There’s an excellent article in UnHerd by Willian Nattrass explaining why Hungarian football fans boo the knee-taking of England football players. It begins:
Hungarians are celebrating today – and not just because their football team thrashed England 4-0 at Molineux last night. They also see a moral dimension in the victory, with headlines focusing on the booing of the Hungarian national anthem and chants of “you racist bastards” from England fans, after previous controversy over England ‘taking the knee’ at an away match in Budapest on June 4th.
At the Budapest game – supposed to be played behind-closed-doors due to racism from Hungarian fans at Euro 2020 – the gesture was booed by a crowd of 35,000 schoolchildren allowed to watch the game by the Hungarian FA. After heavy criticism from England manager Gareth Southgate and his players, along with widely reported comments in the British media about “brainwashed” Hungarian youth, a Hungarian Government spokesperson bullishly said “anyone who thinks that children at a football match in Budapest can be blamed for any kind of political statement is truly an idiot”.
Yet the glee with which yesterday’s victory was greeted suggests Hungarians took English criticisms to heart. And while rejection of the western stance on anti-racism is becoming another key marker of Hungary’s cultural independence, this difference isn’t limited to Hungary alone. Throughout Central Europe, many football fans would side with Viktor Orbán in regarding England’s anti-racism stance as a “provocation”.
The controversy in Budapest recalled a match between Sparta Prague and Glasgow Rangers last year, when a crowd of 10,000 children booed Glen Kamara, the Rangers player whose allegations of racism saw star Czech defender Ondřej Kúdela banned from Euro 2020. A diplomatic crisis erupted after Czechs were described as “rotten fruit” by a Scottish Football Association equality and diversity advisor.
While there’s clearly a problem with racism in Central European football, the issue has become entwined with wider attitudes towards cultural developments in the West. Hungarians, Czechs, and others do not take kindly to what they see as the patronising educational intent of Britain’s anti-racism drive.
Worth reading in full.
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Good article. Everything about ‘taking the knee’ feels wrong to me. The most obvious problem is that kneeling denotes inferiority. Are we saying that to put right centuries of racial exceptionalism we are going to agree that white people are inferior now? Fighting bad racism with good racism seems to be the zeitgeist. Why is everyone so accepting of this? No human should ever kneel before any other human. It’s not the Middle Ages FFS!
Agree 100%.
Can’t understand this very obvious and pathetic virtue signalling. Well played to the Millwall fans who were first to boo this, (against QPR I think), leading to limited amounts of booing elsewhere.
Of course your BBC and media elites immediately jumped on the booing as “evidence” that some football fans are racists, rather than the more obvious conclusion that these fans do not appreciate being asked to participate/conform with something they can clearly see as ungenuine “box ticking”.
The people who run/administer/play football need to get a grip on all this woke shit…I,m looking mostly at you Jurgen Klopp and Gareth Southgate.
“The people who run/administer/play football need to get a grip on all this woke shit…”
It’s the same in cricket. Went to the recent Lords Test they were pumping out all this racism and diversity woke nonsense all very annoying and patronising. Thank God they didn’t “take the knee” think I would have walked at that stage. Assume it’s the same with Rugby, they all seem to be falling over themselves to accommodate this shite.
Exactly, CG. In March 2020 the world rushed headlong into the New Dark Age. A technocratic totalitarianism. It’s just that so few of us have recognised it for what it is…
Taking the knee is a luxury belief – you can show how “caring” you are, whilst not having to actually DO ANYTHING.
The Middle Ages wouldn’t like us either!
At least they weren’t destroying civilisation back then.
They boo because they recognise it for what it is – virtue signalling and compliance with the “latest thing” for fear of standing out and being denounced.
It’s all so effing false and cowardly. People who take the knee are nothing more than functionaries, unwittingly participating in the destruction of everything of value to a free society.
Useful idiots.
Gates’s Goons
And this silly little gesture will stop when exactly?
When racism, real or imagined, ends? When the terrible sins of generations past, real or imagined, have been sufficiently atoned for?
So basically never.
Which really makes it a quasi-religious ritual designed to remind everyone of their natural racist tendencies. It’s quite clever really. They’ve hijacked the most popular sport in the world and built into it a religious ritual of the new woke ideology.
I wonder how many of these football players realise they’ve been co-opted for a new religion.
