On Wednesday the South African Springboks thrashed
the American Eagles in the rugby world cup. I find it odd.
For 21 years South Africa was correctly
denied the right to play sport in the free world because of apartheid, only
being re-admitted in time for the 1992 Olympics. Before that, up to around 1965,
its racially discriminatory policies (that indirectly killed millions in the
Southern African region) were deemed okay by the big world provided First World
business wasn’t compromised. It was only when the global outcry against South
Africa began to make a dent in gold and diamond sales that something was done.
Today the same criteria are at work. The
USA is the biggest terrorist organisation the world has produced in its near 5
billion years of existence - a fact acknowledged, written about and apologised
for by hundreds of thinking Americans (see Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, Noam
Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Daniel Elsberg, Benjamin Barber, Robert Reich, Craig
Roberts, Richard Wolff, Woody Harrelson, John Stockwell, Karen U. Kwiatkowski, Democracy
at Work, the Skeptical Enquirer, Daily Beast, Real News, Jewish Voice for
Peace, Alternative View TV and Rolling Stone, as a start). But the world is not yet listening.
As the recent past in South Africa proves,
the move away from apartheid had nothing whatsoever to do with reforming
society or making South Africa a better place to live. Instead it had all to do
with expanding the Greed Capitalist, Maximise Profit at Whatever Cost strategy
that underpins today’s conflicts. South Africa’s poor are getting poorer, and
the ever shrinking pool of the well-off is hoarding more and more cash.
As in the USA. Its policies actually have
little to do with the States of America or its people, instead it’s the united
conglomeration of big business that is doing the damage, wasting what little
resources are left and destroying the world while the money flows one way. Barrack
Obama has just ‘apologised’ for bombing a hospital in Afghanistan.
‘War is just a racket … It is conducted for
the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses …’ said America’s most
decorated soldier in modern times, Major General Smedley Butler.
'... a few million
people have died in the American holocaust and many more millions have been
condemned to lives of misery and torture as a result of US interventions
extending from China and Greece to Afghanistan and Iraq ... since 1945 the
US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were
democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at
least thirty countries' said William Blum back in the 1990s. They’ve done a lot
more damage since then as the flood of refugees attest.
Is the United States currently that version
of South Africa before ’65, a country with policies that destroy the lives of
millions in the pursuit of maintaining privilege, that the rest of us somehow
forgive? What, I wonder, will it take to make the world shake its head and see
that America is a fascist dictatorship, brutalising the world? Why in the arena of global sports do the American Eagles get to play?
Instead of allowing the US to compete at events such as the Word Cup I say send them home, cancel their passports, and tell them to keep those funny bits of paper they optimistically call the ‘dollar’.
Instead of allowing the US to compete at events such as the Word Cup I say send them home, cancel their passports, and tell them to keep those funny bits of paper they optimistically call the ‘dollar’.
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The 1981 Springbok tour to New
Zealand was marred by protests due to South Africa’s racist Apartheid policies.
Why are the American Eagles allowed to play at the 2015 Rugby World Cup?
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