Orlando - It's Not Terrorism.

It's Much, Much Worse.

~~~

It took far too long for the stupid and fatuous term War on Terror to be expunged from the lexicon of foreign policy. The political history of the United States is littered with silly declarations of hopeless domestic conflicts – on drugs, on poverty, on want, on crime – but the War on Terror is so asinine, so self-contradictory, so evidently impossible to prosecute that it could only have been created in and maintained by W’s White House.

What is war if not a terrifying prospect? What does it do if not utilize means and methods that terrify the sane? Has there ever been an account, from a civilian trapped in a conflict zone, that has not spoken in stark and candid terms of the terror they felt?

How can a War on Terror then be prosecuted when it involves us in a mind-numbing tautology. War involves terror; a war on terror must necessarily involve a war on the means of warfare., and yet not once did the Bush White House order the bombarding of an enemy with white poppies.

Bush, it seems to me, was at best half right. What he presented as a declaration of a new war, on terms and against an ‘enemy’ of a nature that made a mockery of the claim, should have been presented as a response to a declaration of war on civil society. Terror was never an enemy to be opposed; it is a symptom of war.

We, who are too often disinterested observers, would do well to keep this fact in mind. We are told of the “desperate search for answers” in the aftermath of acts that are commonly, and wrongly, described as “senseless” and “meaningless.” In fact, attacks like that on the Pulse nightclub (made bitterly ironic because a pulse is what the victims have been cruelly deprived of) should serve as reminders: that, whilst it is obviously ridiculous to say “on terror,” we are still participants in a war that predates, and goes well beyond, our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alright, if we are not at war on terror then against what, or with whom, are we struggling?

The  employment of the term terrorist actually predates the Bush White House by three decades or more. It is not as self-evidently self-defeating a term as War on Terror, which probably goes some way toward explaining why it is still in employ whilst the War on Terror is not. But it, too, is rank with contradictions and ripe for specious misuse. A terrorist cannot be defined in isolation from the concept and definition of terrorism and terrorism has no universal or binding definition.

It is commonly parsed as “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Yet this is quite obviously inadequate in a conversation which often involves a debate about the ‘backers’ and ‘financers’ and ‘enablers’ of terrorism. And it grants the holder far too much power whilst allowing for capricious and arbitrary application.

So it is that the Reagan White House could justify its interventions in Nicaragua on the spurious grounds that it was becoming a ‘terrorist state’ (thus admitting that terrorism can in fact be ‘authorised’) whilst at the same time making nice with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan which actually do support, finance, back, endorse, enable and authorise acts of terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror cannot then be reparsed as a War on Terrorism because his related talk of a new axis of evil made no mention of the supposed allies who created and supported the Taliban and, more recently, Islamic State.

Furthermore, the definition requires that violence is used ‘in pursuit of political aims’. This, again, allows for advocates of political causes to be admitted as terrorists – whether they be Viet Cong, Sandinista, PKK, ETA (but not, curiously, - and here again the point about capricious and arbitrary standards – French colonialists, Bay of Pigs insurrectionists, contras, the Turkish government, the murderers of Salvador Allende, for all of whom the United States has found a use whilst denying that terrorism can be or has ever been ‘authorized’) – whilst precluding the application of the term to the very people we now most readily call terrorists, the invariably apocalyptic and messianic death cults of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State. These are groups which combine the ugly fatalism of the nihilist with the dangerous supremacist outlook of the fascist and the zeal of religious fanaticism. And one would have to be very generous indeed to allow that the desire to bring on the apocalypse could count as a ‘political aim’.

The injunction to ‘call things by their proper names’ has had an unusual progression through philosophy and politics, it being recommended to us by figures as diverse and removed from each other as Confucius, Orwell and Ted Cruz. Donald Trump claims prescience on this matter but it was Cruz who first and most often and most eloquently demanded that politicians describe their enemies without equivocation, only then to mischaracterise the nature of both the threat and its propagators.

