Kaepernick puts the right kind of politics into sport

Ask an American sports fan why the US national anthem is played before every single sporting event, and you will not receive a satisfactory answer. The truth is, no one knows. "That's just what we've always done" is about the best you can hope for. "Is it in case you forget which country you're living in?" I always ask. In case all those US flags that top so many buildings and that are displayed on so many suburban streets disappear overnight and you suddenly can't remember where you are? Nepal? El Salvador? England, for God's sake?

Heaven help you if you fail to join the overwhelming majority in standing up for it. I've tried, and have been - on the worst nights - cursed at and stared at with naked aggression. 

Daring not to stand for the SSB (note: this image
 on Facebook posted by a white US woman in Texas
 complaining the woman pictured had "zero respect"
 caused a furore on social media earlier this summer)

In the end, getting older, I capitulated and started to stand up with everyone else. Many US sports fans I know reluctantly do the same because it's just not worth the hassle. No one wants to spend a night at a sports event feeling like they're about to be confronted by a Bud-fuelled, raging redneck. It's not like there's going to be a debate. Ask an irrationally patriotic American why they play The Star-Spangled Banner and he or she will ask you back why you don't go and live in another country. That sophisticated discourse hasn't changed for decades.

The brave decision of San Francisco 49ers quarter-back Colin Kaepernick not to stand for this tedious ritual on political grounds is the best thing to happen in the National Football League since Ben Fountain's flag-challenging novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. That excellent work of fiction lays bare the empty ceremonies that NFL teams stage for marketing reasons to honour members of the armed forces. They are tokenistic, borderline insulting calls for fans to mindlessly cheer at fighter jet flyovers and reluctantly waving service members forced to smile politely when the kind of citizen who would vote for war but never venture close to a battle field blandly thanks them "for your service".

Kaepernick's absolutely reasonable justification is that he won't honour the anthem of a country which defies its own constitution by failing to treat black citizens as equals. You'd think that in a democracy, this statement from a high-profile athlete would be the starting point for a civil discussion of a pertinent truth. A section of the conservative white US citizenry is, however, still so threatened by the idea of equality, especially for those it's been oppressing for centuries, that the reaction is dominated by shrill accusations of treachery that barrel towards a single conclusion - patriotism is deaf and blind. It has to be, otherwise it can not bear the scrutiny of calm analysis that would expose it as a sham and a pernicious means of barking down dissent.

Novel approach to patriotism - Ben
 Fountain's brilliant novel.

What does this have to do with the 2018 and 2022 World Cups? Only that big-time, big-money sport wants politics to be a one-way street. It secures the advantages of political association when it's a simple matter of waving flags, playing anthems, and paying tributes to member of the armed forces - living, dead or just surviving. As at Rio 16, it will field a team of refugees as proof of its humanity, while ignoring the simultaneous state murder of poor people, including numerous children, in favelas just down the road. Because when a difficult political debate rears its head, sport stands back and claims to have no position, no authority, no interest. Sport and politics shouldn't mix, administrators and figure-heads explain with a straight face. Except that they do, every day, all the time. 

European qualifying games for Russia 2018 begin this weekend. Russian armed forces are currently amassing on the eastern Ukrainian border, threatening to invade. Russian armed forces are currently bombing Syrian civilians in a heinous alliance with the war criminal and dictator, President Bashar al-Assad. Maybe they'll be back in time for a flyover at the opening ceremony to showcase the power of the state. Fans can stand and applaud at their awesome might and noise. Why? That's just what we always do, just like we always stand for the anthem, and even sometimes sing along. Why, though? Why? 

When trying to answer that question we must spare some mighty applause for Colin Kaepernick, for his dignified protest while putting the right kind of politics into sport. And also ask: how will Fifa stage a global sporting event in a country which in 2018 may still be heavily involved in two wars, maybe more? And will fans and players remain politically, patriotically deaf and blind so that they can participate too? 

