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 and 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, Carter was demonstrating that the United States was now founded on at least one of the principles of the communist Soviet Union — that freedom of travel is not a fundamental, God-given right here in the United States any more than it is in communist, totalitarian nations.
Of course, things haven’t changed a bit. If American citizens travel to Cuba, for example, and spend money there without the official permission of their U.S. masters, they are immediately indicted upon their return to the U.S., prosecuted, convicted, fined, and sentenced to prison.
Another big problem is that it was Carter and his national-security establishment who intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately provoked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in the first place. Yes, you read that right. While Carter pontificated about the evil Soviet empire’s invasion of Afghanistan — and used American athletes as pawns in his protest against the invasion — the fact is that Carter himself, as well as the U.S. national-security establishment, wanted the Soviets to invade Afghanistan and, in fact, provoked them into doing so.
This evil little scheme was later confirmed by Carter’s national-security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The scheme called for supporting Afghanistan opponents of Russia in the hopes of provoking the Soviets into invading the country. The scheme worked brilliantly. And when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Carter, Brezinski, and other U.S, officials were as exultant as U.S. officials would be many years later when they succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine.
Why such exultation? As Brezinski put it, they had now given the Soviets their “own Vietnam.” In other words, Russia would now be bogged down in a war that would entail the killing of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, just like the 58,000 American soldiers that U.S. presidents, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA sacrificed in Vietnam for nothing. What a warped and perverted thing to be excited about.
Thus, here you had Carter protesting against the invasion of Afghanistan by those evil Russians when it was Carter himself who desired the invasion, provoked it, and was exultant about it when it happened. He then had the audacity to use innocent U.S. athletes, who had nothing to do with any of these machinations, as pawns to protest against the invasion that Carter wanted, provoked, and got. Is it really difficult to understand why so many people around the world, including here in the United States, hate the hypocrisy of the U.S. government so much?
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
