[History] Why were disabled people persecuted in the USSR?
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Interesting…
So I’m an Olympics/Paralympics nut, right (don’t know exactly why. Guess I was the right age for Sydney 2000, and it went from there!), and one thing I explicitly noticed this year is that Ukraine absolutely dominated a lot of the Paralympic sports, in a way they didn’t at Olympic level. Like, matched only by “Great Britain”, the US, Germany (of course), and bloody China…
Russia, by contrast, did well, but nowhere near on the same level, which I found surprising (Putin did, however, give at least some of the Paralympians Russian “medals of honor”, when they returned, so it’s not like they were “invisible” in Russia, lol).
I realise that Russia and Ukraine are not the same, and I also realise that the whole ROC/RPC “banning of Russia” debacle would have impacted things, but it does make you think: if Russia invested in Paralympic sport in the same way that Ukraine and Germany obviously do (also Poland, to a lesser extent) - man, how good could they be??!
Same problem with Japan, who were the hosts, obviously… Though they seemed to view the Paralympians with even more of a dismissive sneer, which is… Unfortunate, but perhaps unsurprising given Japan’s historical obsession with uhh… “Purity”… 🤢
Are you sure about that? Because that doesn't match my experience when talking to any Japanese people. Maybe that's just compared to Americans who couldn't care less about the Olympics, and don't even know what Paralympics is... but many Japanese actually treat it as a legitimate sporting contest. Some of it airs on TV like the Olympics, and the news stations give regular updates on the results. People might not know individual competitors like they do famous olympians, but they anticipate the results and add the totals for Olympics + Paralympics together to see how well Japan did vs. other countries.
You certainly cant gauge national excitement for an event based on how well the athletes perform.