Julio César (Inter Milan), Gomes (Tottenham), Doni (Roma)Maicon (Inter Milan), Daniel Alves (Barcelona), Michel Bastos (Lyon), Gilberto (Cruzeiro) Lúcio (Inter Milan), Juan (Roma), Luisão (Benfica), Thiago Silva (Milan) Felipe Melo (Juventus), Gilberto Silva (Panathinaikos), Elano (Galatasaray), Kaká (Real Madrid), Julio Baptista (Roma),Ramires (Benfica), Kleberson (Flamengo), Josué (Wolfsburg), Luis Fabiano (Sevilla), Nilmar (Villarreal), Grafite (Wolfsburg), Robinho (Santos), Dunga (Bureaucratic Hellscape)
Yeah. We may win, but will definitively not deserve it. Just compare from the midfield forward to Argentina or Spain, and you will understand what I’m talking about.
This is a translation of a post by Maurício Neves in the Flamengonet Blog.
Flamengo will go into the field while Rio mourn her dead. Amidst rubble and tears, Flamengo will go into the field. Public employees, at this moment, work at Maracanã cleaning up for a game that will start in less than 4 hours.
In this moment, there are estimated 200 people missing, and flamengo will go into the field. There are homes at risk, people made homeless, people buried in the rubble. Firefighters dig, roll up the bodies in black tarp, and TV reporter Ana Paula just announces that more victims were found in Niterói.
There no way to think about football, and Flamengo will go into the field arguing that there are no other dates. The Libertadores can stop for the World Cup but it can’t stop in respect to human beings.
Thirty firefighters will be in Maracanã. Thirty firefighters that should have been searching for the missing people, all because the Conmebol, Flamengo and Universidad say that there are no other dates.
What there isn’t anymore is respect and solidarity. This game Flamengo has already lost, even in trash the Chileans 10-nil. And for those that, like me, was used to seeing Flamengo as a club of solidarity, a club that got Pelé to wear its jersey to help people after a tragedy, this is the worse defeat.
” It has been five or six years of Flamengo, in which I had to endure some situations, and in a moment like this, I have to say something. I suffered a lot of injustice in here, unpleasant things, that I wouldn’t even like to mention now. (…) Those people now have to bow down to my work, because the results came, and they came fast.”
These are the words of Jorge Luís Andrade da Silva, the most victorious man in the history of Brazilian tournaments. He is the only person to have ever won six Brasileirões – five as a player, in 1980, 1982, 1983 and 1987 for Flamengo and 1989 for the poor thing and now 2009 as a manager. He is also the first out of very few black coaches to win a Brasileirão, and has a speech impediment that has got him the nickname of Tromba (elephant trunk).
Andrade, always the sportsman, takes the high ground and doesn’t go on detail about the humiliations he had to endure in Flamengo as the as the coach for the Junior teams and then as assistant manager to the main team. But just like our memory serves right to remember the great accomplishments of this man, it should also serves us right to not forget all the shit that it was thrown at him by the same institution that he made great.
His return to Flamengo as part of the club’s staff was marred by the constant humiliation inflicted on him. Andrade recalls that when he and Adílio were incorporated into the staff, one of the Flamengo’s directors complained about the move to the “vulture Flamengo,” a racist snide referent to the original usage of the word vulture as a derogatory term against Flamengo’s fans, associated with Blacks and the poor. Or when he was made stand in the searing heat of Rio’s summer sun for hours as a barrier so the players could train free kicks. Or having a little upstart like Bruno cuss him out in from of the cameras and deride his accomplishments over a perceived bad call in a playful game between the players.
He had his value questioned, he saw his friend Adílio being thrown out of his charge as manager for the junior team without explanation or reason, and took over as interim coach a couple times when the high-salaried prima-donas where sack from the manager’s bench one after the other. He had players that didn’t knew him and his history, and attacked him cowardly and with pettyness, mocking his speech behind his back.
All this he endured. When signing the contract for next year, Andrade tried to get restitution for all in monetary form, asking for a R$ 250,000 monthly salary. He didn’t get it, but I think mainly because there’s no way Flamengo can afford that. He did get a decent package. Maybe not worth what he’s worth, but, Andrade being Andrade, that would be impossible.
