Let Them Eat Dog.

Let Them Eat Dog: The Spectacular Hypocrisy of the Anti-Yulin Movement.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” said the great princess. And how contemptibly naïve she was. For those words would hasten forth the ringing of the death knell for the French monarchy.  L’Autrichienne had issued a statement so trite, so appallingly unaware, so out-of-touch with popular opinion in France that the people, the French people, normally so calm and considered and averse to the idea of strikes and demonstrations, had no choice but to revolt.

The mass ‘anti-brioche’ movement had been born, and, with overwhelming verve and vigour, the people signed en-masse a petition condemning such cruelty to Vienoissaries, and calling on the government to ban such a gross demonstration of culinary immorality.  

There followed a revolution, during which sense and decency was restored. Brioche was allowed to live a long and happy life, bread was restored as the basic ingredient in the national diet, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Except that it isn’t.

For one, the great princess to whom Rousseau attributes that memorable phrase was almost certainly not Marie Antoinette. But that is a minor quibble. No, the most important fact of the matter is that the first iteration of the French Revolution was not a popular reaction to the Dauphine’s goute immorale but a protest against the appalling conditions faced by the French citizenry; conditions that, incidentally, had forced many to resort to far more desperate acts and means than being cruel to man’s best friend. 

The anti-Yulin protest is as inaccurate as the above parody. The Yulin dog-meat festival, a ‘tradition’ that has been celebrated in the Guangxi city of the same name since the mid-‘90s and that received State approval in 2009, might appear to be an expression of particularly poor taste. But, as is so often the case, those campaigning against it are disinclined to explore beneath the surface of the issue. I contend that the festival, and the uncountable equivalents which will escape condemnation by avoiding the attention of viral-moralists, is caused by human suffering. I contend that those who truly wish to see an end to expressions and exercises of barbarous cruelty would better serve their mission by focussing not on one trivial example of it but on that which causes such things to be popular.  

Friends and colleagues have been inclined to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by signatories to Change.org and other petitions; those who will lambast the Chinese government for allowing such a festival to occur before settling down in front of the television with a burger made of the less-appetizing remains of a tortured pig or cow or chicken. They are correct to do so. And, as someone who unashamedly salivates over the prospect of a good sausage, I could hardly claim to be bastion of coherent morals if I were myself to have signed the petition. 

But my objection to it, and the particular hypocrisy which I have found most galling, is different. And I should request here, now that I find myself just past the outset, that the reader does not mistake this as a piece by one in favour of battering Chihuahuas to death with sticks and stones. (I am not. Not least because, if the purpose of this capital punishment were that the executioners should be able to devour the carcass, it would be more efficient – it would produce a higher yield - to find and kill a real rat.) Rather, the objection contained herein is to a moral theory that places fluff and paws and cuteness above the rights and liberties of nasty, carnivorous human beings. 

It’s inconvenient, isn’t it? The Chinese… no, the human race in its entirety is not particularly attractive. We’re not fluffy and cuddly. Our noses are often protrusions of unappealing dimensions. Our faces so often lack the features necessary to redeem their lack of symmetry. Our ears are dull, we have hands and not paws, we lack tails, and we are obese and bipedal. And we kill and maim and butcher each other every single day. It’s hard to care, isn’t it? Human suffering produces human apathy. It’s an unpleasant truth, but a truth nonetheless.

But it is worth remembering that China contains perhaps the largest population of disenfranchised people on the planet. Its state, its Party, suppresses dissent with violence and oppresses its people with means that (and clichés are occasionally necessary) can only be described as Orwellian. It brutalizes its ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, where it is deemed necessary in order to assuage the Han majority. It is slowly but inexorably bringing its overseas territories and provinces, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, under the complete control of the mainland, against the wishes of their peoples. This is but one facet of a resurgent, aggressive nationalism that is expressed elsewhere in the form of dangerous and flagrantly illegal irredentism, as demonstrated by the hard line and tough stance taken by The Party in its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands, and with territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

The Party, in an exercise in newspeak reminiscent of Airstrip One, counters claims made about its almost total lack of respect of human rights by international observers, not least those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, by saying that it adopts a different definition of the same. The Party defines human rights in relation to the Four Cardinal Principles, which are: 

1. We must keep to the socialist road.
2. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party.
4. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

More recently The Party has expanded its definition. Human rights in China are now considered in relation to its ‘national culture’ and its level of economic growth. (George Osborne would doubtless approve.)

