A Hero Is Gone

The famous chess player Bobby Fischer - world champion in 1972, as a sole American breaking the dominace of the chess players of the Soviet Union - is now dead. Hunted by the American authorities for breaking sanktions on Yugoslavia in 1992 by playing a game of chess there, he finally got refuge in Iceland. He gave up his US citizenship for an Icelandic one and never returned home to America.

Bobby Fischer was regarded as a hero in 1972. It surprises me that he did not get a pardon twenty years later. Once a great hero, should you not always be treated with the respect that a hero deserves? What he did in 1992 could not have been so bad that it erased all the heroic status he had, could it?

It should be noted that I see Bobby Fischer as a hero for defeating competitors from the Soviet Union. This was an important victory against representatives of an evil country. However, I strongly disagree with the opinions that Mr. Fischer expressed on the Holocaust and his defamatory remarks about Jews.