The 2012 Olympiad, which opens in London on Friday, will doubtless witness another astonishing exhibition of sporting endurance and excellence. It will also see yet another outburst of utter drivel from its organizers about what the Games themselves can achieve for the human spirit. Enjoy the former by all means; abjure the latter at all costs.

"The longest national Olympic torch relay in history will create a spirit of community and world citizenship," claimed the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, in 2009, adding this year that, "Through the Olympic spirit, we can instill brotherhood, respect, fair play, gender equality and even combat doping." Like every IOC president, he is repeating the view of the modern Games' inventor, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1892 stated that the Olympic ideal represented, "The true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced the cause of peace will have received a new and strong ally."

For all that the IOC trots out these platitudes, the fact remains that if anything it has caused more international bitterness and resentment than it has calmed. Far from finding "a new and strong ally" in the Games, the cause of world peace has been betrayed by the IOC time and again.

Although the IOC cannot be blamed for choosing Berlin for the site of the 1936 Olympics in 1931 (since Adolf Hitler did not come to power until 1933), its decision not to move the Games after the Nazi takeover hardly cultivated peace and harmony. No fewer than 114 anti-Semitic laws had already been promulgated by 1936, yet the chairman of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, vigorously opposed moving or boycotting the Games.

The first meeting of the International Olympic Committee, organized for the 1896 Olympic Games. From left to right: Willabald Gebhardt of Germany, Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, Jiri Guth of Bohemia, President Dimitros Vikelas of Greece, Ferenc Kemey of Hungary, Aleksei Butovksy of Russia, and Viktor Balck of Sweden. Corbis

Brundage argued that since only 12 Jews had ever represented Germany in the Olympics, the Nazis could not be blamed if none did in 1936. Controversy still rages over whether Brundage was involved in the decision to stop the two Jews on the U.S. track team, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman, from running in the 4 x 100-meter relay race.

What is undoubted is that Brundage, later the IOC president between 1952 and 1972, oversaw the gross undermining of the amateur ideal by allowing the Communist bloc countries to give overt state support to their athletes—employing them, for example, as policemen who never had to do any police work. It was also he who stated after 11 Israeli Olympians were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at Munich in 1972 that "the Games must go on," allowing only one day of mourning. (This year the IOC compounded the insult by refusing to recognize the 40th anniversary of those terrible events in any ceremonial way.)

Yet at least Brundage was not an actual member of a fascist party, as was the Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch, who presided over the IOC from 1980 to 2001. Despite there being photographs of Samaranch in fascist uniform giving the fascist salute at a ceremony mourning fascist "martyrs" in 1956—and others of him giving the fascist salute in Barcelona as late as 1974, when he was an IOC vice president—the IOC still elected him its president in 1980.

Add to this the IOC's willingness to award the 1980 Olympics to Moscow despite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2008 Olympics to Beijing despite its gross human rights abuses and subjugation of Tibet, and you have an organization that is happy to allow any totalitarian power to showcase itself, burnishing its image in the best possible light for the world's media. Whatever else it may be, this is not promotion of "a spirit of community and world leadership," as Mr. Rogge, successor to Brundage and Samaranch, today tries to claim.

Despite all the evidence of the effect of international sport on encouraging hypernationalism, the IOC keeps holding expensive and worthless annual forums where delegates mouth meaningless guff about how if the two Koreas can march into the Olympic stadium under the same flag—as happened in 2000 and 2004—or India can play Pakistan at cricket, then the world would appreciate what the IOC calls "the power of sport as a tool for peace."

Yet today the Koreas are as far apart as ever, as are India and Pakistan. And neither have the IOC's much-vaunted "sports partnerships" with Congo, Liberia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic or Somalia "served as starting points for development," as was promised. The Olympic Games are a fabulous occasion for seeing who can jump and throw the farthest and run and swim the fastest. In that nothing can equal them. When they claim to be anything more than that, they swiftly veer into utter cant.

Mr. Roberts, a historian, is author most recently of "The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War" (Harper, 2011).