ArcaMax

PARIS – Bonjour, world! Bienvenue to the Paris Olympic Games! Come for the propaganda, stay for the rampant authoritarianism!

The tone couldn’t have been better set. Paris blew €1.5 billion to “clean up” the Seine river — effectively an open-air sewer — promising Parisians a long-term legacy of open water swimming using preparation for Olympic distance and triathlon swimming as a pretext. But it was still too bacteria-infested with a month to go. Then, with just days to go before the Games, the French sports minister donned a full wetsuit and slipped into the river, screaming her head off (perhaps because she knows exactly what’s in there) before declaring, “It’s mild!” She quickly hopped out and pat herself on the back for the government keeping its promises. Within days, the mayor of Paris did the same, raving about the water, which was brown. Just like Saint Tropez, though, if you squint hard enough!

The reality check came from CNN correspondent Melissa Bell, reporting during her own river dip, that the water was “not quite clean” but swimmable.

Pretty weak return on a billion-plus investment. Kind of makes you wonder where all the cash went.

But there’s a part of French society that just wants people to shut up and enjoy the show. The other part refuses to allow the Games to be a free pass for ruling elites to run around behaving like caricaturistic movie villains in a dystopian hellscape.

The July 26 Olympic Opening Ceremonies will be grandiose and unprecedented. But at what cost to French society and to humanity?

The idea of an unconventional, non-stadium ceremony, conjured up at the height of pandemic panic when officials were treating any closed spaces as a threat, was to hold the Games’ opening throughout the entire city. The delegations of athletes would float down the Seine river on boats, and the show would be open for everyone to watch. The only security that seemed to matter was of the sanitary kind. Images of a giant two-week, open-air party atmosphere seduced Parisians. It was going to be the people’s games. Accessible to all.

But with each news cycle, Covid faded into rear view. Off came the masks, and out went the delusions. Suddenly, officials found themselves getting mugged by realities like budget deficits and conventional security considerations of the non-viral kind.

So much for the affordable tickets. And the free public transport pitched in the games bid? The prices for transit in the entire region would skyrocket instead. Businesses expecting an Olympic-related boom were told that maybe it would just be better if everyone just took their vacations or worked from home during the Games.

Then came the return of the Covid-era QR code to control citizens’ everyday movement. At first it would only be for a few days, and just for vehicles over a few select areas to ensure the security and success of this grandiose Opening Ceremony. Send your documents to the government online and they’ll judge whether or not they consider your reason valid. Suck it up to make France proud, whiners! The world would witness a show like none other, with breathtaking views of the world’s most touristic city as a backdrop. And to make sure that it all gets pulled off without any embarrassing incidents, here come tens of thousands of giant metal barriers to turn Paris into a giant open-air cage, with police and military officers from all over the world enforcing compliance.

OK, so maybe it won’t just be for cars, but also for pedestrians, too. And over several kilometers. And maybe not just for a few days but instead for the entire period covering the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which end in September.

You can be sure that if there’s anyone who will absolutely have his QR code, it will be the jerk hell-bent on making trouble at the Games. Which makes you wonder about the rationale behind the “security theater”, if not t o mask deep insecurities in the same way that weak guys overcompensate with overt shows of “manliness”.

These heavy-handed visible crackdowns are apparently so ineffective that they also need spy drones, Minority Report-style “smart surveillance systems” of facial recognition software governed by artificial intelligence, plus electromagnetic and thermal imagery to detect hidden objects in crowds from a distance. And even those may not actually be up to par, as suggested in a classified French Senate report, leaked in May, expressing concerns over the effectiveness of Olympic anti-drone defense. How convenient that Paris has created massive security risks for itself, beyond those of any other Olympics, whose "solutions" just happen to enrich the military-industrial complex and usher in a system of enhanced government control.

The athletes likely won’t know any better, shuttled around from one safe space to another. The world will see the city’s shiny façade beamed through their TVs. But Parisians are now living an authoritarian nightmare. Many are wondering if it’s all some kind of a giant experiment, and which measures introduced for the Games will persist afterward.

For the average Parisian, the Paris Games are starting to feel like the Hunger Games movies, which are set in a Balkanized authoritarian city called “Panem” (Latin for the “bread” part of “bread and circuses”). Oh, the irony of Paris’ longstanding nickname being a nearly identical sounding “Paname”.