Racism isn’t dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and those who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’.
Thomas Sowell
They all take the knee for exactly the same reason they all wore the goddamn face nappies.
And got the gene therapy treatment and complied zealously with Lockdowns and on and on it goes. Pathetic really pathetic.
It will stop once we’ve overcome Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down, the post-war European strategy of post-imperial Britain. Keeping the Americans in
only works when the so-called western states all become second-rate Little Americas or larger Puerto-Ricos as the so-called American left won’t even accept autonomous allies, let alone souvereign ones. IMO, this price is to high for the convenience of outsourcing much of The Military to the USA. In order to avoid losing its soul, Europe needs to be restored as set of independent actors, Russia and Germany being among them, and the USA reduced to just another foreign power (we might be allied with or not or might be at war with or not, depending on what makes the most sense in any given situation).
And this silly system of international organizations for everything, UN, WHO, UNESCO, FAO, WBG etc needs to be dismantled.
I don’t think that I’ll live to experience this, but We shall see.
Just play the game, I deplore the politicisation of everything these days. I would happily boo the England team for these gestures but instead I just don’t watch anymore.
Until 1918, a much larger Hungary was part of the empire of Austria-Hungary containing a great many Slavs who were exactly as oppressed as non-English British subjects in British colonies. These included the Czechs who were gifted a state of their own by the Entente powers who also ruled over the Slovaks. After the second world war, this entirely artifical construct dominated by a Czech majority was forcibly restored. Slovakia finally managed to become independent in 1993. One should also really mention the Czechs pogrom of the German minority forced into their state in 1918 and forced back into it in 1945, eg, burning them alive in Prague, but since the author is politically left, he probably considers this perfecly ok. After all, there are Germans and people and the former must not be confused with the latter.
In other words, these people from far away countries we know little of are exactly as guilty of historic racism as the author claims the Brits are. Sorry, no saints on this planet.
NB: This is not supposed to be a defense of nonsensical BLM rituals.
“England’s anti-racism stance.”? Utter bunkum, it’s the modern way, do nothing in reality but be seen to make some empty gesture…I’m with the Hungarian kids.
Does that mean if we all do it racism will disappear……? Who knew?
It’s not even English. This was invented in the USA and presumably, at least to some degree, to annoy Donald Trump (by signalling contempt for the flag of the USA, originally).
I’m British and I object to the patronising educational intent of this virtue-signalling as well.
Which virtue, by the way? Professional football players usually make a lot of money with advertising contracts. And this kind of behaviour is pretty much mandated by the people paying for these. Hence, it really means I’m kneeling down in public because my paymasters demand it. Ritual prostation of the parvenu millionaires in front of the billionaires to ensure that the money keeps flowing. A ridiculous and disgusting spectacle.
Paymasters being Blackrock, Bloomberg who are funding the whole WEF, WHO, UN & WTO project….
There can be few more risible actions than the minutes silence for Prince Phillip, a man who gave his life to this nation and his duty to support The Queen for 80 years, followed swiftly by taking the knee for a career criminal who died 4000 miles away full of drugs that would have killed him regardless of what the police officer did.
The attitude is the same as the Victorian Missionaries who were despatched to take the word of God to ‘the darkies’ and sometimes ended up as a decent main course. It is imperialism. It is borne from misplaced superiority, but more than anything it is a stunning burst of narcissism which does nothing to ‘bring an end’ to racism even if it were possible. The whole BLM thing has set us back 30 years.
Maybe the English team should stop teasing and just drop their shorts and hold their ankles.
Taking the knee, started in the USA by Colin whatshisname. Theatre, clown show. Perhaps the starving children around the world might have as much attention from the legacy press than these overpaid young men.
Good on you Hungary and the Hungarian people don’t take this patronising woke shite.
Annoyed by my club West Bromwich Albion FC virtue signalling at EVERY game now for 2 years. WW1 & WW2 heroes get just one minute a season. The real heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms. Not George Floyd and the Marxist opportunists. I turn my back on them at every game. GET WOKE GO BROKE.
Astonishing that the UK football authorities allow the players to wear the Burn-Loot-Murder armbands in glorification of a vicious street thug who threatened to shoot a pregnant woman in the stomach to extort money to buy drugs and died because he swallowed his stash when arrested by the police but banned British fans from wearing poppies…