“Radical Islamic terrorism” was and remains his classification of choice. One might, I suppose, give him the credit of trying; the response universally adopted by those on the liberal left-wing of politics has always been to resort to the lines “it has nothing to do with Islam,” “hate has no religion,” and words to that effect, a via negativa approach that does not attempt to provide an explanation or to give answers to those who so “desperately search” for them.

But Cruz fails the standard he claims to value so dearly. For one thing, terrorism is (as we’ve seen) a stupid and inadequate category that affects specificity but is in fact staggeringly vague. For another, it does not distinguish between different forms of Islamic, or Islamist, fundamentalism. Islamic State is born of Wahabbism which is itself a strand of Sunni Islam; should Hezbollah achieve its stated wish  - the destruction of the state of Israel – it would have achieved a goal of Shiite extremists. And for another, it encourages jumping to a conclusion without consideration for the facts. Remember how quickly people declared Anders Breivik’s slaughter in Norway an act of Islamist terrorism?

There is no easy, immediate, catch-all definition which answers our burning questions. Life, like the perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity, is not so forgiving. It is not blowback; the LGBT community so pointlessly massacred in Orlando have no more invaded another country than had the children at Sandy Hook Elementary, killed not by any Islamist terrorist but by a mentally deranged American citizen. It cannot be justified by citing the alleged crimes committed in the name of foreign policy, nor can it always be said that the perpetrator is gripped by a fervour that is explicitly religious.

Where any of these things can be proved to be true, we should then call them by their proper names. The shooter in Orlando did apparently offer a pre-emptive declaration of affiliation with Islamic State. But what if he hadn’t? What if he had been motivated by Shiite fervour? Would it still have been ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ had this man, with a ‘Muslim name’, instead been a devotee of some crazed, millenialist sect?

No, ‘terrorism’, whether Islamic or anything else, simply will not do. There can be no guarantee of motive, no pre-emptive classification. There can be no certainty, and that is a terrible thing. Nihilism, the pointless taking of life, the wanton destruction in and of this world by those to whom life has no value except as preparation for the unknowable and non-existent beyond; this is what we are faced with. Not a clash of civilizations but a war between civilization and its enemies ; enemies who view all of us, gay or straight, man or woman, adult or child, black or white, civilian or military, as combatants to be targeted.

It has no political aim, it has no realisable dream, it has no goal to be justified. It’s not terrorism; it’s much, much worse.

'Why I'm Joining ISIS'

 There is, at first glance, very little to distinguish Salusbury Road from any other just-off-central London backstreet. Mile after mile of terraced housing, broken only by the occasional shabby chemist, shabby off-licence, or shabby estate agents’ equally shabby offices. But appearances can, from time to time, prove deceptive. Inside one of these unremarkable flats sits a very remarkable man, and I, with curiosity overpowering my apprehension, have been sent to meet him.

Baruch Mendelsohn is surprisingly easy to find. In fact, he’s a well-known figure in these parts, especially amongst the community of drug addicts and homeless people that make up society’s shadow in the Brent Council area. One man, a cheerful old sod with a fondness for Sour Diesel and a beard that wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, sings in praise of Baruch.

“He’s a top lad, Barry,” says the vagrant. He can’t remember his own name, but he’s enamoured by ‘Barry’, who gives him food and money, and occasionally steps out to share a joint on the porch of the old, run-down police station.

This story is repeated, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of erudition and eloquence, up and down the road. By the well-spoken woman with the well-fed dog who begs outside the tube station, by the singing Rasta-man, and by the odd couple who can be found wandering drunkenly, hitting each other with half-full cans of Special Brew and, on this occasion, kicking an unopened pack of sausages up the street. “Top lad,” “Great guy,” “Love him to bits.”

 The Sleeping Man is perhaps the only exception. Huddled in an alcove next to the bookshop, he shouts and swears when I mention Baruch. But then, as I soon discover, The Sleeping Man does little else. He shouts and swears at dogs, at children, at women; at anyone who crosses his eye line. The Sleeping Man does not discriminate.

