Author and actor Stephen Fry urged Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee to impose “an absolute ban” on the Winter Olympics scheduled to be held in Russia’s Sochi next year.
“I am gay. I am a Jew,” he wrote, comparing Russia’s new anti-gay policies to Hitler’s legacy in Germany. Here is an excerpt from his letter:
He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats.