As the Olympic flame has been burning bright in Paris, the fires of far-right thuggery have been raging across the English Channel . It has been an horrific spectacle, stomach-churning in its ugliness. Hotels housing asylum seekers have been targeted and torched.
Mosques have come under assault. People of colour have been encircled and set upon by racist mobs. There have been Nazi salutes in the streets and chants of “Stop the boats”, a populist slogan, simplifying the most complex of problems, which originated in Australia.
Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: This firestorm of anti-immigrant violence has been whipped up by an explosion of anti-immigrant misinformation. After the killings in Southport last week of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, the 17-year-old alleged to have carried out the attack was misidentified as a Muslim asylum seeker who recently entered Britain by boat. Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, who has now been charged with the murders, was born in Cardiff, has lived all of his life in Britain and has no known links with Islam.
His parents, who came to the UK from Rwanda, evidently raised him as a Christian. Rightly, the vileness of far-right provocateurs, such as Andrew Tate, who propagated the false information, has been identified and admonished. So, too, the recklessness of Elon Musk, whose post on X stating that “civil war is inevitable” alongside footage of rioting in Liverpool has sparked a war of words with the new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
For decades, the British tabloids have fomented anti-immigrant feeling, but Musk’s X has become even more of a super-spewer of xenophobic disinformation. That England’s violence should coincide with the beauty of the Paris Games is doubly poignant because it was only 12 summers ago that Britain basked in the same Olympic glow. The 2012 London Games, from the moment the Queen’s stunt double leapt from that helicopter , presented to the world the country’s modern and more multicultural face.
Rather than glorifying Britain’s imperial past, the opening ceremony focused on innovation and restless change – the industrial revolution, the suffragettes, the foundation of the National Health Service and the invention of the internet. Also, it showcased a nation seemingly increasingly comfortable in its many shades of skin. Fittingly, the athletes who emerged as national heroes personified 21st century Britain.
Mo Farah, who won gold in the 5000 and 10,000 metres, was born in Somalia. Jessica Ennis , who won gold in the heptathlon, was the offspring of a mother who came from Derbyshire and a father born in Jamaica. By 2012, stories of immigrant success, of the kind more commonly associated with America, had become a routinely British experience.
Anti-migration protesters during riots in Manvers, England, outisde a hotel used as accommodation for asylum seekers. Credit: Getty Only four years later, however, came Brexit , a vote to leave the European Union driven in part by anti-immigrant feeling and nostalgic nationalism. The feel good euphoria of the London Games now looked like a chimera, a figment of progressive wishful thinking.
In 2016, of course, there were parallels in America, where the shock victory of Donald Trump became Brexit’s trans-Atlantic twin. There were also historical echoes. Three months after the London Games, Barack Obama demonstrated that a Black man could not only win election but re-election as US president.
Four years later, however, he transferred power to a racist white nationalist who had made his political name as the untitled leader of the birther movement, which questioned, speciously, the legitimacy of the country’s first Black presidency. That Obama was followed into office by Trump, and that Brexit came hot on the heels of the London Games, demonstrates the Newtonian character of 21st century politics. It seems bound by the British physicist’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Indeed, in Australia at the dawn of the new millennium we saw a foreshadowing of how these cycles would play out. In September 2000, the Sydney Olympics opened with a thrillingly inclusive retelling of the national story, and culminated in Cathy Freeman running that golden 400 metres of reconciliation. The following year, however, came the Tampa election, where anti-asylum seeker sentiment and post-911 Islamophobia were factors in John Howard’s success.
In the polarised polities of the west, liberal advances can quickly be followed by illiberal backlashes, and vice versa. In Britain this week we’ve seen those alternating cycles play out, with the thuggery being displaced by anti-racist community rallies that were both large-scale and non-violent. Again it underscores how politics is becoming a clash over national and personal identity fought along the battlelines of race, immigration and inclusion.
Paris offers yet another example of how a celebratory multicultural montage can easily be misconstrued, for soon we will doubtless return to reporting on the menace of the French far right. The Olympics also raises the question of what story America will tell at the Los Angeles Games in 2028. Will it showcase Trumpian triumphalism or will the country’s first Black female president hold aloft America’s torch? Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself .
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