Greece Bans Voula Papachristou from 2012 Olympics over African Joke
Voula Papachristou was kicked off Greece’s Olympic team on Wednesday for making a racist, derogatory comment on her Twitter account. She wrote: "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!"
A harmless joke. Offense to Africans is in the eye of the beholder.
What was the joke? "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!" she tweeted. Athletic officialdom was not amused.
What was racist about the comment, given that Papachristou, apparently a strong Greek patriot, did not express any negative opinions about Africans, is a mystery … at least to normal people. She did not traffic in what the left believes are standard racist tropes. She did not say that Africans are more violent or disposed to crime than Greeks. Nor did she claim they are less intelligent than the descendants of Homer, Plato and Aristotle. She told an off-color joke, as it were.
She is also guilty of supporting the Golden Dawn party, which, while admittedly sounding a little extreme, opposes immigration; in other words, they would keep Greece for the Greeks. Perhaps that, as Patrick Cleburne wrote, is the real crime. Vdare
What we at Human-Stupidity say is much more offensive. Prepare for Human-Stupidity being raided and shut down! Freedom of expression has long been abolished by speech codes and political correctness rules.
Voula Papachristou’s other sin is promoting views of a party that is in Greek parliament. If a party is not outlawed, promoting it should not lead to expulsion from the Olympics! Political correctness destroys our democratic liberties and ideals.
Papachristou’s Twitter account ((at)papaxristoutj) contained several retweets and links to sites and YouTube videos promoting the views of Golden Dawn, a formerly marginal extreme right party that entered the Greek Parliament in two recent elections – in May and June – by polling almost 7 percent of the vote. She has since erased those links and retweets from her account. 2
Political correctness
Political correctness starts lightly and is ever expanding overcriminalization. Hate speech laws were intended to punish incendiary speech promoting violence and genocide. It was illegal to say "Kill Africans". Then it extended to using derogatory terms like the N -word ("nigger"). If someone uses the N-word, it is understood that the offended have the right to escalate violently "retaliate". I do hope that I don’t get arrested, or attacked by vigilantes, for typing this word once. Now we got as far as to get punished for privately making a joke?
But it was her attempt at a joke Sunday that got the most attention. Commenting on the widely reported appearance of Nile-virus-carrying mosquitoes in Athens, Papachristou wrote: "With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!". Her tweet prompted thousands of negative comments that snowballed Wednesday. 2
Vdare assails the fuzziness of hate crime definitions:
One cannot know what is racist and what isn’t. The word has no precise definition. One day, it means burning crosses and terrorizing blacks. The next, it means calling President Obama a socialist. Or skinny. Or opposing his health-care plan. Yet because those who level charge control what it means, or doesn’t mean, and can use it any way they wish, one is defenseless against it. It cannot be falsified. The very charge imposes the conviction of guilt. Vdare
Be aware that making it to the Olympics is a lifetime struggle of hours of daily training since infancy. So the ban is not a triviality, like not letting someone into a Club.
Of course, when there is real racism, but in favor of Blacks, then reaction to a Black Power salute is more positive.
Globally, it was understood as an act of solidarity with all those fighting for greater equality, justice and human rights. Margaret Lambert, a Jewish high jumper who was forced, for show, to try out for the 1936 German Olympic team, even though she knew she would never be allowed to compete, said how delighted it made her feel. "When I saw those two guys with their fists up on the victory stand, it made my heart jump. It was beautiful." Guardian
London 2012: Greek athlete’s racism ban condemned by far-right party
"I believe it was exaggerated to expel Papachristou, especially after she apologised," tweeted Adonis Georgiadis, a conservative MP.
She should not have to excuse for sharing opinions of a far right party. Excusing for politically incorrect behavior will not achieve forgiveness, an James Watson found out. It might be more productive to courageously defend one’s opinion.
The Greek Olympic Committee condemned the comment as "contrary to the values and ideals of the Olympic movement", though Papachristou’s coach and the far-right Greek Golden Dawn party were among those to attack the punishment as excessive. 3
London 2012: Greek athlete ‘very bitter and upset’ over racism ban
• Voula Papachristou devastated by exclusion from team
• ‘I am trying to stay calm otherwise I would lose control’
• Far-right Golden Dawn party attacked ban as excessive
Another naïve white momentarily forgets about the sacredness of blacks, and has her career ruined
I didn’t know that anyone in a mainstream position who says anything in public under his own name that is in the slightest degree “iffy” about blacks is taking his livelihood and his future in his hands, but because, for a few moments, I was at a loss as to how to respond to it. What do you say about a society (Western society) in which you don’t have to say anything actually negative, anything actually biased about a protected group, particularly blacks, to have your career and place in society destroyed, you just have to tell a garden variety joke? A society in which, even if you issue the most profound apology for your garden variety joke, as Papachristou did, that will not rehabilitate you? No. In liberal society, the society that worships not God but the nonwhite Other, there is no forgiveness.
And finally, an explanation. Before, I could never understand why a joke can be racist, if it does not say anything negative about Blacks
Her joke was not an act of discrimination against anyone, it was a joke. At worst it was in questionable taste. But if you mention blacks in any context which has the slightest negative implication (such as referencing the large number of Africans in Greece in any other way than to celebrate them, or to joke about African mosquitos eating African “food”), that is considered discriminatory, and once you have committed a discriminatory act, you are dead meat.
But really this is not about discrimination. it is about the fact that blacks are sacred objects, and you do not make jokes about sacred objects. But this truth, that in liberal society blacks are sacred objects, cannot be stated aloud because it would reveal too much about the liberal order, so instead it is said that we must “never discriminate between human beings and races.”
