As the football reached its epic climax in the Qatar desert last week, the increasingly unhinged FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, declared the 2022 World Cup “the greatest ever”. It was certainly melodramatic. In a curious way the month-long event in the uber wealthy Gulf Sheikhdom reflected and magnified the state of the post-Western world disorder and what the late Samuel Huntington presciently described in 1996 as the inexorable clash of civilisations. Huntington observed that as the West declined economically, demographically, and territorially compared with challenger cultures like China, the Muslim world, Latin America and Eurasia, so too would its soft power.
The official FIFA slogan of the World Cup was “Football unites the world”, which echoes an elite orthodoxy that has been promoted relentlessly by Davos Man and the corporate media ever since Francis Fukuyama announced the dawn of the open, borderless, post-Cold War world after 1990. The problem is that this world isn’t dawning. And football, far from uniting the world, is merely reflecting its mutation into something very different, namely its fracturing into ‘civilisation identities’.
In Samuel Huntingdon’s words, these identities inform an evolving “pattern of cohesion, disintegration and conflict in the post-Cold War world”. Inhabiting “a mirage of immortality” a purblind West failed to see that this brave new world was multi-civilisational. As the challenger cultures acquired Western technologies and secured their manufacturing base, different civilisations came to resent the drive to Westernise (a.k.a. democratise) their societies into accepting a one-size fits all progressive agenda, where supposedly liberal, universal, moral values of human rights and social justice prevail.
This clash between the West and the Rest was immediately apparent in Doha as Western commentators drew attention to Qatar’s appalling human rights record, its brutally cavalier sacrifice of 6,500 migrant slave workers to build its cavernous football temples, while woke football pundits intoned against the Arab kleptocracy’s treatment of women and the LGBTQ+ community.
Burnishing their progressive credentials, the England team and seven other Western nations committed to wearing the ‘one love’ rainbow arm band. The commitment didn’t even survive the first kick. FIFA’s stipulations against the display of political statements ruled that wearing the armband would incur an automatic yellow card. Meanwhile, the England team’s ‘taking the knee’ against racism looked increasingly inane, especially when performed in front of the United States team, which studiously ignored it. Principles were notable only for their flexibility in the post-modern Muslim paradise.
As the BBC commentary team engaged in smug virtue signalling, Infantino righteously denounced the West for “its staggering hypocrisy and racism”. Europeans for their past crimes against humanity, should be “apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give lessons to people”. Yet on the eve of the opening ceremony, Infantino, engaged in a further round of bizarrely contradictory pronouncements, declared that he felt Qatari (possibly because he has a large second home there), Arabic, gay, disabled and like a migrant worker because he had been bullied at school for being “a foreigner”. The World Cup was about “pleasure and joy”. Fans wanted to watch “90 minutes without thinking about anything”.
Qatar, of course, maintained it defended human rights “in its own way”. FIFA claimed it went to great lengths to keep political messaging out of its tournament. It even denied Volodymyr Zelensky’s request to share a message of world peace on the eve of the cup final. But in fact, political messaging was subliminally on display everywhere. It took the shape of largely non-Western crowds fanatically disporting their national allegiances. Japanese fans chanted ‘Nippon’ and ‘Banzai’ as their team reached the last 16, South Koreans fanatically declaimed Dae Han Min Guk a homage to the Republic of Korea, while Argentine fans and their football team predictably chanted ‘Muchachos,’ a song denouncing “the fucking English” and the Falklands War they “don’t forget”.
As fancied West European teams fell by the wayside and England predictably choked, the Rest rose in the shape of Argentina, Japan and, of course, plucky little Morocco. Morocco, in fact, served as a proxy for the Arab world in general and Qatar in particular. The North African kingdom and the desert sheikdom share close cultural and business ties. Every Moroccan game was a home tie, with the local fans screaming and whistling incessantly to unsettle their opponents, rather successfully, as their unlikely victory over Portugal demonstrated. Less widely acknowledged was the widespread display of the Palestinian flag at Moroccan games. While the Western media chose to ignore such obvious political messaging, Qatar’s state-owned international broadcaster Al Jazeera regularly hosted broadcasts from the Gaza Strip where Hamas supporters celebrated every Moroccan goal.
As Huntington noted in The Clash of Civilisations, as civilisational affiliations became more pertinent in the borderless post-Cold War world, large migrant communities increasingly identify with different civilisations. In such situations previously coherent nation states become ‘cleft’, as minority populations and their host countries find that “the forces of repul¬sion drive them apart and they gravitate toward civilisational magnets in other societies”. As a result of uncontrolled migration flows these cleavages have become a demographic feature of European and American states.
During the World Cup the ‘cleft’ character of Western Europe became all too apparent. After much fancied Belgium lost to Morocco, Brussels experienced several nights of rioting in the city that hosts a population of 40% Muslim migrants. Riots also broke out in Antwerp and Rotterdam. After France defeated Morocco in the semi-final several days later, rioting again broke out in Brussels, as well as in Paris and Montpellier, where an angry mob assaulted a car disporting a French flag and at least one person died. Yet, somewhat ironically, as the cup final whistle blew, at the end of 120 minutes, the French team consisted of only one native European, the ageing goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. The rest of his teammates on the field hailed from Francophone Africa or were sons of migrant families from the Parisian banlieus.
