This week we turn back to 1978, and another international football tournament legitimating a dictatorship

~ punkacademic ~

So it’s finally here: at the end of this week, the FIFA World Cup™ begins in the United States, a bloated jamboree constructed by Trump’s chief acolyte in the sporting world, the shameless Gianni Infantino. As with Qatar in 2022, questions of boycott are live ones, at least on a personal level – so much so that Barney Ronay felt he had to wheel out a solipsistic defence of his own engagement, which boiled down to ‘you just can’t ignore it!’

Apart from the fact that actually, Barney, you really can, and the real reason you’re not ignoring it is you’re paid to write about football (a more honest defence) – the dilemma is real for many. I don’t get pious about other people’s choices, but I won’t watch a minute of it – just as I didn’t watch a minute of Qatar.

Some will doubt the efficacy or meaning of individual boycotts. The tournament will get a huge audience, it always does. Some random not watching it won’t make any difference to Trump. And those things are definitely true, and I wouldn’t debate them. But the meaning of it still matters, to me at least.

Our anarcho forebears have had to grapple with this too, and in eerily similar circumstances. In 1978 the World Cup was in Argentina which from 1976 on was under the control of a military junta. The ‘Dirty War’ – known as the ‘years of lead’ in Argentina – that the junta pursued against left-wing activists and anyone it perceived as a threat left tens of thousands dead and disappeared, and would continue on to the fall of the dictatorship in the aftermath of the Falklands War.

England didn’t qualify in 1978, which probably made it easier for a significant chunk of Freedom’s readership to ignore it, but Scotland did. Scotland’s campaign famously underwhelmed, but Archie Gemmill’s goal against the Netherlands became an iconic moment that even popped nearly twenty years later in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, worries over dictatorship and exploitation long removed.

Back in 1978, Freedom came at the World Cup from different directions, with a leader article reproduced here discussing the status of political prisoners, whilst later in the paper interviewing the exiled Argentinian anarchist Osvaldo Bayer. A cartoon accompanied the interview, with the caption ‘ARGENTINA 78 – Mundial de Futbol em campo de concentraçāo’ – the World Cup in a concentration camp.

Whilst there are similarities to the current USA World Cup, there are also major differences. The fascist regime which has taken power in the US has injected some steroids into aspects of US imperialism, which would make the junta’s ambitions for the Falkland Islands look pitiful by comparison. The US is now openly murdering civilians in international waters, launching wars on countries that don’t openly subordinate themselves left, right, and centre, starving Cuba of fuel, in addition to murdering political opponents at home and incarcerating minorities and immigrants.

That said, the US hasn’t – yet – specifically killed tens of thousands of political dissidents at home. But in its new counter-terrorism strategy, a completely confected international conspiracy of anarchists, antifascists, trans folks, is set up as a target for American power to strike.

Finally, unlike in 1978 England are in the World Cup and exposed to what comes from it. Over past months the US government has ramped up its fascist rhetoric on the ‘death of the West’ which recycles tropes from fascism and white nationalism that date back as far as the nineteenth century, let alone 4Chan and Reddit. Britain has been in the crosshairs, not least in the aftermath of the tragic murder of Henry Nowak, which has now become a cause celebre for white nationalists including Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, very much against Nowak’s parents’ wishes.

And whilst the UK has an indigenous and visceral anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ movement, it’s also been pumped up by US money and networks. That’s had real consequences for trans folks, who a decade ago might realistically have thought self-ID was about to happen – even under a Tory government – only now to find themselves persecuted and discriminated against following the publication of shameful EHRC ‘guidance’.

For all these reasons, many of us cannot just ‘enjoy the football’. So no, Barney, I’ll give it a swerve, thanks.

—

(From Freedom, vol. 39 no. 11, June 10th 1978)

Don’t cry for…?

IN Northern Ireland the men ‘on the blanket’ fight for the right to be regarded as ‘political prisoners’. In half a hundred countries around the world that is hardly a category that would seem even remotely desirable.

There are today – 33 years after a war for freedom or something more military dictatorships in the world than ever before, nearly all ruled by colonels or gen- erals who never fought any but their own people, nearly all established with the help of democracies (through international conspiracies like the CIA and the equally international arms trade) and maintained by the torture and execution of ‘political prisoners.’

Especially true of South America, there the tradition of the Spanish conquistadores and the Inquisition dies hard. The original search for gold has changed to more mundane cash crops, as greedy traders in the commodity markets of the First World seek to corner the coffee and tin, the rubber and wheat, beef, oil, uranium, or whatever will make them rich – and keep the people poor and humble and subject to an elite which knows better.

The CIA and dollar imperialism have successfully kept the Russians out of South America – which is why Soviet ‘diplomacy’ and militarism is now making such determined efforts to get into Africa – cynically using Cuban ground- troops to provide for Africans an on-going frying pan/fire situation. It was no coincidence that in the same week that General Videla, President of Argentina, was welcoming World Cup visitors to his ‘land of peace and liberty’, a Kremlin spokesman was describing Russia as ‘a just democracy’ as Orlov was led off to begin 12 years of prison and exile.

The anarchist analysis of power, as distinct from phoney scientific jargon about dialectical materialism and historic processes, carries more weight as time goes by. The struggle is, quite simply, the people against every kind of State.