Discrimination
I hate racists, no matter what their colour.
A recent FA DVD called "Pride of the Nation" has been withdrawn after it was noticed that no black players were featured. According to the Guardian:
At last summer's European Championships at least four of Sven Goran Eriksson's first 11 were black, as are some of the leading lights of the past, including Paul Ince, Ian Wright and John Barnes.
There might be a valid claim that Rio Ferdinand was better than Terry Butcher, and Paul Ince is a better player than Steven Gerrard, but we can have that as a football discussion. Is it not inherently racist to react this way:
"The FA is in the process of producing a new DVD which will include several outstanding black players who have of course made a huge contribution to the national team and football in this country."
For me, this makes a mockery of the new "Stand Up Speak Up" campaign against racism in football. (Yes, they're the ones behind black/white wristbands!) If the original panel thought Butcher was better than Rio, leave it as an all-white video. If the guy was a racist, sack him and apologise. Either way, get off the fence.
Jessse Jackson was recently being asked to defend positive discrimination, in the circumstance where an "African-American" student gets a place at Harvard, against an equally equiped Asian student, to fulfill their affirmative action program. His justification, predictively, centred on the past suffering of African American black people and that legislation was necessary to redress the balance.
If this was a moral issue for Jackson, he'd appreciate the hypocrasy of such a point of view. Clearly it mustn't be.
This episode reminded me of a recent visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The scene was set on arrival, as we were rudely marched through an x-ray machine, forced to empty all valuables into a tray, and subjected to a rough prodding/search. Without chance to re-dress we were herded to the cloakroom, experiencing an unexpectedly ironic introduction.
The exhibits were awesome: sections of vandalised Synagogues; collections of shoes; a carriage from a train; corridor walls packed with portraits...
And the education was prominant, with ample information boards and visual documentaries - most of it quite scathing of the feigned ignorance of the Allied countries that refused to admit refugees, and especially critical of America.
As we left, I told Faith how offended i'd been by the museum's intentions - I did not appreciate the thrust of guilt. She defended the intensity by saying that the Jewish people had a moral right to guilt us into not letting this sort of thing ever happening again. Fair enough, but if that was their intention, I think they're failing. Consider the explanations for the advent of Nazism: the rise of a personally persuasive leader (Hitler) who scapegoated minority groups for political gain. The lesson, seemingly, is that as long as there's no more Hitler's, and as long as we're not anti-semetic it won't happen again.
Bollocks. There were fundamental inadequacies in the constitution of Weimar Germany, that facilitated changes to centralise power. Today, most Brits are crying out for a Home Secretary to be more "authoritarian", and most American's criticise Congress for "getting in the way". Anti-semitism is a concept heavily policed (see The Sun) and we're no longer turning away boat loads of Jews. However Australia turned away a boat load of refugees, and immigration is generally seen as a bad thing.
So have we learnt the lesson of the Holocaust? No, we haven't. We still fail to accept the dangers of political power, especially when it panders to a xenophobic nation. We still see genocide because borders are closed (e.g. Sudan), and hostility to welcoming refugees. So I completely agree with Peter Thatchell who exposed the hypocrasy of the Holocaust Memorial service. (see BBC).
"never again, today means not closing our doors to refugees fleeing persecution".
The US Holocaust Memorial is unpleasant, because it loads emotion to guilt and shame non-Jews. It is also self-defeating, for pandering to stereotype and revenge. Instead of fighting racism, it merely deflects it.
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