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"Samaranch" Museum for China


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Pics, and a link to the story of the opening:

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Jacques Rogge and C K Wu International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board President Jacques Rogge and C K Wu visit the Samaranch Memorial Museum

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Juan Antonio Samaranch Junior poses outside the Museum dedicated to his father

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Don Porter, co-President of the World Baseball Softball Confederations, visits the Samaranch Memorial Museum

Insidethegames

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This would be like building a Museum for Mao in Montreal or New Orleans. Why there??

To be honest, I think the Samaranch collection section of the Olympic museum at Montjuic is enough, and that is surely the appropriate place to do it, if any more extensions are to be made. I found it just enough, without feeling like I was visiting a shrine to an administrator. Certainly, Barcelona is far more of a tourist destination as well.

But if they have the money and feel like getting a brown tongue, go for it I guess.

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1967

Samaranch, dressed in full-blown Fascist uniform, is sworn in as a National Councillor in Spain's sham "parliament" by General Franco

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1974

Samaranch greets his leader, just a year before Franco's death, a loyal Francoist to the bitter end.

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Why Juan Antonio’s right arm is more muscular than his left (It’s had more exercise!) The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name

It’s a taboo subject among the more than one hundred members of the International Olympic Committee and the majority of the journalists covering them and their sports event. Why won’t IOC members ever talk about the fact that the right arm of their dearly beloved former president Juan Antonio Samaranch is more muscular than his left arm?

By Andrew Jennings

August 1, 2008

Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC from 1980 until 2001, had a dirty secret. Most IOC members know the truth but stay silent because he organised a regal life-style for them - with money diverted from sport. And the truth is so embarrassing.

In 1980 Samaranch introduced the institutionalised corruption of the fascist Franco regime to the IOC. He encouraged members to steal – if they wanted – from cities bidding to host the Olympics. Grateful, they gave him all the loyalty he required. It was so very Franco. Who cared that he believed the wrong team won World War Two? A card-carrying, right-arm waving, uniform-wearing nazi-sympathiser for 37 years? Not a problem at the IOC - or in the Olympic media rooms. Just as much a taboo subject for the reporters.

Even today IOC members love him so much that if you inquire, ‘Please enlighten me, what were the politics of Juan Antonio Samaranch?’ they’ll duck your gaze, avoid answering and never use the F-Word. It’s the love whose name they dare not speak.

I revealed his happy fascist career in 1992 in a book and a television documentary shown worldwide - and was awarded the Samaranch Prize for Literature!

Samaranch and his IOC hit me with a criminal libel case – he totally denied any involvement in fascism - and I won a 5-day suspended jail sentence at the Lausanne district court. The judge warned that if I repeated that Samaranch was a prominent fascist it was off to a Swiss jail for me.

So, thanks to those wonderful people at the IOC, I’ve had a criminal record ever since . . . for telling the truth about Samaranch’s right arm.

The last known picture of Samaranch saluting with his fascist comrades was taken in Barcelona in July 1974. Franco died the following year. At the time Samaranch was a vice-president of the IOC. Six years later they made him their President.

Samaranch deserted from the Army of the Spanish Republic in 1937 and joined the fascist rebels, led by General Franco. After they won the civil war, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, he ingratiated himself with Franco’s daughter Carmen.

In 1956 Samaranch was pictured in his fascist uniform at a ceremony mourning fascist ‘martyrs.’ Note the Olympic-style flaming torches in the background. (The Olympic torch relay was invented by Adolf Hitler’s spindoctors for the 1936 Games. Now it belongs to Coca-Cola.)

In the 1960s, again wearing his fascist uniform, Samaranch was shaking hands with the dictator. In 1967 he was sworn in at quasi-religious ceremony as Franco’s Sports Minister.

Days later he repeated his loyalty pledge surrounded by fascist goons wearing regulation blue shirts. Samaranch never missed a chance to grovel to Franco and wore his blue shirt at yet another fascist ceremony in 1974.

When you know the truth about his ideology and preferences for authoritarianism, you begin to understand why he steered the Games to Beijing.

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