All very well and good, but how do I square this with the profile I’ve got?

This profile, written and sent to me by Mr. Mendelsohn himself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, I’ve been told that I am to address him not as Baruch Mendelsohn but as Baadir Mohamad, he having “Renounced [his] Jewish faith and [his] kafir ways, turned [his] back on decadence and sin, accepted the truth of the al-Quran,” and so on. B.M. is apparently unaware that one does not need to write ‘the’ before ‘al-Quran’; it translates as ‘the the Quran’. A quibble, but possibly quite revealing.

The mental portrait I’m trying to create is shattered as I’m accosted outside Starbucks and whirled around to face who I assume – who I hope – must be Baadir.

“Mr. Mercer!”

I’d been expecting to be confronted by a cliché; by a Choudary clone or Hamza doppelganger, all wild eyes and austere robes and liberated facial hair. But Baadir Mohamad isn’t any of that. Or rather, he’s not quite any of that. I seem to have caught him in the very early stages of his metamorphosis. An almost indiscernible hint of mania in the otherwise friendly blue eyes, something not-quite-unpleasant in the crooked-toothed, tarnished-silver smile; traces of some artificial colourant in his thinning hair.

“Mr Mohamad, I presume.”

“Please, call me Baadir.”

These introductory niceties having been concluded, Baadir takes me, bizarrely, by the hand, and leads me to a door not ten yards away from the ‘coffee’ shop (I use the term in its broadest possible sense). Two flights of stairs later, and I’m in the unremarkable flat with the very remarkable man.

We’re sitting in his kitchen, which doubles up as a living room. There’s a copy of the Quran next to a bottle of fabric softener on top of the washing machine, and the surface next to that is covered with a sea of unwashed plates. The place reeks of marijuana and cigarette smoke, and I’m hit with a strange and sudden realisation. Sitting here, on this disgusting sofa, it occurs to me that this is how it must feel to be a discarded fag butt.

My first question, the one I’ve been most looking forward to asking, concerns his Jewishness. What does he think of it? Do Jews really control the world?

“They control the media, certainly,” is his reply. He reaches for a pile of papers on the kitchen table and picks one out, seemingly at random. “This,” he says, “is something I was writing for my blog before it was taken down. This should explain it.”

And it does, after a fashion. I can’t repeat much of what I read; it would be impossible to print. It’s called ‘Letter from The Fat Controller’, the title taken from B.M.’s bizarre theory; that the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine is a metaphorical depiction of our Jewish overlords.

Does he really think Islamic State will accept him? He doesn’t look particularly Jewish, but he doesn’t look much like a Salafist, either. Wahhabi doctrine forbids you from shaving, and Baadir clearly has, and recently. His appearance is somewhat transigent; as though he dresses with one inept eye on fashion whilst the other looks toward the future he claims he desires.

“They will, when I get there. I can’t look the part now; I’m too easily noticed, and they’re watching me.”

This is undoubtedly true. When I ask him how he plans to get to Syria, he explains that he’s already tried, and been prevented. He also tried to move to Birmingham, believing that there might be some truth to the Fox News claim that the city is all but ready to declare itself an Islamic state, but was prevented again. He’s set his sights on a move to Tower Hamlets, from where he intends to plot his escape. Either he’s being coy, or he really has no idea how he’s going to go about it.

When I ask him about his family his expression becomes dark. Born and raised somewhere near Luton, he left home when he was fourteen, arrived in London when he was nineteen, and claims to have never been back. Having been born and raised somewhere near Luton myself, I can attest to the fact that the closer you are to it, the more it f*cks you up.

“My mother,” he says, “is a decadent western whore.”

“How so?”

“She can’t cook. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t tend the house. She goes out to work and leaves the place to fester. She’s not married; wears makeup and no veil. She made me a bastard. She made me the way I am, or rather, the way I was.”

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Every Tuesday.”

Curious. “You said she made you the way you were. What were you?”

