The first surprise in store for us with this 2026 World Cup is the impressive amnesia of everyone involved, including the international media. Nothing, not a word, absolutely no mention of its infamous “ancestor,” the 1936 Berlin Olympics. For, despite the 90 years that separate them, the elective affinities between Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup are glaringly obvious: the same propagandistic exploitation of the sporting event by the same authoritarian, racist, and freedom-suppressing regimes led by megalomaniacal supreme leaders devoid of moral and democratic scruples.

That said, it is precisely these similarities and elective affinities that allow us to better understand and assess the differences between Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup. And the first of these concerns the popular and other reactions they have provoked. Virtually none in 2026, at least on the part of states and international organizations. And only a few—rather rare—protests and criticisms here and there from NGOs and social movements. In short, an apathy that betrays a resigned acceptance of the event in the name of the highly fatalistic “what can one do against this gigantic circus?”.

The difference from what happened before and during the Berlin Olympics is striking. In contrast to the resignation prevailing in 2026, movements to boycott the 1936 Olympics—which brought thousands of demonstrators into the streets—had emerged in the United States, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. These movements were unable to prevent the Berlin Olympics from taking place, but they effectively articulated their anti-fascist cause, alerting the public and mobilizing anti-racist vanguards by fighting on a class-based line against supporters of the Olympics and other admirers of Hitler. (1)

In contrast, Spain’s Popular Front boycotted the Berlin Olympics, and even better, the left-wing Catalan government of Prime Minister Lluís Companys (later executed by Franco’s fascists) organized the People’s Olympics, in which 6,000 athletes from 49 countries were to participate. Ultimately, these alternative Olympics never took place because their opening on July 19, 1936, coincided with the outbreak of Franco’s coup. Many of these athletes, as well as sports journalists sent to Barcelona to cover the alternative Olympics, joined and fought in the left-wing militias (such as the author of “1984 ,” George Orwell, in those of the POUM), and some lost their lives in the anti-fascist struggle…

The comparison of popular reactions to Hitler’s Olympics and Trump’s World Cup speaks volumes and says a great deal about the current (miserable) state of the international left and popular movements. And it is probably this appalling state of the progressive camp that makes Trump feel he has more or less free rein to make his World Cup far more openly racist, repressive, fundamentally anti-democratic, and in the service of the ultra-rich than Hitler’s Olympics! Indeed, while the Nazi regime had taken care during the Olympics to appear almost… liberal by removing anything that might betray its pathological anti-Semitism as well as its anti-democratic and repressive “excesses,” Trump and his regime almost proudly flaunt their unapologetic racism, their contempt for the poor and…people of color, their ruthless hunt for migrants (even in the stadiums!), and their white supremacism. And all this while couldn’t care less about regulations or his own promises, going so far as to ban supporters of Third World teams from entering the United States, and even their staff (!) or the African referees chosen to officiate World Cup matches!

However, it must be noted that neither Hitler nor Trump could have done all this without the enthusiastic support of international sports leaders. And while Trump enjoys the unwavering support of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, whose almost comical servility rivals that of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte—known for calling Trump… “Daddy”—Hitler had his own Infantino in the person of the famous Baron de Coubertin or Avery Brundage. Indeed, the notorious colonialist, racist, anti-Semite, and misogynist “father of the modern Olympics,” Baron de Coubertin, never hid his admiration for his “friend” Adolph Hitler, whom he celebrated as “one of the greatest builders of our time,” for the Nazi regime, which he praised, and for the Berlin Olympics, which he defended with all his might. As for the racist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic American Avery Brundage, who led, for nearly half a century, the infamous International Olympic Committee—that den of princes and other fallen aristocrats, ultra-reactionary millionaires, and professional anti-communists—did everything in his power to thwart the boycott of the Berlin Olympics in his capacity as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. And if today, the unspeakable Infantino calls on international public opinion—deeply shocked by the U.S. rejection of Somali referee Abdulkadir Artan—to… “chill and relax,” Avery Brundage described the boycott movement and all those who denounced the Nazis’ persecution of Jews in 1936 as a… “Jewish conspiracy.” An Avery Brundage who was at the time a member of an isolationist organization sympathetic to Nazism, with the evocative name… America First! Clearly, Trump didn’t invent anything…

Just as, for that matter, this ongoing World Cup—aptly dubbed the “World Cup of Money”—has invented nothing new except for its sheer scale and its total domination by the forces of big capital. These forces, of course, have no qualms about either unabashed racism or the repressive mania of that Nazified Caligula known as Donald Trump.

And while all this takes us back nearly a century, imperceptibly reminding us of the era of the Berlin Olympics celebrated then by the same elites who today celebrate Trump’s World Cup, there is nothing that can surprise or shock those who govern this world. Take, for example, that eternal bastion of reactionaryism, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has just reproduced and put on the market a T-shirt bearing the official poster of the 1936 Olympics glorifying the Third Reich!

All the more reason for us to take seriously the deadly threat posed by all these nostalgics for a past that is by no means over, and to react accordingly…

Note

1. For the Berlin Olympics, see our texte How long will the “Olympic flame” scam last? “The Olympic flame, a wonderful idea from Dr. Goebbels”! : https://www.cadtm.org/The-Olympic-flame-a-wonderful-idea-from-Dr-Goebbels

---