So it is quite proper, says the Party, that China be allowed to execute people (more than every other country that still utilizes capital punishment put together in the ‘90s) who have never seen a trial let alone a jury and then to harvest their organs. It is quite proper that the One Child Policy, and the bizarre and inhumane rules and laws that have spawned from it, should be celebrated; maintained where necessary and redefined elsewhere (with the effect of exacerbating problems of sex-selective back-street abortions and abandonments). It is absolutely right that The Party should maintain strict control of the press, and indeed of all information. It is necessary that it should permit those religious and superstitious practices and traditions that it can control, such as Yulin, whilst seeking to eliminate (in the case of Falun Gong) or impose its own doctrine (in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) on those that defy The Party’s rule. The Party is the religion, and all condoned festivals and ceremonies and traditions are condoned because they conform to its doctrines. More on that later. 

It can maintain the absence of a judicial system and workers’ rights. It can treat its rural and migrant workers as subhumans. It is proper that freedom of political expression and opinion be suppressed and that their advocates be treated as ‘counterrevolutionaries’. It is essential that The Party maintains the myth of a common cultural enemy. Orwell’s dystopia never really required anything other than Goldstein and a one-at-a-time rotation of a foreign foe to achieve this effect, but The Party in China has demonstrated its flexibility in continually coming up with new dangers, new pariahs, new enemies.

I am flirting with crass and artless danger. Perhaps there is already too much paint on the canvas. Suffice it to say that all of the above, and the rest of the exhaustive list that I have not the space or the time to include here, are not just condoned under The Party’s definition of human rights; they are the Party’s definition of human rights. All of this, all of these crimes, are human rights, according to The Party, because they are necessary to ensure the upholding of the Four Cardinal Principles and the continuation of economic growth.

What, then, is the real problem? Is it that some Chinese people (and not, as many Twitter morons seem to believe, the entire population of China) have taken part in the ceremony? Is it that some Chinese people eat dog and cat meat? Rest assured, Yulin does not represent the sum total of animal cruelty and questionable culinary tastes in China. Or is it rather that festivals like Yulin are created, and are popular, because the conditions in which the people of Guangxi are forced to live in, and those of other states and cities and provinces, make them popular? 

Surely it is telling that the official response in China, the state-sponsored backtrack, has coincided not with the advent of a large and international animal rights protest – for the festival has been the subject of international protests for years – but by the involvement of China’s rapidly growing middle class; the social group that is becoming increasingly vital in maintaining the country’s economic growth; the class with access to education; the class with expendable wealth; the class that can afford to keep pets, such as dogs, for pleasure. They have the luxury of being able to afford to care; the money to back the morals.

 I return again to the point made previously; that The Party is, intends, and has always intended to be the religion of China. People will often cite the country as a part of a desperate and misguided attempt to defend the crimes of religion. What they seldom realise is that The Cultural Revolution did not seek to eradicate religion. It sought and it was successful in its quest to adopt the religious impulse itself. It has its own clergy, it has its religious hierarchy, it has its scriptures and its incontrovertible truths and its contempt for free thought and liberty. It is especially ironic that The Party, which still occasionally boasts of its adherence to Marxist-Leninism, is itself the very essence of that which Marx argued so forcefully and ably against.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

That the Yulin festival has been the subject of an international outcry; a great popular movement that claims to decry cruelty, is, then, spectacularly hypocritical. The Yulin festival is but one tradition, one expression, one festival that was created with the express purpose of maintaining the totalitarian religion. In limiting ourselves to attacking its expression, we ignore the fact that the denial of the rights of the Chinese working class to indulge in such activities will only increase the human suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of animals) whilst The Party, the summum malum, that which creates these illusions to glorify itself, remains in power.

A mass movement? Great. A popular revolt? Fantastic. But it is my firm belief that the eliciting of such a sentiment by nothing more substantive than the suffering of a few cute animals is worse than impotent; it is counter-productive.

It is not unworthy of us, it is not a sin, to focus our attention on human suffering, on the abject facts of the human condition, and on the causes of human depredation and exploitation. Perhaps, if we were able to be exercised by these, and if we were capable and more inclined to direct our ire at that which truly deserves it, we might achieve something more meaningful than the downscaling of one minor festival.

 

 

The Matter of Blatter

“I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield.”

Orwell might have been surprised, though not necessarily encouraged, by the changes in the nature of sports rivalry that have taken place since his article, The Sporting Spirit, was published in 1945.

Granted, outbreaks of barbarism and violence still occur – the aftermath of Egypt’s defeat to Algeria in 2009 sticks in the mind as an example of sport as war with the shooting – but the animosity surrounding such fixtures as England vs. India, Brazil vs. Argentina, England vs. Ireland and Italy vs. any country formerly identified as a part of Yugoslavia is not displayed now in the way that it was seven decades ago.

But rightly is Orwell lauded for his prescience. In The Sporting Spirit, he devoted as much time to the treatment and lack of regard for the ‘rules of the game’ as he did the base, sadistic nature of many of its supporters. (It is always worth remembering that the word ‘fan’ shares its roots with the word ‘fanatic’).