He pauses. “You know the story of Lut?”

I do. Lut, or Lot, is amongst a handful of figures from scripture who have survived plagiarism twice, appearing first in the Torah, then in the Bible and finally in the Quran. His story is contains that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  “Ah,” I say, “so you are-“

“I was,” he interrupts, “but I am cured.”

“But you blame your mother?”

He shrugs, non-committally. “One way or another it’s her fault. And I won’t stop until the black flag of jihad flies above her house. Maybe it’s her nature. Maybe it’s because she had me vaccinated. You know about vaccines? You know the Jews in the CIA invented them for their war on Muslims? They sterilise us, they infect us, they make us mentally ill.”

“Are you mentally ill?”

“Again, I was cured.” The source of these ‘cures’ is to be found in the Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza’s alma mater. Baadir’s conversion owes itself, at least in part, to the toxic blend of Saudi Wahhabism, oil wealth, and Prince Charles, that royal speaker to vegetables. “Allah is the cure,” Baadir continues.

When I ask him about his other diagnosis he waves me away, claiming he can’t remember. Schizophrenia or MPD; one of those. So, as he begins to roll a joint, I ask him… why. Why Islamic State? Conversion is one thing, terrorism is surely quite another.

“You mean you can’t see it?!” he exclaims, gesticulating toward the window. “Look at it. It’s filthy. It’s corrupt. The women are all prostitutes, the men are all beggars and sinners. The scriptures are clear; we do this, and we win. We have to win. There is no way we won’t win. The people who accept that might be saved, but the rest can burn.”

“And you’d be prepared to behead people?”

“Sure, why not.” He shrugs again. “I’ve seen the videos. I could do it. And it’s not as though I’d be beheading real Muslims.”

Alas, our time together is almost over. We both have places to be. Baadir is heading out to the Two Brewers in Clapham, which means I have to change my plans and head elsewhere. The Two Brewers describes itself as being ‘gay friendly’, and it’s full of friendly gays. It serves as a useful staging ground for trips into other worlds. Perhaps Baruch isn’t as dead as Baadir likes to pretend. Perhaps Baruch is still in him, somewhere. Perhaps someone else will be, later.

-----

“One for the road?”

He’s offering me a joint. I hate the stuff, but how often does one get the chance to take a spliff from a wannabe jihadi?

“Sure,” I say.

I’m still wondering, as I make my way back up Salusbury Road, what it is that separates us. We are the same age, we have similar backgrounds, we share many interests. And yet, he fantasizes about joining Islamic State, about beheading infidels and blowing up history, whilst I do not. Quite the opposite. Let the infidels keep their heads, I say, and history has a lot going for it.

The nameless old sod from earlier is sitting on the porch of the old, run-down police station. He eyes me up, meaningfully, as I stride toward him, and beckons with his gnarled old claw. Well, why not?

“Alright, Barry?” he asks, as I squat down beside him.

“Barry?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind, old sod. Got a light?”

Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain

Coming Out to Heaven: Dispatch from the Clouded Mountain.

The first of Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, published in the original and only issue of the troublemaking Alfred Douglas’s suggestively titled magazine The Chameleon, is this: “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”

I have tried for far too long and with far too many false starts to write about this particular episode. Having been reminded of Wilde and put in mind to make reference to him, I found myself repeatedly frustrated at having not read more from the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I was lacking perhaps the most important of a series of metaphors that would form the framework on which to build an account of my first experience of Heaven.

I have at last embarked upon the exercise of rectifying this appalling gap in my literary knowledge – helped along the way by Frank Harris’s excellent book on the life and confessions of his old friend – so perhaps I can make some headway.

One is reluctant – and not without reason – to attempt to act as the ventriloquist for a community. Nevertheless, if we allow that it is occasionally so tempting that it becomes unavoidable: I am fairly sure that there must come a time in the life of anyone who is anything other than straight when one is compelled, by a mixture of naive boldness, peer pressure and a stifled sense of adventure, to step out of what we stupidly call the ‘comfort zone’ and experience something new. (By the way, find me someone who would describe stagnation and boredom as being comfortable feelings. I’m not sure I’d want to meet them.)

