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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Nice piece Chris. Joe Bastardi has also been on this theme recently in his weekly Weather Bell video.
Shhh. Say it quietly, but there might be another variable in all this climate stuff. I’ve noticed it the other day, but none of the scientists seems to. Its a large round thing in the sky. I dont think its very close to us, but it is hot, really hot, It appears each morning, moves across the sky getting warmer and warmer, until it goes below the horizon, when it gets colder, much colder. The other day it went from -5c overnight to +15c in the day, 20 degrees, in a few hours. I was reading something, in the restricted section of course, that it can go as high as 50c. in a few hours.
All this 0.1c by 2050. Its nonsense, obviously. Anyway. Mum’s the word. Don’t want to lose our funding now do we…?
There is another variable which seems to have increased significantly over recent decades and is responsible for all the anthropogenic warming – it is called green funding.
And propaganda, rendering homo sapiens, homo stupidus. The matrix is very good at control and brainwashing.
To the tune of coming trillions!
Whooo you cad! Why didn’t you tell the rest of us about this? Does Antonio Guterres know about it? Please advise him of it,.. it may stop him from being a monumental twathead!
I can’t imagine any force, natural or supernatural, that could achieve that
You do realise that that is an out-of-control fusion reactor, don’t you? It should be banned.
If Billy Gates had his way it would be
Remove the B and the G, you get “ill ates” which is the name of his new insect protein company.
He absolutely would. CO2 is currently 420PPM – one of the lowest points in the Earth’s history but Bill Gates and his batshit mates want to ‘scrub’ it from our atmosphere. Nobody seems to have pointed out to him that if it drops below 250PPM everything on the planet dies. Including Gates.
It’s a bit like saying that my living room isn’t so much being heated by the roaring wood-burning stove, as it is from the CO2 I’m exhaling from my mouth!
Earth sits in relatively close proximity to the sun WITHIN the heliosphere (the sun’s atmosphere). Along with geothermal energy, it is one of the two original sources of all the earth’s heat. You could fit about 1.3 million earths within the sun, and it accounts for roughly 99% of the mass of the solar system. It’s like a grain of sand a metre or so away from a giant bonfire… But of course solar activity can have nothing at all do with climate change – it’s all our fault, obviously!
Thank you for an excellent article, a touch of common sense amongst so much shrieking and hysteria. Who would have thought that a chain of active volcano’s in antarctica, would not cause some warming of those waters.
There’s only one (1) thing causing a major, emergency-power requiring event, to which there is only one (1) solution? Which solution, by pure coincidence (of course), can only be provided by multi-billionaires and their acolyte politician buddies who force taxpayers to pay billions in tax money straight into the multi-billionaires pockets? And the multi-billionaires will then turn out to have nothing by way of solution and will then gaslight the entire world saying they and their whore politician buddies never, ever violated any laws, constitutions, fundamental rights, never thieved off the taxpayer and only ever meant to help mankind and it was just ever such bad luck that it failed and they got miserably rich?
Just because the vaxx was not the solution to the “pandemic”, surely does not mean that eradicating all cows and cars on earth is not the solution to “climate change”?
I’d say even Hollywood hacks would think this script is too worn and incredible now, but looking at all the dimbulbs and their EVs and vegan obsession, I guess not. Not being a scientist, maybe I’m just not capable of seeing how cow farts will cause the world to wither and die.
A group of oceanographers led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego identified in total 19,325 new volcanoes, or seamounts, to add to the existing known total of 24,643.
To be clear seamounts are mostly extinct volcanoes and these are only new in the sense that they are newly discovered. They haven’t suddenly popped up! Nor has oceanographers’ estimate of the total number of sea mounts changed (it is about 100,000 depending on how you define them). All that has happened is that a lot more have been identified. Perhaps it is not surprising that the main stream media have made little of this research.
I should add that the referenced paper did not “Uncover the Role of Undersea Volcanoes in Climate Change”. All it did was map sea mounts. In fact there is no mention of climate in the paper at all!
Chris Morrison’s article made it very clear that these are discoveries of existing seamounts and I don’t think anyone would imagine that they’ve suddenly popped up.
And also his article doesn’t claim that the referenced paper explicitly uncovers ‘the role of undersea volcanoes in climate change’. The headline may suggest it, but I suspect that the Daily Sceptic’s clickbait headlines are not written by the writers of the articles.
The headline may suggest it, but I suspect that the Daily Sceptic’s clickbait headlines are not written by the writers of the articles.
Whoever wrote it, the headline is false and should be corrected.
I thought false headlines were a stock in trade of global warming orthodoxy.
And I feel I should remind you that the undersea volcanoes are likely to be in all stages of their lives. I understand that the continents are still subject to movement of tectonic plates and fresh volcanoes arise as a consequence of that, to put it simply for you, molten rock and associated gases ooze out wherever the plates separate or come together. The rock oozing out tends to be quite hot and the gases both carbon and sulphur oxides.
I remind you that putting hot rocks in a pot is one traditional way of cooking.
See your point, both sides of the science should be considered
Especially as we have knowledge of only 5% of the worlds seabed! (We are more knowledgeable about the surface of the moon!)
Just reading Michael Palin’s book on the first Antarctic expedition, Erebus. Once they breached the pack ice they soon found a couple of volcanoes – Mt Erebus and Mt Terror on Ross Island.