FIFA, the governing body of the world’s most popular sport, is a bastion of foul play. An Orwellian supranational organisation and a Kafkaesque labyrinth of bureaucracy and statecraft in equal measure, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association is controlled, and has been for decades, by an incestuous cabal of crooks, mobsters and Chaucerian frauds. Their sole concern is profit (or, as they would have us believe, billions of ‘non-profit’ dollars) and they pursue it with fewer scruples than Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov.

A certain Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter has been sitting at the head of the organisation, stroking his white cat, since 1998. His longevity is, in part, an explanation for itself. During his sixteen year tenure, Blatter has continued the work of his disgraced predecessor, Joáo Havelange, creating a Byzantine obscenity with an almost impenetrable system of layers through which money may flow and trouble may be filtered out. Havelange, once Blatter’s chief sponsor, was himself finally cast out of the organisation by the very means he had helped to design, punished for his flagrant disregard for the democratic process whilst Blatter used his creation to render that same process redundant.

That Havelange lasted in his position as honorary president until 2012, and was then compelled to resign only after the ethics committee produced its exceptionally vague report on bribery, is testimony to the efficacy of his own work. This is a man who, during his tenure as FIFA president, was on very good terms with the head of the Argentine Junta and the Brazilian fraudster Castor de Andrade.

That report also led to the resignation and expulsion of a number of prominent FIFA members, such as Havelange’s one-time son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira. One of the few members of Havelange’s clique to emerge unscathed from the process was the general secretary at the time of the alleged offenses; Havelange’s anointed successor, Sepp Blatter.

But this is not the only occasion on which Blatter has remained erect whilst the layers beneath him shift and turn. Just before the last FIFA ‘election’, Blatter’s ally turned rival Mohammed bin Hammam was banned for life, along with Jack Warner and other members of his faction, by FIFA’s ethics committee. He abandoned his bid to become president in order to fight the ban – Blatter ran unopposed and, when asked, stated that this was not a problem – which was lifted due to a lack of evidence. Bin Hammam was then banned again on a second set of charges.

Despite the furious press and public reaction to the scandal, Blatter has escaped any serious indictment, and the tainted World Cup bids of Russia and Qatar have not yet been overturned.

Much of the attention has, quite rightly, been focussed on Qatar. Current estimates place the number of construction workers killed in the country into the hundreds, with the ITUC predicting that that number could be over four thousand by the time the tournament begins. These are mostly migrant workers from countries like India and Nepal who arrive in Qatar, have their passports confiscated and their wages withheld, and who are made to work in intolerable conditions until they drop.

Blatter has suggested that the decision to award the tournament to Qatar was a mistake, but not because of the human cost. Nor is because there are obvious difficulties to holding the world’s biggest sporting tournament in a country which bans alcohol, executes homosexuals, isn't particularly fond of women, and in which summer temperatures are between 40 and 50 degrees. The problem is the negative publicity.

Russia, too, is not proving a popular choice. This is a country run by an ex-KGB thug who imprisons his opponents, imprisons homosexuals, imprisons journalists, censors free speech, makes corruption a government policy and annexes the territory of neighbouring countries.

In Blatter, Putin and his oleaginous friends have found a staunch supporter.

"A boycott will never give any positive effect. We trust the country, its government. Russia is in the eye of the international media. Football can not only unite Russia but show the whole world that it is stronger that any protest movement."

Blatter has conceded that Russia and Ukraine will have to be kept apart during the tournament, which is the only concession he has thus far made to the advocates of common sense. But he has placed himself firmly in opposition to those who do not want the Russian government to triumph over the protest movements. His advice to those concerned by the attitude of the Russian and Qatari governments toward homosexuality is to suggest that our gay brothers and sisters should “refrain from any sexual activities." (This was supposed to be a joke. He might as well have advocated a policy of “no ball games.”)

FIFA holds a great deal of power. It insists on the right to challenge, change or ignore the rules and laws of the countries hosting its tournaments. It grants itself exemption from all forms of tax, it controls the security of stadiums and related territories, it demands the creation of FIFA courts to try those selling unofficial merchandise, and it demands that national governments relocate thousands of undesirable citizens. One might hope that FIFA will exercise this enormous power to temper the authoritarian nature of the Russian and Qatari rulers, as indeed it might, in the case of alcohol.

But FIFA’s record is uniformly bad. It chooses fledgling democracies – countries that have recently thrown off dictatorships – and revives the totalitarian spirit. Without the kind of reform which Blatter opposes, I doubt this record will have improved by 2022.

(“Illustrating how constrained our rights are, I asked one police superintendent (name withheld), “What if I say ‘Viva Argentina!’ in the fan park? No problem? What if I say ‘Phansi Fifa phansi!’?” (Down with Fifa!) ”Then you’re wrong,” the policeman answered. “You can’t say, ‘Phansi Fifa phansi’.” – Patrick Bond, Counterpunch.)