Knowing that everything has a price is a knowledge that comes with maturity.
When a kid sticks a metal rod into an electrical socket, he doesn’t know the shock until he suffers it, and then he learns the cost of action. For me health is a state of general and temporary balance between forces in conflict. Example: if due to an accumulated negative emotion, a genetic deficiency, an external attack, or the simple inability to regenerate, an organ starts to contribute less to the common good, it will overload its peer organ or others that are forced to compensate, generating becomes the imbalance we call disease (or old age). Anyone who consumes too much alcohol knows, or should know, that it afflicts the liver, forcing it to work extra hard to process the poison, the alcohol, in order to make it assimilable by the body. You’ve certainly experienced a hangover, you know the consequences so you agree with the cost. If liver failure occurs in the long term due to abuse, it is difficult to claim ignorance; let’s be honest, this person chose to be unconscious, so he implicitly accepted to pay whatever the price.
A few days ago Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, rebelled against critics of Qatar’s choice to host the World Cup, stating that “what is happening is profoundly unfair; After what we’ve done for the last three thousand years, we Europeans should apologize for the next three thousand years before we start lecturing anyone. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel like a migrant worker… I feel everything at the same time”. I’m not even going to comment on this bizarre thing that distorts reality to its interests, eventually the same as the so-called critics do, and ends up being as paternalistic as it is incendiary since it mixes a few dusts of facts with many convictions and exacerbated emotions. Forget the verbiage, it’s there to divert the attention of the people, what interests me is the essence and it boils down to this: Infantino is justifying the cost of the choice. Taking the drink analogy, by attributing the organization to Qatar someone before him enjoyed the pleasure of alcohol (influence peddling), now to keep the face of the organization Infantino deals with cirrhosis. In the background he says “ahhh shut up you hypocrites, have you complained before? No? So now shut up!” It’s the law of compensation, one hand washes the other “I failed but you also failed, so you don’t have more morals than me”. In the midst of all this, a lucid comment from a man of football, the German coach of Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp, appeared: “you in the press at the time did not write any article that showed that this could be critical, but the circumstances were clear, and we are the culprits. It’s not good for the players and we all let that happen. When 12 years ago it was decided that the World Cup would be held in Qatar, nobody did anything, now we can’t make any changes either. Attention, there are wonderful people there, not everything is bad but the way things happened wasn’t right, now let the players play. We all allowed this to happen, you more than I, but we all did. At the time it was already clear what was going to happen, people said ‘it’s difficult to build stadiums in Qatar because you have to do it in the summer and it’s 50 degrees’. That’s not good for human beings, in fact it’s impossible, and nobody thought about it, I don’t think anybody even talked about it at the time.” Klopp takes his share of the blame (very relative, by the way) showing that he is both an intelligent and mature man. FIFA has a different attitude, of course. Yet another feeling compelled to defend the indefensible, Brian Swanson, FIFA communication director and openly gay, said: “I have read a lot of criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community about the World Cup in Qatar. But I want to say here, in public, that as a gay man, I feel comfortable here, I feel welcome.” Words for what? It’s the same principle that, taken to an extreme, produced Nazi defendants at Nuremberg justifying atrocities with “What could I do but look away? If I didn’t obey I would be the victim”…
Human rights are a flag of the West, beautiful by the way, but when you cross in front of another flag of the West, capitalism, it usually fades. We have already seen that everything has a price, and for the right price the flag of human rights is rolled up in a drawer or at least not waved. The flag that in the decision of this World Cup 12 years ago was unfurled now. Is it because there is more awareness? Yes, but let’s not be naive: just as the governments of the great western powers rub it in the faces of their enemies, the human rights banner has served to exert pressure; together with “democracy” they are the only moral advantages that the West has since in the concert of nations the convictions represented by religions all have equal rights. That is why human rights are so important to Western powers, they are their ethical weapon, more powerful than any other of the enemy.
Meanwhile, the ball is already rolling in the stadiums and right after opening, Qatar set a new mark: never has a host country lost the opening game. It will not exactly be a novelty, paraphrasing Klopp “it was clear what was going to happen”. And what happened? Well, what happened is that the kid has no talent for football yet rich dad bought the school just so the coach could play him. Doesn’t mean I’ll ever play well, it means that if others want to play football they have to take the kid. And look, things are getting better now… Here’s the story: 1982 World Cup, game between Kuwait and France, in the 87th minute France increases the score to 4-1. The Kuwaiti players surrounded the Soviet referee complaining of an alleged offside. When everything looked like a typical situation of discord, the unusual happened. Dissatisfied with the judge’s decision, the Kuwaiti sheikh ordered his players to leave the field, went down to the pitch accompanied by dozens of Kuwaiti soldiers, claiming that his players heard a whistle and that was why they stopped pressing, so the goal should have been scored. annulled. After all the fuss and confusion generated by a perfectly legal goal, even taking into account the initial decision, the referee decided to disallow the goal for fear of his life. Once the decision was communicated, the sheikh and his entourage returned to the tribune and the game resumed with the French astonished and unresponsive to what had happened. Respect is very beautiful, man! Whoever organizes the World Cup skips the qualifying phase and then in the group stage is seeded. Qatar is one of the weakest teams in the ranking, they haven’t played a single serious game, they’ve never been to any World Cup before and, I know this media is full of clichés such as “in football, anything is possible”, but there are no signs that it will ever be possible to be in another World Cup… unless you buy it. In sporting terms, the Qatari team is paying the price for the ambition of its directors. Man, there are no miracles, they want to be present in an elite competition with a team just four places above Burkina Faso in the FIFA ranking, they risk embarrassing results, and it’s just not a shame because in countless aspects of this World Cup nobody seems to screen.
*Musician and ambassador of PLATAFORMA