The triumph of Olympic values in China and Brazil

The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, believed that physical education was a key factor to moral education. The three pillars of Olympian idealism are said to be Excellence, Friendship and Respect. It was reassuring to read in the newspapers this morning how hosting recent Olympics has helped these values become entrenched in China (2008) and Brazil (2016) respectively.

All these values are now widely instilled in Brazil
and China thanks to hosting the Olympics

In Hong Kong, which reverted from British dependency to Chinese rule in 1997 (Margaret Thatcher's name is about as popular in HK as it is in northern England), there's a new push for independence among young people who are experiencing first hand the Chinese government's broken promise of 50 years of autonomy. In 1997, the Chinese pledged: "One country, two systems." It turns out that they lied.

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Leung Chung Ying, widely presumed to be a Communist Party stooge, has enriched himself on the territory's property market. The umbrella movement that demonstrated for free elections two years ago has been ignored. Peking is interfering in university appointments, and the independent anti-corruption commission. Critical journalists have been fired, independent newspapers bought up by Chinese concerns, and five Hong Kong publishers were kidnapped by Chinese security services, one of them on Hong Kong territory.

Excellence (in skulduggery). Friendship (be our friend or we'll shut you up). Respect (for totalitarian law, or we'll shut you down).

In Brazil, a parliamentary coup (61 votes out of 81 in the Senate) has confirmed the ouster of democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff (54 million votes in 2014). She has been usurped by the conservative right-winger Michel Temer (no votes in 2016) on the grounds that she allegedly fiddled with the figures to beautify the nation's budget deficit. Rousseff claims she was continuing a practice already put into place by her predecessors (Note: imagine how easy it would have been to cut $12 billion from the budget deficit by not staging the Olympics...)

The Rio correspondent of the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung describes the use of the statutes in the Brazilian constitution to justify Rousseff's removal as "highly controversial from a legal standpoint". 

Excellence (in flouting democracy). Friendship (with political rivals to overthrow a democratically elected leader in a dubious grab for power). Respect (for no one, least of all our own constitution). Olympic values triumph again!

Quote of the day: Mutko is a happy man

"This was a very important day for us. I would like to congratulate all the athletes and sports fans."

The joys of sport in a time of war

Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko was content on Monday with the latest haul of Russian medals at the Rio Olympics, despite it being "a pity that we will have no track and field athletes" (though he doesn't mention why). In the meantime, the political exploitation of every triumph in windsurfing, gymnastics and Greco-Roma wrestling will have to do. It's enough to distract you from the latest Human Rights Watch report on the Russian use of internationally outlawed incendiary weapons against the civilian population of Syria. 

“The Syrian government and Russia should immediately stop attacking civilian areas with incendiary weapons,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. “These weapons inflict horrible injuries and excruciating pain, so all countries should condemn their use in civilian areas.”

European qualifying games for the 2018 World Cup in Russia start next month. Please do not indirectly endorse the Russian government by watching any of the coming matches.

Book Review: Brazil's Dance With the Devil by Dave Zirin

Essential reading matter
 for the next fortnight.

Brazil's Dance With the Devil - updated Olympic edition, by Dave Zirin (Haymarket Books, 2016)

I always prepare for a major international sporting event with some appropriately cheery reading matter. Dave Zirin's examination of Brazil's back-to-back hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics have helped me reach the perfect conclusion - that we should all spend the next two weeks doing something better with our time than watching the drug-fixed, pseudo-harmonious sham that the quadrennial sporting fest has been ever since the 1936 Games were staged in Berlin.

Zirin precedes his book with a quote from the Brazilian footballer Socrates: "Victory is secondary. What matters is joy." Socrates was a free-spirited democratic socialist, and unfortunately these are few and far between in either sport or politics. The author also quotes George Orwell's famous essay 'The Sporting Spirit', in which Orwell professes his amazement that some people believe that "sport creates goodwill between the nations". He adds that "as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage instincts are aroused."