Cultural Appropriator, Con Artist and Killer James Arthur Ray
So called self-help guru James Arthur Ray, a millionaire white man from Southern California, held these “Spiritual Warrior” weekend retreats in Sedona, AZ, where he preyed upon the desperation of the middle-classes with promises of “healing” and of awakening a “power within you (regardless of what everyone else does) to create the life you desire and deserve.” His particular mish-mash of New Age mumbo-jumbo and motivational speech became deadly when he appropriated the sweat lodge ritual from First Nations to jack his gullible followers out of U$9,000 a head for the weekend retreat.
As the “Spiritual Warrior” has fled the scene of his crime, Native people are decrying the appropriation of their sacred ceremonies (as they have been for a while now), while most of the media concentrates on the sensational and the irrelevant.
The essential point that is not being raised loudly enough is that was not a Native ceremony. It was a white man playing Indian, messing with things that Medicine People take 4 to 8 years of training to learn, and using it to exploit the fear of the white middle-class of losing its social status.
Because, yes, the whole point of the retreat was to “create wealth in all areas of your life” and “double, triple, even multiply by ten the size of your business.” How transcendent! As with everything else under capitalism, spirituality is measured in monetary value – and the only winner in this equation is James Arthur Ray.
As for 2012 – enough of this bullshit too.
Imagine if someone walked into your house, looked at your calendar ending in Dec. 31st, 2009 and went to your window and start belching that you predicted that the world will end in a couple of months – all the while ignoring you standing there, telling them that that’s just the end of the year. It’s exactly what’s happening with 2012.
All these people talking about 2012 never ever fucking bothered to ask the Maya – the leaving, breathing Maya. Is the continuation of the mentality of extermination of Native cultures – to eliminate them physically or culturally to steal their land and resources; the mentality of Columbus, of the colonizer, of Manifest Destiny.
Worse yet, they throw over themselves the mantle of protectors of Indigenous wisdom, of true believers of Native ways, and if anyone question them, it is the questioner who becomes the one who is trying to destroy Indigenous culture – and only the sage white middle-class weekend “Shamans” that can protect it. So much stolen, so much destroyed and trampled upon, so many perversions of cultural heritage – sweat lodges, dream-catchers, Polynesian-styled “tribal tatoos”, Tiki Bars, Ayahuasca… The list is almost endless.
And it is the same with the “sweat lodge” ceremony – to infer to First Nations the character of mythical creatures or relics from the past, to strip from them their humanity and living history, to try to erase the 500 years of Native struggle for survival in this Continent – from the Mapuche in Chile to the Inuit in Alaska.
To complement they own hallucinations, they throw some bad science behind it. If scientists question their bad science, then again they become the defenders of Native culture. It’s only bad science, folks, and none of this is helping anybody:
While for many this question will elicit a number of responses, but I think the most dangerous one is to define anarchism as Anti-State.
Anarchism is primarily a socialist, communist ideology. As the authors of “Black Flame” strongly argued, It cannot be understood and made sense of without coming from an anti-capitalist, pro-communist perspective. Anti-statism is a feature of anarchism, not the feature that defines it. It is primarily an ideology of class warfare.
Yet every day it seems another weird “strain” of anarchism pops out, another “anarcho-this” or “something-other-anarchist” that has absolutely nothing to do with the liberation of the toiling people, but are mainly forms of bourgeois rebellion, individualistic and superficial.
Luigi Fabbri, in his excellent “bourgeois influences on anarchism”, talks about defining anarchism just as something that is against the status quo, without a coherent social program of what we want to achieve:
The minds of men, especially of the young, thirsting for the mysterious and extraordinary, allow themselves to be easily dragged by the passion for the new toward that which, when coolly examined in the calm which follows initial enthusiasm, is absolutely and definitively repudiated. This fever for new things, this audacious spirit, this zeal for the extraordinary has brought to the anarchist ranks the most exaggeratedly impressionable types, and, at the same time, the most empty-headed and frivolous types-persons who are not repelled by the absurd, but who, on the contrary, engage in it. They are attracted to projects and ideas precisely because they are absurd; and so anarchism comes to be known precisely.for the illogical character and ridiculousness which ignorance and bourgeois calumny have attributed to anarchist doctrines.
White-r Anarchism?
However, a more present and insidious danger has slowly trying to creep its way into anarchism – the far-right. While so-called “anarcho-capitalists” (WTF!) is general seem to steer mostly clear of the same circles as anarchists, another group seems to purposely try to blend in as “just another strain” of anarchists.