Back in the seventies people like Stephen Schneider were concerned about global cooling. Today these people have forgotten all about global cooling are now on the global warming gravy train. OfCourse the solution to both these crises was———More Government. mmmm. These people come from the “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste” department of government. But it is still the case that a beautiful hypothesis is easily slain by an ugly fact, and when it comes to climate change there are tons of ugly facts flying around. Not that you would know it because BBC and the rest of the bought and paid for media keep them swept firmly under the carpet ———–SSSSHHHHHH.
How on earth do we have the Arrogance to believe we control anything when we’ve only been on the planet for the last 30 seconds of a 24 hour clock?
We are not the owners of this ball! just temporary custodians!
Life will do what it wants, it doesn’t need a verdict from us!
We should be at nature’s feet in humble thankfulness, not spitting in its eye!
Where’s Greta? Obviously learned that all she spake was put in her mouth by others! Hence the quietness when having to speak for herself. A lot has changed since her future being “stolen”! Nothing has changed, and there lies her dumbness! Proof? Pudding? Strangley, the sea hasn’t engulfed her house since she was 15!
She has single handedly done more damage the the world than any human in history! I hope in her “stolen future” she is proud of that fact!
“…runs the risk of opening discussion about the natural forces surrounding the constantly changing climate”
Please, please please… there are multiple climates on earth, not one. As well as the six major climate zones as defined by the large atmospheric cells, driven by the rotation of the earth and the mass of the atmosphere, there are multiple climates within geographic regions, for example Ethiopia has 14 climates which range from Hot Desert to Humid Subtropical to Subpolar Oceanic.
Climate is defined as “the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.” Therefore how would anyone characterize the Earth’s climate (singular)? In addition many people will live on the boundaries between all these climates and will experience change because there is considerable turbulence within the atmosphere and oceans. So far the various tree lines around the world are exactly where they were 200 or more years ago. Russia has not observed the tree line moving north and trees are not moving up mountain ranges. In addition, the six main climate zones mark out, or determine where the rain forests and deserts are and I cannot see how a small increase in the proportion of a trace gas is going to upset any of the convergence zones.
Spot on.
fake climate scientists ignore Undersea Volcanoes
************************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Great article. I’d like to know how much CO2 these new volcanos are emitting each year of the 97% natural portion and frame it against the £3 trillion (or 43 million nurses) we’re spending in an apparent ‘fight’ with the UK’s anthropogenic 0.00001% portion. Does anyone know what the annual overall volcanic contribution to CO2 is?
volcanic emissions account for less than 1% of CO2 inputs. Human activities account for about 3% but that 3% is responsible for almost all the increase over the last two centuries. Prior to that CO2 levels had hardly changed for thousands of years. CO2 inputs (including volcanoes) had been in balance with outputs.
There are lots of places where heat from the earth’s inner layers escapes. These include volcanoes on earth and under the sea, and smaller vents around which a selection of organisms is able to tolerate high heat. The activity of all these varies. We know that major eruptions on land can spill enough stuff (dust and gas) to cause global cooling. We know that underwater eruptions cause sea warming which will affect ocean currents, as will changes in the topography of the ocean floor. None of this is man made and man cannot alter it.
Other causes of localised climate change include deforestation and river diversion. These are man made but may produce profound change that by the butterfly effect causes more distant change. Thus Himalayan deforestation causes a failure of water holdback and contributes to flooding in the Pakistan plains.
Given all of this what is needed is a careful analysis of how much each contributes to climate change, and what each actually does temperature-wise, up or down. I suspect that global emissions are a minute percentage.
Yet another great piece, Chris.
Just a reminder that Prof. Ian Plimer’s brilliant book “Heaven and Earth”, way back in 2009, pointed out how many undersea volcanos were known then, and pointed out that this number was without doubt grossly underestimated.(Only a brief mention in a very thorough discussion of Climate, but picked on by the GangGreen zealots even then.)
For this, he got Hedge Fund fraudster Jeremy Grantham’s Imperial College Climate Rottweiler, Bob Ward, to run one of his bogus attacks on Plimer in the Times and George Monbiot to ‘interview’ Plimer on Aussie TV.
“What a rude young man!” as Plimer pointed out when the Moonbat spewed out his lies but refused to engage in any discussion.
Fortunately, His dopey Majesty Charles III’s wise old dad had read the book and arranged to discuss the implications face to face with Plimer and Nigel Lawson.
I’d bet anything, that Charles never even bothered to pick it up.
“Carbon dioxide is well mixed in the atmosphere so it is a valid scientific question to ask why it only warns the surface in this one patch?”
A very good question.
When I was fourteen, I asked my geography teacher a very similar question about The Hole in The Ozone Layer ™ – why it was only over Antarctica.
I also asked him when The Hole first appeared.
No, I never did get any answers from him.
When I was fourteen, I asked my geography teacher a very similar question about The Hole in The Ozone Layer ™ – why it was only over Antarctica.
I also asked him when The Hole first appeared.
I am sorry that your geography teacher was so ill informed – but of course I don’t know when you were 14. Nowadays the answers to both questions are available on the internet. The second question is easily answered. The hole was predicted in theory from the 1970s but first observed by the British Antarctic Survey in 1985.
The answer to the first question is more complicated.
The ozone hole over Antarctica is formed by a slew of unique atmospheric conditions over the continent that combine to create an ideal environment for ozone destruction.
As spring comes to Antarctica, the PSC’s melt in the stratosphere and release all of the halogenated compounds that were previously absorbed to the cloud. In the antarctic summer, high energy photons are able to photolyze the halogenated compounds, freeing halogen radicals that then catalytically destroy O3. Because Antarctica is constantly surrounded by a polar vortex, radical halogens are not able to be diluted over the entire globe. The ozone hole develops as result of this process.