A specter now haunts the London Olympics: that of public indifference, bought at the cost of billions that future generations will struggle to repay.

My mother saw Hitler in the stadium during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was the only fragment of memory of her childhood in Nazi Germany that she ever spoke of and, perhaps illogically, it did not predispose me favorably to the Olympic spectacle.

The opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics reminded me of an observation of the Marquis de Custine, the young aristocrat whose father and grandfather were guillotined during the French Revolution. De Custine went to Russia in 1839 in search of the virtues of hereditary autocracy and returned a convinced democrat. Tyrannies, he said, demand immense sacrifices of their people to produce trifles.

It does not follow, of course, that if tyrannies produce trifles, trifles—and the opening ceremony was undoubtedly one—are necessarily the product of tyrannies. But the ceremony, postmodern as it might have been in form—assuming, as it did, that the contemporary mind is like that of a child, in constant need of swiftly changing amusement—was not free of ideological content, even if that content was comparatively restrained and benign compared with that of, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. It was more akin to North Korea lite.

Of course it was impressive, as anything staged on a sufficiently large scale and well-organized is impressive. The fear of almost all Britons, amounting virtually to an expectation, that the games would at once descend into chaos was not fulfilled.

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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.