Following up on the topics of historical facts versus political statements, news consumption versus withdrawal, and one particular helmet in the 2026 Olympics.
First, the background. A Ukrainian athlete was banned from the Olympics for having a helmet with photos of other Ukrainian athletes who were killed during the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. According to the Olympic Committee, once someone is killed in the course of genocide in Ukraine, they cannot be publicly mentioned or depicted, as the Committee will interpret the mention as a political statement. At the same time, there is absolutely no reason not to depict, for example, your dead dog on your helmet, or an athlete that died from other causes — you should just make sure that it wasn’t the Russian army that killed them.
Here’s the story of one of the people depicted on his helmet. She was 17 and a civilian killed by a Russian air raid in Ukraine: https://mezha.net/eng/bukvy/tragic-death-of-ukrainian-kickboxing-champion-karina-bahur/
The story of the ban is here: https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/cx2dnd7g209o
Now, here is my tiny contribution. Perhaps I would not have bothered writing about the obvious, but today one of my acquaintances took 20 minutes of my time by their monologue on why the Ukrainian athlete was wrong to do what he did, and why I am wrong in supporting him. That acquaintance was from Western Europe, and, unlike me, was not connected to events in Ukraine through family, geography of childhood and youth, life changes provoked by war, grief, and other personal ties. One of their main arguments was that it is good to be ignorant both of news and of history (but, of course, still teach those Ukrainians in their face on what they should or should not do). So, I guess, obvious things are obvious only if you are not ignorant, and ignorance is abundant.
The first obvious thing is that human history is violent. On a human/humanitarian/ethical level, the way to reduce violence is to make sure each generation remembers history and empathises with past victims. There is also a technological level, where technology helps to stop violence, and yet it hasn’t fully worked yet. Unfortunately, any technology so far could be exploited by people, and by bad actors in particular.
That is why we remember, for example, the Holocaust. Holocaust remembrance is not a political action. It is a human action, and if one is a human, of any nationality, religion, or political views, one remembers it and empathises with the victims.
The genocide of Ukrainians in the 1930s (the Holodomor) took between 5 and 7 million lives according to conservative estimates. These numbers make the second thing obvious: this was, unfortunately, the scale of government-orchestrated mass murder similar to the one of the Holocaust. (Some of it took place on the territory of current Belarus and Kazakhstan, with both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian communities in these places being affected — or, more precisely, annihilated.)
The significant difference for history between the Holocaust and the Holodomor is that the murderers in one case lost power, and in the other case stayed in power. Hence, the latter ones were more successful in prohibiting mentions or depictions of historical facts.
We are currently witnessing another genocide of Ukrainians. Fortunately, it hasn’t reached the same scale yet, but only because Ukrainians have slightly more means to defend themselves this time. The civilian victims so far are in the tens of thousands, according to conservative estimates, but it has not ended yet. These numbers are confirmed civilian deaths with identified bodies; one has to add missing people, unconfirmed deaths from carpet-bombed and occupied places like Mariupol, kidnapped and POWs who are being slowly killed in Russian death camps, and losses in the Ukrainian army that consists mostly of volunteers who were civilians just recently, and we obtain around 0.5 mln Ukrainian victims.
The killings, once they are committed and investigated, become history. We often associate history with the distant past, but centuries are not necessary for something to become historical. Once there is evidence that someone was killed by a Russian missile or drone, Ukrainians document the event and submit the evidence to international courts, as well as add this to extensive local records. The evidence is abundant, since in the digital age, no one can hide a missile or drone that flew through the sky from another country and hit a residential building. There are hundreds of thousands of such cases, investigated, recorded, and submitted. In addition to killings, there are cases of torture, kidnappings of children and adults, enslavement, rape and child rape, and all kinds of terrible things done to Ukrainians by the Russian army.
While propaganda is political, history, as a scientific discipline in its best form, aims not to be: it aims for objectivity. First and foremost, it aims to register facts, dates, and evidence, and make people aware of them. Only then it proceeds to careful logical conclusions drawn based on those facts, and the conclusions must be clearly delineated from facts. That is the rigour standard in history: mathematicians prove theorems, historians collect facts and delineate them from the conclusions they draw.
Russian propaganda machine tries hard to erase the boundary between historical facts, centralised propaganda, and random political statements. So does every authoritarian regime. Unless one wants to be a part of a totalitarian state, one should do one’s best to distinguish between these. Historical literacy and not hiding away from the news cycle, however annoying it might be, helps here, though you have to scrutinise and diversify your sources. Of course, the media which delivers news tries to manipulate us, and even more so with the development of machine learning and the respective algorithms. Perhaps in response, in some circles, it became almost fashionable to withdraw from news and modern history, and to substitute the need for filter and analysis with ignorance. It helps to remember that this ignorance is not just a personal choice: it is a personal luxury, affordable to those who are at least second or third generation not facing any wars or genocides. If you, for example, are trying to make a real-time decision on when and how exactly to evacuate your family out of the war zone, you do not have that luxury. It also helps to remember that this ignorance does not equal to political freedom, as it, in its turn, gets exploited by politicians.
While historical truth is not political, the prohibition of history is always a political decision. So is the decision by the Olympic Committee to disqualify the Ukrainian athlete due to his photo-helmet. Certain people, widely known for their ideological or political views and actions, may become political symbols in themselves: Che Guevara, Lenin, Hitler. Unless you put a depiction of one of those people on your helmet, you are not making a political statement. Rather, you are putting a photo. If the person in the photo is not living, you are also making a historical reference to the facts of their life and death. Investigating the circumstances of this life and death is not the business of the Olympic Committee. Moreover, giving political interpretation to this life and death is not the Committee’s business either, and since they are not historians, they lack professional expertise to do it. But if they choose to do it, they should remember that the political interpretation is their own, delineating it from facts. And if they try to prohibit a photo based on how the person on it died, their decision becomes political.
So I believe the Olympic Committee has involved itself and 2026 Olympic Games into politics by banning an athlete for photos of other athletes. They did not have to: memorials to fallen athletes are common in all sports competitions, including the Olympic Games, and they could have let it be just that. Most spectators would not even notice, with the exception of Ukrainian and Russian ones. However, in Russia, Olympic sports are a serious part of the Kremlin propaganda machine, so for them, it would matter. Kremlin also still has (unrealistic) hopes to win further parts of Ukraine by propaganda. In this context, the reason for the Olympic Committee’s decision is very clear (I hate to say, «obvious»), and it is not rule 50, 51, 54 or 20,037. The reason is that the Committee would rather put themselves and the whole event through this huge sticky embarrassment, now excitedly covered by all media, than put the Kremlin through an inconvenience. I’ll leave it to the reader to think about further whys.
almond & dandelions 