Tourism organization blunder

The offending bit showing the torch lighting ceremony at the controversial pre-war games, an idea thought up by the Nazis, was removed posthaste, after officials were alerted to the gaffe by the Guardian. Last night the original version of the video disappeared from YouTube.

“This was a commemorative video marking 100 years of the Greek tourism organisation, that was shown in the UK for the first time, and we wanted to include footage from the Olympic games,” the tourism ministry’s general secretary, Panos Livadas, told the Guardian, adding: “In the sequence, a scene from the 1936 Olympics was mistakenly included which we will immediately remove and rectify.”

The clip that lasted a couple of seconds shows an “Aryan” athlete lighting the Olympic flame. The blunder was rectified but not before UK media got wind of it and made it, yet another, cause to blast at Greece at a time when some UK circles are doing their bit to stave off any attempt by Greece to regain the Parthenon sculptures, using all available arguments.

At the same time the video has been blasted in Greece and abroad as being out of date, aesthetically indifferent, Hellenistically irrelevant, and in general a botched up job that taxpayers paid for.

For some unknown reason the 12 minute creation features an American athlete that has no connection to Greece whatsoever, and almost nothing about modern Greece. There are long scenes with the Parthenon museum, perhaps far more irksome than the 2 seconds of Nazi-era footage, shot by German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and cameraman Walter Frentz.

However, the Guardia ends their piece on the issue by picking comments from the most “offended” of critics writing on youtube, where the spot aired, as one Ares Kalogeropoulos wrote: “It is perhaps the most repellent thing I have ever seen or paid for as a taxpayer.”

Obviously this last comment comes from someone with either a very limited video experience, or an extreme sense of hyperbole.