That depends to some extent on how much a government is invested in the success of its athletes for propaganda purposes. In the case of Russia, looking ahead to an embarrassingly low medals haul at the 2014 Winter Olympics, it decided instead to cheat, on a breathtakingly mass scale. It left the "savage instincts" until five days after that lamentable, egregiously expensive tournament was safely over, demonstrating its spirit of international unity and goodwill by annexing the Crimea region of Ukraine.

Brazil, as Zirin demonstrates, is a quite different case. It's less focused on flag-waving and medals and more on presenting a positive image of itself to the outside world. That means playing up the joy cited by Socrates, a virtue traditionally associated with Carnival, a particularly crowd-pleasing style of soccer, and the kind of jubilant public scenes that some years back greeted the awarding of the 2016 games to Rio de Janeiro.

Zirin travels to Brazil and talks to the people affected about what this really meant once the initial excitement gave way to hard sums, and the realisation that the physical presence of the city's favelas were an obstacle to the official concept of how the government wanted Rio 2016 to look. The author does a good job of tracing the history of the favelas and how they came to be in the first place - the county's land-hogging oligarchs made no provision to house the mainly illiterate labourers that flocked to the cities after the abolition of slavery towards the end of the nineteenth century. So the workers built their own houses wherever they could.

"The favelas are perhaps best known, and most notoriously, for their history of poverty and violence," writes Zirin, "mostly in the minds of those who have never set foot inside these communities." As he discovers, the favelas are much more community than slum, and though he stresses that the poverty and drug violence are very real problems, the sense of co-operation, openness and a collective civic society are much more prevalent than in the middle class housing units of either Brazil or, say, the US.

Favelas, though, don't look good to tourists, and so the city of Rio and the Brazilian government have been bulldozing those within plain sight, displacing residents who have lived there for decades, and opening the way for property interests. "The real-estate and construction magnates' dream of totally removing the favelas from Rio cannot be disconnected from the goals of hosting the Olympics and the World Cup," Zirin notes. "A full scale effort by the city to rebrand itself as a global city."

So Fifa and the IOC come to town, and the poor get shafted in every way - the money that might have been spent educating them, treating them, or re-housing them close to the communities where they have always lived is instead spent on stadiums and facilities that will, in many cases, be used for less than a month, or under-used and costly to maintain for several years to come. Sure, there's new infrastructure (like a cable car through Providencia favela that will mainly be used by tourists, or an improved access road to the airport), but isn't that the government's job anyway?

Meanwhile, in the name of 'security', the police and military are then bolstered to monitor those with the temerity to protest, and to tear-gas them or shoot them with rubber bullets if things seem to be getting out of hand. The security excuse can also be used to indiscriminately shoot dead hundreds of chiefly young black men in the favelas on the grounds of controlling the drug trade.

If Socrates had lived to see the current anger of the urban working class at the waste of $12 billion for Rio 2016, he might have said, "Victory is secondary. What matters is housing, health and education. Then we can have joy." Still, enjoy the Olympics. Alternatively, read this timely and necessary book.

World Press Freedom Rankings 2016 - Qatar 117th, Russia 148th

The 2016 World Press Freedom Index makes for sober reading ahead of the next two World Cups. Russia is ranked 148th, while Qatar takes the coveted 117th. slot. In both countries it requires almighty amounts of courage for independent journalists or news organisations to report critically, truthfully and accurately on the activities of the ruling autocrats.

While Russia climbed four places from 152nd in 2015 (Yay!), its overall score on press freedom declined further. In other words, its ranking improvement only came about because press freedom in other countries became even more restricted. Like when a team loses 5-0 but jumps up a place in the league table because the team above it lost 7-0. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which compiled the index, assessed the situation in Russia as follows:

"What with draconian laws and website blocking, the pressure on independent media has grown steadily since Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012. Leading independent news outlets have either been brought under control or throttled out of existence. While TV channels continue to inundate viewers with propaganda, the climate has become very oppressive for those who question the new patriotic and neo-conservative discourse or just try to maintain quality journalism. The leading human rights NGOs have been declared 'foreign agents'."

