Jimmy Carter’s Hypocritical Olympic Boycott
According to an article in the Washington Post, Gene Mills, a U.S. citizen who was one of the top amateur wrestlers in the world, stated, “He stole my life. That was my life. He took it away from me.”
Mills was referring to President Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100. It was Carter who ordered U.S. athletes to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Russia. The reason? Carter used the boycott to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
There were two at least two big problems with Carter’s order, however.
One problem is that in a genuinely free society, people have the right to travel wherever they want and interact with anyone they want. If people want to compete in sporting events in foreign lands or just be spectators, that’s part of living the life of a free person. It’s none of the government’s business.
That wasn’t Carter’s mindset. His order reflected the reality of the American condition in modern times. In the United States, citizens no longer have the God-given, natural right of freedom of travel or freedom to interact with people in foreign lands. American citizens are subject to the orders, dictates, and edicts of their political masters. Once the president issued his order prohibiting them from competing in the Olympics, American citizens were expected to obey. I’ve sometimes wondered what U.S. officials would have done to U.S. athletes who decided to disobey Carter’s edict. No doubt Carter his federal henchmen would have figured out ways to smash them.
Thus, the irony was that in issuing his boycott order to protest Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, Cart
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