Greek triple jumper and political correctness

Voula Papachristou is the hottest among the top Greek athletes who defended her 2009 European gold a year ago (July 2011) in Ostrava, Czechia.



She also has a Twitter account where she showed that she isn't just a pile of protein; she is apparently rather creative and intelligent.




Mosquitoes managed to infect several Africans in Athens by the West Nile virus which she commented on in this way:

With so many Africans in Greece, the West Nile mosquitoes will be getting home food!!!

LOL. Needless to say, this refers to a shared birthplace, not to races, and even if it were referring to races, there is nothing negative about the tweet. That's really why I've seen black tweeters who agreed it wasn't racist.

Assuming she invented it, I think this is a very clever joke, putting her in the top 10% of the people when it comes to the sense of humor. The real reason why it's funny is that it's true. We usually don't track viruses and people and the same moment. She did; good for her. Well, not so good for her because she was instantly removed from the Greek olympic team. The explanations looked like this:

No matter how old you are, when you offend the Olympic values, you can’t be a member of the Olympic team.

Oh, really? Needless to say, this is a shameless lie. There are many Olympic values but the political correctness is surely not one of them. The true violators are those who would love to hijack the political movement and transform it into an arm supporting their favorite ideology such as the political correctness. Adolf Hitler did nothing else in 1936 and if you wonder why I compare them to Hitler, it's because they are structurally doing the same thing. What about the PC promoted by the ancient Olympics? Even women were prohibited to participate at the Olympics. What about black slaves?

Sport was in Greece above all a domain of the free, in which slaves could barely participate.

There is no record of a single slave victor of Greek games. Participating in the crown-games was strictly forbidden for them. At some local games, however, they were permitted to compete, although their participation was not encouraged. An inscription from Misthia, a small town in Asia Minor, states that slave victors had to give one fourth of their prize money to the other participants. In this way, it could be avoided that masters trained their slaves as athletes to profit from the prize money.

So fix your history, comrades. It's you who is bending the Olympic values.

There could have been a more general underlying reason why she was ousted. She supports the nationalist Golden Dawn party. I wouldn't endorse those folks, they are really not my cup of tea, but the feeling that the supporters of other average Greek parties – such as SYRIZA or the Communist Parties of various other types or even PASOK – have the moral credentials to place themselves above the voters of the Golden Dawn such as Voula is arrogant, anti-democratic, and preposterous.

At any rate, I am amazed that the officials in the failed state where nothing works still find enough time and energy to impose the political correctness and harass the citizens who aren't innate politically correct asslickers. The apparatchiks responsible for this decision should be ashamed and they should be kicked into their butts, too.

BTW I am sure that during the times when I were at Harvard faculty, I would run into trouble even for this very blog entry. The political correctness isn't just an inseparable feature of officials in far-left failed states such as Greece; it has penetrated into almost every corner of the Western Academia, too.



After the 2011 victory in Czechia...

Here in Czechia, most people would find such violations of the basic freedom of speech to be unacceptable. At least in generic enough sectors of the society, there's no one who matters and who tries to cripple the basic human rights in this way. That's also why jokes that are much more "racist" than Voula's tweet may be broadcast in the primetime for millions of viewers.

Take Tele Tele. A "commercial" confusing Vietnamese sandals with... Vietnamese women. Footage of a (fake) African soccer player who was kicking into coconuts before he moved into a Czech soccer team. Detergent named Aryan modifying the usual advertisement for detergent Ariel: why isn't my baby white? And so on. Sometimes I found the number of such references to be too high for my taste. While I was a great fan of the program, sometimes it looked shallow to me. But it's still important that people aren't harassed for innocent jokes and that one group of political parties doesn't change the official institutions into an octopus used to fight their political competitors. That's a major thing that I and others were fighting against during the times of communism and I won't sacrifice an inch here.