In Qatar, where freedom of speech enjoys as much tradition as daffodils in the desert, the RSF summation was just as cheery:

"Qatar’s outspoken TV channel, Al-Jazeera, has transformed the media landscape in the rest of the Arab world but ignores what happens in Qatar itself. Journalists in this small emirate are left little leeway by the oppressive legislative arsenal and the draconian system of censorship. The same subjects (the government, royal family and Islam) are off limits as in the rest of the Persian Gulf, and violators risk imprisonment. A cyber-crime law adopted in late 2014 imposed additional restrictions on journalists and criminalized posting 'false news' online."

It's little wonder Fifa ended up selecting these two countries as host nations for the World Cup. The attitude of the Russian and Qatari ruling elites towards freedom of speech mirrors the suspicion that football's governing body has always harboured to any writer asking awkward questions about its secretive ways, or uncovering uncomfortable truths about its inherent, rancid corruption. Fifa 'reforms' will aim to improve the body's image, but not its transparency.

Unfortunately for Fifa, even a muzzled media doesn't guarantee a passive host nation. Brazil's ranking of 104 in the Press Freedom Index is nothing to boast about either, but you can't hide the truth when exorbitant new stadiums pock the landscape where residents once lived, and a $12 billion price tag makes a mockery of widespread poverty and under-funded public services during a recession. Today, Brazilian police have been dispersing anti-Olympic protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas.

The protesters have been impeding the process of the Olympic Torch, that beacon of international peace, co-operation and solidarity that is currently requiring state-ordered violence to clear the way. It seems that the Brazilian women team's 3-0 win over China in their opening football match wasn't enough to assuage the population's anger. Let the Games begin!  

Boycott the Rio Olympics - it's the very least you can do

A reader's letter in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung is short and to the point with regard to this coming fortnight's Olympics in Rio: "There is someone who can undertake action against doping: us. Only when we refuse to watch this now risible event will something change. Because nobody's forcing us to watch" (Martin Schüller, Cologne).

Olympics - sick and limp

Last night the French/German public broadcaster arte screened a documentary about the labour conditions of Nepalese workers in the Gulf States, with a particular emphasis on Qatar. The film painted the same depressing picture as previous media and Amnesty International investigative reports. Working conditions, accommodation, quality of life and wages for most of the estimated 1.7 million south-east Asian workers in Doha are lousy, while passports are still being confiscated to prevent workers from leaving the country or switching employers. "The world is doing business with a slave state," said Sharan Burrow, the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

How can sports fans settle down in their armchairs to watch sporting events like these, knowing what we know? It seems there's no case to be made against boycotting these events, because it's increasingly harder to find any reasons to justify watching them at all.

If you were at a party and the barman collapsed and died because he'd been working a 12-hour shift and had had nothing to eat or drink, would you merrily keep drinking and dancing after the body was dragged away and a new barman stepped in to replace the deceased worker? Would you bother buying a lottery ticket if you knew that Vladimir Putin, or one of his associates, had already been given the winning numbers in advance?

It's easy to see why the vast majority of sports fans will watch the Olympics, and the next two World Cups as well. All week there have been quotes out of Rio from journalists, athletes and officials about how they just want the flame lit, and the games to start. The International Olympic Committee's decision not to ban Russia, its unconscionable exclusion of Russian whistle-blower Julia Stepanowa, the crappy living conditions in the barely finished Olympic village, and reports of the dangerously polluted waters for the forthcoming aqua events have all made for heavy reading. Let's have some running and throwing instead!

Who among us wouldn't rather watch a competitive (if ultimately meaningless) race between several of the world's strongest, fastest humans than the latest news of cronyism, corruption and dubious alliances at the top level of international sports administration? Because if supple, sinewy athletes are running round the track while flag-waving spectators cheer from the stands, then everything must be alright now. Right?

Still, I agree with Mr. Schüller of Cologne, and you can add the favela clearances and displaced Rio residents as another reason, as well as thousands of extrajudicial killings , not to mention the monstrous waste of state money that millions of Brazilians would rather have seen spent meeting their basic needs. We should all opt to switch off Rio 2016 for the next two weeks. It's literally the very least that we can do.