That is the only explanation. Don’t say anything about Blacks. Don’t mention Blackness, except in pure praise. Otherwise you are racist.
Rule 10(r) While it is important for your physical survival to take blackness into account when encountering black individuals or finding yourself in a black neighborhood or at a beach or amusement park with many blacks, when it comes to your social survival you should pretend to be unconscious of blackness. If someone says, “There are a lot of blacks in the park today,” the safest response is, “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Being aware of race, in any context outside of fulsome praise, is tantamount to racism.
Races will probably mix, as they did over the last few millions of years. We have also a less probable scenario of isolated groups developing slowly into separate races and even separate spieces.
I am thinking about next million years.
Surely, we upper class people will not mix with lower class right now.
I mean feminism in wider sense. Men and women have to be together. Women have to continue exploiting men, because women consume more than produce, and the difference is covered by exploitation of men, in form of husbands, taxpayers etc.
>I mean feminism in wider sense. Men and women have to be together. Women have to continue exploiting men, because women consume more than produce, and the difference is covered by exploitation of men, in form of husbands, taxpayers etc.
@Equalist: interesting point. Reminds me also of the situation in Europe where the Euro forces a re-distribution of income.
Some races have mixed (neanderthals and cro-mags, possibly?), some have split off (Black Africans and White Europeans, for example). And the recent history of racially mixed societies does not indicate that they all blend into a single race. Rather, different sorts of mixed types become endogamous and crystallize into new races of their own. The hybrid Uighur people who want their independence from China have both Caucasoid and Mongoloid ancestry. But they have been mostly endogamous for centuries, and thus have become a race in the sense of being a partially inbred extended family. And Ashkenazi Jews, of mixed European and Middle Eastern ancestry, have developed characteristics, such as an unusually high average IQ, that distinguishes them from both groups.
If anything, I think that the ability of people to be far choosier about the genetic qualities of their mates now than in the past (assortative mating) will cause populations to differentiate even more quickly than they do now. Steve Sailer hypothesized that part of the reason for the surprising whiteness of Latin America’s elites, even in heavily mixed countries, is that upwardly mobile men from the mixed-race masses preferred the most European-looking women as wives (which you will find in populations of mixed European and non-European ancestry simply through chance assortments of phenotype-affecting genes.
If Charles Murray’s latest thesis is correct, then even within each of the continent-scale races there will be assortative mating leading to divergence in important traits like intelligence and future time orientation. My point, simply, was that while feminism may be anti-male discrimination, it is not “racist” because the discrimination is not based on ancestry groups.
My last sentence should really be split off into a point of its own. Most of my comment was about race-mixing, but my last sentence was about feminism and why it is different from racial discrimination. I meant to segue into it, but looking back I can see I did a bad job of that. Please read it as a point separate from the rest of my comment.
One day, when all races mix, we’ll have only one type of racism left: feminism (man-hate).
@Equalist,
“One day, when all races mix”
Try getting the Chinese to accept mass race-mixing with blacks. Or getting high-caste brahmins to mix en masse with Dalits (let alone a non-Indian). In any case, why do you want to destroy the unique qualities of each race? I think each race is perfectly fine in its own place. There are some that, frankly, I find more admirable than others, and I am of course more attached to my own, but I don’t particularly wish the extinction of any others.
“we’ll have only one type of racism left: feminism (man-hate).”
Men and women are, by definition, not different races, since they must interbreed to reproduce. Feminism, therefore, cannot be a form of “racism”.
Summer Olympics 2012: Did Political Correctness Sink Voula Papachristou?
We have doubt in our mind, we were raised in the old fashioned constitutional rights of freedom of expression.
The acceptance of blacks, into any society, will inevitably lead to that society becoming black and being run by blacks. The same applies to Muslims. The only way to avoid this is through strict racial controls (Jim Crow laws).
@jewamongyou
Does the same apply to Jewish people? You should be ashamed of yourself!
I never understood why white supremacists or Nazis are against Jews.
Jews are highly intelligent and productive. I believe they also are low in violent crime (data anyone?)
If anything, Jews are envied for their success, it seems to me.
Or for taking skillful advantage in loopholes in the laws. But I don’t think Jews are high even in financial crimes and illegal dealings.
So opposition to high crime, low IQ populations are not the same as opposition to highly successful intelligent populations like the Jews.
I think it is much safer for a white kid to walk through a Jewish neighborhood then through a black neighborhood. With the exception, maybe, of black middle class neighborhoods.
I sound racist, but I think all this can be proven through statistics. I have linked to the US Department of justice site showing that Blacks commit much more crimes then whites. Not sure if they have similar statistics about Jews.
No. Obviously the same does not apply to Jews. Jews have been minorities in non-Jewish countries for centuries without reducing the native populations to minority status. We’re not dangerous to be around, we don’t try to screw every non-Jewish woman we encounter, we don’t breed like cockroaches and we don’t seek out non-Jewish areas to colonize. We do tend to advocate for genocide against whites – and for that I am ashamed.
Or racial separation. A country for blacks, and a country for whites. Whites can act as white as we please, and the blacks can act as black as they please. Unfortunately, such a solution is unlikely in the current political environment. The IWSB Elite that leads black voters benefits too much from affirmative action and black racial resentment against whites to take a lead on this issue, and white political leaders are either utterly whipped by “racism” accusations, or are associate members of the coalition of the diverse themselves.