Some embrace it, others reject it. Some find themselves huddled in a corner writing copy. But I speak with some small amount of assurance when I say that, when one has abandoned the once cosy and comfortable closet, one tends, sooner or later, to end up in a gay club.

I was tempted to draw on C.S. Lewis’s vastly overrated Chronicles of Narnia to describe the experience, but the analogy doesn’t quite work. The children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have first to enter the closet, and that is precisely the wrong way around. This left me with something of a quandary: Do I invoke Philip Pullman’s sublime His Dark Materials trilogy to attempt to describe the experience, or opt for Lewis Carroll’s inferior but better-known works.

The latter will probably serve me better. The windows cut by the Subtle Knife in His Dark Materials share an essential quality with the knife: they are subtle. They are hard to see, because they often open onto one part of another world that bears no stark or easily distinguishable difference from your own. By contrast, Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole would, were Carroll’s surrealism not quite so insufferable, have been rather more jarring. The experience of entering Heaven was certainly more jarring than it was subtle and mysterious.

I began with Wilde partly because my impression of nightclubs is that they embody that quip about the artificial, and partly because he embodies a lesson you should possess and carry with you as you take your first tentative steps into the other world, and partly because most of his Phrases and Philosophies rely on paradox which, according to Mr Best in James Joyce’s Ulysses, is... well, I’ll quote him.

“Of course it’s all paradox, don’t you know. Hughes and hews and hues, the colour, but it’s so typical of the way he works it out. It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know.” Heaven is far from “the tame essence of Wilde,” but my experience of it was certainly paradoxical; something I had to hate but had to love, too. Well, “the wise contradict themselves.”

I was compelled to brave Heaven by the recommendation of another Oscar; my friend and colleague Mr. Yuill. (His excellent new blog can be found quickly germinating at oscaryuill.wordpress.com.) I say recommendation, but it was given with a caveat: “99% of the time it’s a shit night.” All the same to me; I’ve never enjoyed clubs, but, imbued with and driven on by almost forty pounds worth of scotch courage, I set off from a very poorly attended event at the Star of Kings and, via a quick stop at my flat in Queens’ Park, found myself queuing for entry.

It should have come as no surprise: I got lost as soon as I was inside. The internal geography of Heaven can be described as resembling a warren without drawing on any work of surrealist fiction, and I soon found myself wandering and wondering. Not foundering, I hope, nor quite wandering aimlessly, but wandering and wondering nonetheless, amid a cacophony of sound and seemingly pattern-less movement.

I claim to be able to sit down and write in almost any place and at almost any time, and, spotting an unoccupied sofa in the corner next to the bar, I resolved to push my way through the crowd to get to it. This I managed, but not before running into the (very drunk) deputy editor of the newly relaunched London Student; the only familiar face I was to see that night. He was barely intelligible, and the encounter proved a fruitless one. The same cannot be said of the sofa, where I remained for nigh on four hours, pausing only to restock on whiskey, and documenting anything and everything that came to mind.

My almost neurotic refusal to indulge in the whims of attraction leaves few opportunities for distraction. There was the moment when a man saw fit to drop his trousers in front of a small audience – I thought then and I think now that the description “small” applied to more than just the crowd – followed by the entrance of a not-unattractive man, sans shirt, with his arm around another gentleman dressed in a very impressive three-piece suit. But aside from that, and the sudden death of the phone I’d intended to rely on to get me home, my time in the club was fairly uneventful.

(It’s a tangent, but I’m not at all sorry to keep doing this: in Wilde’s moving letter to Douglas, De Profundis, he expresses the remorse born from a belief that his trial had been the trial of his name, and its verdict one that disgraced his family. I cannot claim anything like that level of anguish, and my comparatively inconsequential trials exist only in my head and involve only myself, but it occurs to me, having read De Profundis and now in writing this, that I’ve not ‘come out’ to my own family. So: Mum, dad, if you’re reading this, take it as a compliment that I never felt the need.)

