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Mon, 23 Oct 2006
Militarism in the Football Field (Turkish)
I saw this article quoted from a feminist magazine in Turkey (Amargi) and the prominent Turkish anti-militarist web-site, http://www.savaskarsitlari.org. The author discusses her experience as a woman at the football field (the real one, i.e. soccer) and how it could be viewed as a militarist, anti-feminist activity. I have long had similar observations about institutionalized, commercialized sports. I am noting this issue here because many people on the "progressive left", "libertarian left", "anti-militarist left" (watch the quotes that are deliberately inserted here to point out the ambiguity of the terms) , specially from Cyprus are very much into football teams and what not. For example, many Turkish Cypriots still stop the time when a *Turkish* team plays an important game. What were they doing before the time stopped? They were discussing about Turkey's occupation of north Cyprus! Well. Why so excited about the success of a Turkish team? who knows. Anyway, this is just to irritate some people , heheh heh, the point is about militarism, about chavunism (male or national). Before I put the whole text in Turkish below, let me quote Chomsky: "Sports plays a socieatel role in engendering, jingoist and chavunist attitutes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators." ( http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Noam_Chomsky.html) and from "Understanding Power" quoted at http://terasima.gooside.com/article1sports2spectator.html and http://elliptic.typepad.com/elliptic_blog/2003/12/chomsky_on_spor.html ;
In fact, I have the habit when I'm driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it's striking when you hear the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions...
...And when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It's as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and it they don't have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures...And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow...
Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way -- so what they do is put their minds to other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff...So what's left?
...And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves society in general: it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.
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