John Aravosis has been doing an excellent job on keeping up to date with events having to do with official homophobia in Russia, but today's edition of AmericaBlog has an article that absolutely froze me. Here's his opening:
I wonder what the International Olympic Committee has to say about this latest Stalinesque tragedy taking place under the authority of its good name.
It seems the curator of a Russian museum, Marat Guelman, was fired from his job after he refused to censor an art exhibit that had the audacity to criticize the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
What's really chilling? Guelman is a Jew.
Yes. I'm going to follow his links to see if it's as bad as I think it is. First, here's the piece of art that the officials found offensive:
Okay. The Nazi era
Entartete Kunst (degenerate art)
immediately comes to mind here. Here's the centerpiece of the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. Marc Chagall's 1916 painting,
Purim:
Several men attacked Guelman after his firing.
Artdaily.org has details of the attack, but what's even more telling is this:
A criminal investigation was opened by prosecutors. Several nationalist web sites list Guelman as an “enemy of Russia” for his Jewish last name.
Um, yes, Neo-Nazis.
And why was the gallery being scrutinized? Look at the art again. See the Olympic logos? Well, yes. NBC has a LOT of information on this. It's not exactly "refusal to censor," which is why we follow the links. The artist, a Georgian, Vasily Stolov, had his work removed from a festival Guelman was curating by Russian authorities because it used symbols of the Olympic Games (you know, you can't disrespect the Olympic symbols) at which point Guelman moved the art into the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum fired him for doing so.
Guelman posted on his Twitter page Wednesday that he had been fired by Igor Gladnev, the minister of culture for the Perm region.
"Gladnev just called me and confirmed the fact of my dismissal. The Ministry of Culture, it seems, has confused its role with that of the FSB [the former KGB]," Guelman wrote.
I mean, really. I wasn't going to diary the article Jere Longman wrote in the New York Times yesterday because it was a condemnation of the IOC and the USOC for refusing to engage in uncomfortable politics and it didn't really deal with Russia, but now, it's all fair game.
The Olympic charter calls sport a human right that should be practiced “without discrimination of any kind.” But all the indignation the I.O.C. could muster about Russia’s new antigay law was a statement saying the Olympic Committee would “oppose in the strongest terms any move that would jeopardize this principle.”
The USOC isn't getting involved either because it has an "uncomfortable" relationship with the IOC. The sponsors (he names McDonald's and the Coca-Cola Company) aren't saying much either.
Move the whole thing to Vancouver. Or Lillehammer, or Lake Placid. Russia doesn't deserve to have an Olympic Games there. The IOC doesn't deserve to run one either.