It was pleasing to note that Heaven has, in an expression of solidarity and moral responsibility that those at the top of FIFA and the IOC have yet to show, banned Russian vodka from the premises. I believe this is a step that has been taken by all establishments owned and operated by G-A-Y, though the news media showed far more interest when they were discovered rejecting people who looked too straight. (That is a policy I have a certain amount of interest in combating, as ‘looking gay’ or, more accurately, ‘looking bi-‘ is something I’ve apparently yet to master.) 

As to whether Heaven itself is in any way cliquey; that is a subject on which I feel I am not qualified to judge. All I can say is that, in my – admittedly limited – interactions with people there (another double please, sir), I did not see anything that hints at that sort of exclusivist sentiment.

Not that the implied criticism necessarily holds true in the first place. For all we like to think we live in a tolerant, accepting, modern society, clubs like Heaven are still amongst the few places in which this culture  (if indeed culture is the right word), which used to be so completely subversive, is allowed to thrive and to express itself with relative impunity. I could be accused of being pessimistic, but name me a single ‘mainstream’ club in which you are likely to see two people of the same sex holding hands, kissing, or showing affection and attraction for each other with the freedom that was on display in Heaven.

But freedom and comfort are two very different things. As someone whose first introduction to the ‘other side’ came through the historical novels of Mary Renault and, though to a lesser extent, the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling, my disquiet and uncertainty comes not from societal expectations or the risk of condemnation. It comes in part from my anti-social nature and my dislike of crowds and clubs and dancing, but also from one of my deeper, darker secrets. I am a closet romantic.

Or rather, I am and I am not. It’s another of those contradictions; praised by Wilde before his trial, regarded as a necessity by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, and certainly present in figures from Orwell to Auden and Samuel Johnson. (I may never be able to claim that level of talent, but I am already some way toward matching the description of Auden once given by Louis MacNeice: “Everything he touches turns to cigarettes.”)

It is obviously futile to hope for anything quite so romantic and quite so picturesque as the gardens of the school at Mieza in Fire from Heaven. And even if it were possible to delicately walk the line between innocence and the other on the Street of Lights in Rhiminee (a reference to the colour codes that have played such a fundamental part in the history of LGBT movements, though it is interesting to note that Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, believes the legend of the green carnation to be little more than a myth), a nightclub is certainly not the place for tentative steps and cautious emersion. I knew this before I entered Heaven and I have known this for a very long time. I did not hope or expect to be proved wrong, and yet I must acknowledge that part of me did. No one is entirely free of doublethink.

Whilst it is an experience I would not now do without, nor one that I would never have again, I did leave at the end of the night thinking that perhaps I had come some way toward understanding, albeit in a metaphorical sense, what it must have felt like to be one of the boys hired for enjoyment by Gore Vidal and his friend, the equally fabulous Tom Driberg.

The best version of the story I know is found in Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, the relevant paragraph of which I will republish here so that the reader might better understand what I mean:

“Through Tom I was eventually to meet Gore Vidal, and also to learn how when in Rome the two of them would hunt together and organise a proper division of labor. Rugged young men from the Via Veneto would be taken from the rear by Gore and then thrust, with any luck semi-erect, into the next-door room where Tom would suck them dry.”

I suppose I should restate the metaphorical nature of my realisation. I entered by one door on one day and I left on the next and by the other, and with a vague sense of uncertain satisfaction. It was an experience that I should have had some time ago, though if I am to venture back again I will have to make myself a little more presentable and a good deal richer. And perhaps, when I next find myself on the long and meandering road home in the early hours of the morning, I will find myself more willing to embrace the paradox.

(I close with Wilde’s poem, Harlot’s House, not because I think it a fair description of Heaven, but because... Just because.)

We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille,

Then took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.

Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, 'The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.' But she--she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

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.)