In these circumstances of civilisational clashes – all too evident in Qatar – Huntington warned states may become ‘torn’. A torn state is one that used to possess a single predominant culture that placed it in one civilisation, but its leaders now want “to shift to another”. In such societies an elite chooses an identity contrary to the inclinations and attachments of the masses. This is evidently not true of the Arab world or of China, but it has become a feature of Western civilisation and was very much in evidence in the Qatar heat where the pundits’ embrace of woke multicultural values clashed with the instincts and beliefs of the masses huddled in their English public houses.
Political elites have at various times attempted to disavow their cultural heritage and shift the identity of their country from one civilisation to another. In no case to date have they succeeded. Instead, they have created schizophrenic, torn countries. In an era of civilisational clashes, woke multiculturalism endeavours to create a country of many civilisations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilisation and lacking a cultural core.
“Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West,” Huntington observed. At the same time, “universalism abroad threatens the West and the world”. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. “The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America,” he wrote. “The domestic multiculturalists want to make America like the world.”
In the deepening clash of civilisations, Europe and America would hang together or hang separately, predicted Huntingdon. England taking the knee but not the United States, the multi-millionaire soccer pundit Garry Neville comparing the treatment of striking nurses, railwaymen and postal workers to migrant workers in Qatar – and the Belgian police’s investigation of progressive European MEPs concealing suitcases stuffed with Euros courtesy of Qatar for supporting its global sporting endeavours – all intimate a West collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy and performative contradictions.
Dr. David Martin Jones and Dr. Michael Rainsborough are writers and academics. They hold that football is a window into war, politics and society, and have spent many years intensively researching the subject watching Fulham lose at Craven Cottage.
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Can I get a grant to watch football?
I wonder how much was pushed out in bribes for the entirety of the world cup, from bidding through to encouraging celebrities to put their moral scruples to one side (if they had any in the first place).
This is a reasonable argument until we read “As the challenger cultures acquired Western technologies and secured their manufacturing base, different civilisations came to resent the drive to Westernise (a.k.a. democratise) their societies into accepting a one-size fits all progressive agenda, where supposedly liberal, universal, moral values of human rights and social justice prevail.’
The grammar takes an oft frequented but always bad conceptual shortcut, anthropomorphising civilisations. This is completely illegitimate. Who is to say democratisation is resented? Yes I’m under no illusion the people of nations like Russia or Iran are often less keen on democracy than many in the west have erstwhile supposed. And the presupposition that democracy will take root if only the opportunity is given has, of course in the not too distant past proven naive in the extreme. But a nation includes rulers, an executive branch, business leaders and the people, and each group is likely to have a very different take on how society should be run. Anthropomorphising a culture is really just an instant shortcut to ungrounded opinion as to what the consensus view is, regardless of even if a consensus can be determined.
I agree that currently, practically, democracy has amounted to “a one-size fits all progressive agenda, where supposedly liberal, universal, moral values of human rights and social justice prevail.” But it can be debated if democracy inevitably leads to what has falsely been labelled a progressive result. Don’t just accept the language of the left, because it ALWAYS contains a lie and is crafted to deceive. So when I was younger you would hear the phrase Petit Bourguoise to describe businessmen, and it was used for the fact it is a homonym of “petty.” “Progressive” is selected to stifle debate before it has started. There is no necessary “progression” if the aim is equality of outcome. “Investment” when used to describe government spending is designed to cover in addition to true cases of investment, such as in educating our children, what really amounts to nothing more than higher spending. “Austerity” has been redefined to include any reduction in spending at any time, even if the levels of spending involve ever greater profligate borrowing – the very antonym of the word. But the post-modern analysis always descends into incoherency. So today “man” means “woman.” And with that last move perhaps (and maybe I am hoping against hope here), Society at large will finally “become wise” to the game progressives are playing.
If we can’t break free from the linguistic culture the direction of travel is inexorable and democracy is probably doomed. Then lazy anthropomorphising of other cultures is a moot point because doing so will have glossed over nothing of importance and we will be heading for the zone of the others as meant by the phrase, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” But if we can break free, then such anthropomorphising is a bad thing to do because we will evolve to a state that really is superior. The problem of getting the citizens of other systems to agree will remain, but the argument, the moral imperative to try, without resorting to imperialist action, will then remain justified.
I have come to think that so-called “peaceful democracies” are merely societies where the ruling/law-making class have learned how to convince the general populace they are benevolent.
In contrast, “third world” countries seem violent and uncivilised to “western” eyes merely because the general populace still is not blind to the true nature of those in power and they have not given up fighting.
What system of government do you believe is best?
The incompetent type.
