Tommie Smith, John Carlos and that 1968 "black power" salute - an apology would be nice

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico two black American 200m medal-winners gave black power salutes with black-gloved hands as they stood on the podium with “The Star-Spangled Banner” playing. One of them raised their right hand – a symbol of black power, apparently – while the other raised his left hand, symbolising black unity. One of them wore a black scarf and black socks, standing for black pride and black poverty, respectively. Both men later suffered in a variety of ways for deliberately insulting their country.

This week, in London to promote a documentary about the event, one of the runners, Tommie Smith, said “I want to cry sometimes, thinking about what we went through.” No doubt… and I want to cry at the thought of having to hear about it yet again.

Look, by 1968 the American government had been power-hosing money at black communities for at least four years. Civil rights legislation had been enacted. LBJ’s “Great Society” vision – essentially designed to solve the problem of black underachievement – had been implemented (few at the time realised it would have the effect of entrenching failure by encouraging fecklessness). The athletes’ demonstration was at least half a decade out of date.

Nihilistic, left-wing political hysteria reached a peak in the West in 1968. As that great journalist Tom Wolfe so perfectly captured in his 1970 book, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, black militants were riding the crest of that revolutionary wave – their victimhood status trumped all others: America’s left-liberal elite bent its collective knee to the magnificence of righteous black fury. A couple of 200m runners were infected by the zeitgeist, deliberately performed a revoltingly unpatriotic act, and then, when the moment had passed, paid the price, and brought calamity down on their families into the bargain.

Okay, Tommie Smith and John Carlos can be partly excused – while spoilt white middle-class brats and black activists were shrieking about the dreadful iniquities of Western society, the liberal media and the academic establishment at the time, while happy to continue exposing the sins of Nazi Germany and American racism, turned a blind eye to the almost inconceivable evils being perpetrated in communist slave states around the globe.

Now that we know what was happening behind the Iron Curtain and in China at that time, one might have hoped that the athletes would have found it in their hearts to apologise for giving succour to bestial dictatorships by so publicly and effectively insulting the only nation powerful enough, brave enough and free enough to prevent the whole world becoming enslaved by sadistic thugs.

In 2008, at a ceremony in Los Angeles, Smith and Carlos were awarded the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage for their infamous salutes. Given how amazed they were at not being welcomed with open arms on their return to the States, I’m not sure exactly where their courage lay. If they’d subsequently admitted they were wrong to do dirt on their country, the awards would definitely have been deserved.

I think I'll give the movie a miss.