the world reeled under a historic economic crisis.

Nothing about how this ceremony was choreographed was an accident. The organizers made the deliberate choice to include transgender performers, to include a child in the midst of those hypersexualized performers, and to blatantly mock Christianity — all in lieu of actually honoring their homeland.

How one’s nation is represented on the world stage is a choice, just as decline is a choice.

An Olympic opening ceremony should extol the power and glory of the host nation. And any opening ceremony in a Western nation should hammer home that the West is the greatest civilization this world has ever seen or, more importantly, will ever see.

For all the global challenges rising up to threaten its hegemony, the West’s crisis of confidence is by far the most dangerous. And the best way to combat that internal decay is to remind Westerners whenever possible what made their nations great and assure them that greatness will continue.

Instead, France signaled that the West is determined to continue its inexorable march into absolute hedonic madness. If the Summer Olympics opening ceremony allows a nation to both reflect on its achievements and look hopefully toward its future, then this year’s ceremony states in no uncertain terms that the West has no future.

Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel