Originally posted by Shoujikina
Oh my goodness. And people consider this NORMAL? I can't fathom it... what kind of a being would consider something like this harmless and normal viewing for all humanity? And..

Yeah I mean... It's not like the whole world knows about Harry Potter is it?
How abnormal to include one of Britain's most successful Authors and do a sequence celebrating children's literature...

WHAT does this have to do with Olympics anyway?

It was the LONDON Olympics and was a celebration of everything British and was also a little history lesson for those who know nothing of Britain or it's history, culture or arts.

Seems like most failed to grasp that.

.. Children in hospital beds..

Uh huh..... I mean why would Danny Boyle, you know, the world famous Director who Directed the whole thing, want to pay Tribute to the formation of the NHS and celebrate its success and the fact that Britain has free healthcare (at the point of use) for all of its people.

Yeah... how demonic, satanic and NWO to want to celebrate Literature, Music, Free Healthcare.

Those damn evil Satanic Masons.

Originally posted by LUXUS
I started watching at the point where there were a load of kids obviously recruited from council estates somewhere dancing around a house wearing face paint and texting each other.

Aye well you missed the best part.

This was the first Olympic opening ceremony that I willingly watched , all the way .

It was surprisingly original and creative .

Not everyone will appreciate the sense of humour but that is OK .

I've worn plenty of tin-foil hats in my time, I'm politically acitve and generally been interested in Forteana since the 1970s. Just something I'd get in before "open your eyes!" type reponses as I've not posted here for a long time. Yeah, this is long, sorry.

Whilst this thread is hardly surprising given that it's on a forum dedicated to conspiracies and speculation, what has been genuinely interesting is watching that speculation unfold and seeing why it's unfolded in the ways it has. During the latter half of the thread there's been some 'defending' of the speculation and some talk about 'seeing it through the eyes of the 'informed' AboveTopSecret member'. What I'm actually seeing is the opposite.

Some speculators have had a good 24 hours to start googling some of the Olympic ceremony references and people are going to now start saying "oh, I knew that 'superficial, for the masses reference' too, but I was commenting on the super-secret references that you can only understand with the ATS decoder ring".

The context of these Olympics is that it's being hosted by a place that is pretty much on the ropes. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand this. We've had 30 years worth of politics that's amounted to little more than a 'smash and grab' for a wealthy elite: the political left have been saying this throughout, it's not something that people have been saying post-2008 or whenever. We've had 30 years of politicians desperately trying to punch above the country's weight. The present government are many people's nightmare as, in many ways, they personify and embody everything that's wrong with the political class that's shafted people over the last few decades. As such, Britain is pretty desperate.

The Olympics is about 'showing-off' and making money. It's an opportunity for a political and business class to swap business cards and wait for the money to roll in. That's a fact, not a conspiracy - even the least politically informed person understands this. Also, Britain is not China or America or anywhere else in the world. Arguably, Britain isn't even *Britain* (Britain has massive identity problems going back hundreds of years) and much of what Britain is, and the countries that make up Britain are almost 'mythological' in their elusiveness and intangibility. See the works of Olympic inclusions like Blake, Tolkien, Milton &c.

The Olympic organisers wanted to create something that showed-off Britain to the Olympic watching world. It's not about global harmony or promoting anything else other than Britain. This is no really different than other hosts. China excelled with a spectacle based on organisation and mass co-ordination. That is the public face and the embodiment of China that they wanted to promote. Britain isn't China and shouldn't try to be. It has its own history/histories and its own character. If Britain had tried to promote anything other than it's weird and intense history it would have been selling something that wasn't Britain at all.

There was really interesting symbolism and references going on and there some 'political' points being made but they seem to be lost on here. British history is traditionally a sequence of stories of Kings and Queens so numerous that they have numbers as well as names. It's only the last few decades that a 'people's history', a social history, has been acceptable or even warranted - which is bizarre as the people that really built Britain are the millions that worked farms, mines, foundries and mills who leaving nothing but census returns when it comes to putting their names to history. Not so long ago, a people's history being *the* version of history proffered at the Olympics would have been unthinkable and yet here we are with a story being shown of how a near-mythological rural idyll was pretty much ruined by an Industrial Revolution that made a handful of people very, very rich whilst the rest struggled in misery. This is the reality of the Empire that much of the world is still angry about: rich people making money and the rest get shafted. To many people, even on these boards, seem to talk about how the "English" are brutal oppressors who made vast wealth exploiting the poor from other countries. The reality is that a 'British' elite (as in English, Scots, Welsh and Irish) made a lot of money exploiting the poor from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland even before they plundered anywhere else and even after they stopped plundering everywhere else. An historical fact that many abroad seem to skirt around.

We had an Olympics ceremony that portrayed this and showed in it a fairly brutal form - a significant political and historical point - and yet nary a mention of it here. If anything, I'd say much of this wasn't a message from 'the elite to the elite' at all. On the contrary. Even the Queen's role in much of it was reduced to a James Bond joke and blatant advertisement for the new Bond film, 'Skyfall'. Something else, that's pretty mind-boggling (the most famous member of Royalty in the world reduced to a walk on part in an advert), but I suppose it's a double-bluff to distract us from her reptilian evil doing. And I say that as someone who wants to see an end to the monarchy in his lifetime.

The poem/hymn Jerusalem-related posts were genuinely interesting as a lurker as it seems weird that the only part that people seemed to hear was the line about 'dark, satanic mills'. Some of the interpretations of what Blake wrote in "And did those feet in ancient time" are bewildering. Blake was a man obsessed with Jesus and his role in bridging the divine and the human. Whilst he wasn't an orthodox Christian he was a Christian and was concerned with how technology and even science would impact Christianity. Frankly, if he was still here, he'd go bloody spare at the idea of people interpreting his religious vision as even being associated with 'satan' in the way people are trying to do. Blake was important to the Olympic narrative as people like Blake (and William Morris etc) were massively influential in the how a post-Industrial world would relate to an earlier, bucolic Britain. This was pretty important to what was being shown regarding the *massive* change in this country's landscape etc with the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, with the forging of the Olympic rings from these Victorian foundries, Tolkien's work is often interpreted through a similar lens: Mordor vs the Shires &c. Also, Tolkien was pretty devout in his faith too (just in case people are looking for satan there as well).

The reading here (and elsewhere) of John Milton's inclusion (Pandamonium, Hell, Paradise Lost &c) is pretty strange, considering the basis and context of Milton's work. Again, an incredibly religious man and a Christian: pretty much the antithesis of the satanic.

It's quite obvious that things that weren't apparent or known to people on the night created fertile soil for speculation to spring out of and Googling denotatives for earlier connotatives for a doesn't really count.

The scenes about Great Ormond Street Hospital were obviously pretty lost on a lot of people abroad who don't really appreciate or understand the affection that most people have for the NHS or hospitals like Great Ormond Street. Again, a political point that people seemed to miss whilst looking for rebirth and 2001 references. It took balls for Boyle to include this at a time when the government are destroying the NHS: something that was actually picked-up on by a Tory politician (Jeremy Hunt) who wasn't pleased at the potential to link public anxiety over NHS 'reform' with the Olympics.

People seemed to query the inclusion of Voldemort (a villian from children's literature appearing during a sequence where children in bed are reading bed-time stories), completely skirting round the fact that Rowling's books are some of the biggest and fastest selling books in history. Whilst being no fan of her work, it's hardly surprising that the 'scary villain' gets an inclusion. Similarly, it's hardly surprising that 'good wins the day' in the form of another children's classic: Mary Poppins. As for "but Harry Potter is satanic!" style conspiracies, people might want to read Alan Moore's recent work on Mary Poppins (tl;dr: basically, she's God in another form). So if Voldermort or even Potter is the devil (Moore had him cast as a teenage anti-christ), then any satanic vibe is pretty much undermined by the fact that, in whatever reading of the conspiracy you want to make, good prevails.

As for the giant baby, it's hardly surprising that a baby featured in a segment about a children's hospital and, usually, everyone loves babies, apart from on here of course, where giant babies = evil, probably.

Last part:

Ignorance isn't unique to any one country. I couldn't draw the basic shape of any of America's main rivers, for example. So it's hardly surprising that many, even in Britain, didn't recognise the shape of the Thames - which is arguably the most famous river in Britain (with the Mersey possibly being second). Most people only recognise the shape from the opening credits of EastEnders anyway, which has included the infamous Millenium Dome position alongside the river since its building. The Dome being of course the head of the supposed spermatazoa and the river tail being the tail. If you're not familiar with the Thames, EastEnders or the Millenium Dome, it's understandable you'll see something else.

Mark Twain created a great quote about hammer and nails that fits here. In lieu of some appropriate general knowledge specific to Britain, it's kind of understandable that people use the only things they have to hand. However, to paraphrase the quote attributed to Freud, sometimes an Olympics ceremony is just an Olympics ceremnony.

So, yes, it was weird and unusual but, as I've said already 'that's how Britain rolls'. It wasn't like China's? Why should it have been? It wasn't pitched enough at American audiences expecting a more 'America-friendly' experiences that Americans would get? Again, why should it have been? There's plenty the rest of the world doesn't get about America (or anywhere else) too.

Inb4: weather balloon, shill, n00b, &c.

Can anyone see the big red demonic eyes in the audience (top left) that blink? Pause the video at 4 minutes

On page 2 of this discussion

Originally posted by Elisey
Can anyone see the big red demonic eyes in the audience (top left) that blink? Pause the video at 4 minutes

Do they have to be demonic? Red eyes can signify dozens of things: drunks and hangovers or even tired eyes etc. It's worth pointing out the context of this part of the Olympics is kids falling asleep after reading in bed. A quote from Peter Pan is being read out at this point: "When you play at it by day with the table and chairs, it’s not a bit frightening, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it is real." Tired eyes make sense here - certainly more sense than a demon's eyes.

If I was to speculate, a bit like you're doing, I'd suggest that the eyes are the eyes of the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's works. Its eyes were sometimes the only thing you could see. Makes sense in the context of children's fantasy literature that's happening at that juncture.