I totally agree with you. In the western “democracies” the people are conned, deluded and taken advantage of because they naively believe that policies and actions have democratic legitimacy and are for “the greater good” or “in the interests of public health” or whatever. And that included me until 3 years ago.
Our greatest obstacle in trying to prevent the introduction of digital ID, CBDC, social credit systems, etc is the willing compliance of the masses.
That’s a masterpiece !
The biggest threats to my future are central bank digital currency, climate policy, the WEF, bureaucrats that want to regulate every aspect of my life.
None of these things come from other civilisations. They are entirely home grown in my own civilisation.
Our civilisation is being destroyed from within by people that want to wreck everything that is good about it and create a dystopian hell of technocratic control.
Clash of Civilisations has rather a longer tenure than a World Cup.
Not a mention in this ‘article’ about the Holy War – 1400 years of Jihad against Christianity. Can’t take any of it seriously. Europe does not exist but for the Muslim Jihad and the CC.
‘The West’ is the rump of what was left of Christendom after Arab-Berber-Almohad Muslims wiped out 2/3 of it, destroying 30K Churches, libraries, agriculture, industry, trade and everything else from Arabia to southern France, all in 120 years. Millions of white Christians raped and enslaved. The Turks and Mongols were worse. Spain was invaded 3 x by non white Muslims who eradicated anything associated with a cross, enslaving, killing millions. Heard much about that? Guessing no.
Qatar is anti-Christian – not a word about it from anyone. You can’t be an open practicing Christian in that country. A Muslim can’t convert to Christianity (apostasy = death penalty). Few churches exist to serve 200.000 or so mostly Catholics. A Christian man cannot marry a Muslim woman (the children would not be Ghazi, the reverse is of course encouraged).
Qatar is ‘homo and transphobic’. Endless pissing and moaning from the ‘West’ about that. Endless f*ing armbands and pantomine theatre.
A society of ignorance, willing to die in Keev for the right of John to be Jane. But couldn’t give a shit about the endless Holy Jihad against its ancestors or the fact that once majority Christian pops in places like the Gulf States, Iraq, Israel and elsewhere, will soon disappear. The real issue is of course pronouns and gender mental-illness. Not reality or the endless Muslim JIhad which expresses itself in the Muslim Hijra rioting, raping, killing, looting, taking jizya, all over Europe and the UK.
In my simplistic mind, I see little difference between the authoritarians of the Muslim world and the authoritarians of the western one.
The Muslim world believes countries must be run by an Elite who must not be questioned or challenged. They control their populations through fear and intimidation and, in particular, treat women as 2nd class citizens (at best); male possessions and (worst case) sub-human (Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan).
In the western world the self-selecting Elites believe they must run their countries (and preferably the rest of the world); they must not be questioned or challenged and any who do will be silenced. They have learned to control their populations through fear, intimidation, coercion and laws, which the majority do not support. Increasingly they treat women as irrelevant citizens, with the aim of subordinating their rights to those of a small minority of psychologically-challenged males.
Douglas Murray is right in his book The Strange Death of Europe. The Western Elites have destroyed Europe.
“a West collapsing under the weight of its own hypocrisy and performative contradictions”
Beautifully put … but tragic nevertheless.
“its brutally cavalier sacrifice of 6,500 migrant slave workers”
Couldn’t tell if the author is sceptical.
The authors make some valid criticism of immigrant populations in the west, but display a shocking ignorance of the rest of the world, and the influence of the West upon it.
“In such societies an elite chooses an identity contrary to the inclinations and attachments of the masses. This is evidently not true of the Arab world or of China…”
In fact, the elites of the Arab world have been enormously influenced by Western civilisation for the last 200 years, approximately since Napoleon conquered Egypt. Since then, every political trend that originated in Europe has found an elite following in the Arab world: secular nationalism, communism, fascism, socialism, even democracy. All of which were contrary to the inclinations and attachments of traditional society. Similar points could no doubt be made about China, which was also in awe of the West (after we invaded them to protect our opium exports).
But the biggest irony of this piece is that the authors criticise the Gulf monarchies for not being influenced by the West, while being completely ignorant of the influence of Britain in setting up these monarchies and ensuring their survival into the modern world. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are all, to a great extent, client states of the British East India Company, some having relationships with Britain as far back as the 18th century. The deal was simple: support Britain in all matters of foreign policy, and in return, the monarchy has complete authority within its own territory, and protection from its neighbours. This deal is the basis of our modern relationship (and the USA’s inherited relationship) with all these states and the reason they have been able to survive in their anachronistic form, complete with repression of minorities, to the present day. (Don’t underestimate the Gulf’s support for Britain: in 1940, as Britain “stood alone”, they were pumping oil furiously to support our war effort, even while their neighbours were hoping that the other side would free them from the British yoke.)
So you can complain all you like about countries like Qatar and their abysmal human rights record, but the fact that they have been able to persist until today is largely due to the fact that they have always staunchly supported us, and we have always staunchly supported them in return.