When you hear calls for no amnesty for illegal immigrants or praise for the police officers killed by Lovelle Mixon, anarchism is generally the last thing that comes to the mind of an semi-informed person. Yet the two links above are of sites related to supposed “national-anarchists.” While the debate around nationalism within anarchism has a longstading and respectable history – with the majority of anarchists stading clearly in the side of internationalism (actually, I cannot think of a single anarchist that sided against internationalism) – this pseudo “anarchism” is nothing more than thinly veiled white-nationalism.
Aided by post-leftist claims of being “neither left nor right”, third-positionists are trying to worm their way into anarchist circles, infiltrate it and corrupt it. They compare right-wing anti-statism (the fear of big government stifling capitalist entrepreneurship) to anarchist anti-statism (the position that the State is a tool of the capitalist class and an enforcer of hierarchy in behalf of this class). Their aburdist ideology is in every way the enemy of anarchism, yet they feel safe to claim anarchism as their own.
How can someone to claim to be anti-state repression justify praising police officers, or systematic state crackdown on a group of people? It is not possible, and it shows that even their veneer of “anti-authoritarianism” is nothing more than a ruse. They are fascists, pure and simple. they have nothing but a coward’s pride.
“Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.”
What part of this is not true? Was the “War of Liberation” of Israel a National Liberation struggle from Palestinian oppression? No. The modern State of Israel was founded by Britain and funded by the U.S. in a effort to deal with what the time they called “The Jewish Question.” They were trying to get rid of Jews, but crass antisemitism was passé after Hitler. Leave the palestinians to handle it.
Ahmadinejad is not the nicest person in the world, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is a repressive, reactionary regime. So are Israel and the United States – the difference is a measure of levels.The systemic killing and destruction of the livelyhood of the people of Palestine is one of the major humanitarian crisis of the century and the past century, and nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify the actions of the State of Israel against the civilians in Palestine.
Ahmadinejad ate up the right wing Zionist bullcrap that the Holocaust is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the horrors committed by the State of Israel against Palestine. The Holocaust was not the doing of Palestine – why should Palestine suffer for the actions of another. Why was the “international community” that watched passively while Romany, Jews, Communists and queer people were massacred in the concentration camps never held accountable for their inaction? Had Hitler kept his expansionist dreams under reign, the Jewish population surviving in Germany would have been nil. The “final solution” was not the cause of the involvement in the war – political and economic interests were.
So Mahmoud comes out and says the Holocaust might not have happened – crass, stupid and typical of a populist megalomaniac. Yet credit should be given were credit is due – what he said about the State of Israel is right on.
P.S. – The difference between Holocaust denial and denial of Jenin? A matter of scales.
This is one of the first things I wanted to talk about, and that is why the idea of the blog came around.
FUCK ZENIT!
Actually, fuck the whole bunch of them, all those Russian and Eastern European new fascists, from Zenit to the New Bolshevik party. Yes, y’all had something that called itself communism and it sucked. Now capitalism fucking sucks. Question is, what black and brown people had to do with it? That was your own shit, clean it up yourselves.
For those unfamiliar with Zenith and why I’m so angry with them, I little recap. During the UEFA cup earlier this year, Zenit was almost disqualified when, during a game against the Olypique de Marseille, their fans started shouting racist insults to the black player of the Marseille. Also, I’m pretty sure the asshole up in the picture was on that game too. Later on, Dick Advocaat, the dutch coach of Zenit, was quoted saying: “I would like to hire anybody, but the fans don’t like black people.” The repercussion was very bad on Advocaat, but he was only stating the facts.
With poverty running rampant in the Third World and Neo-liberalism making everything a commodity that can be purchased and sold, many countries have considerably heightened a new export: people. While the export and import of labor is not a new phenomenon under capitalism, the heights which it has grown it stupendous.
As far as soccer, about 8,000 people leave Brazil a year to became players in another countries. We hear about the Ronaldinhos and Patos but we don’t hear about the mass of players that every year leave their home country, some of them as young as 12, 13 years old, to play in places like Greeland, Qatar and Russia. We barely hear about what these people go through, like the Brazilian player in Russia that had to endure people spitting on him in the street and being refused service in many restaurants (I’ll tell that too, it wasn’t because of bad performance).
Soccer is major business. But is also a major popular passion. We cannot stand as it becomes a vehicle for the Right to inflame racial hatred and conservatism.
” It has been five or six years of Flamengo, in which I had to endure some situations, and in a moment like this, I have to say something. I suffered a lot of injustice in here, unpleasant things, that I wouldn’t even like to mention now. (…) Those people now have to bow down to my work, because the results came, and they came fast.”
What is Anarchism?
“Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.”
