Sport, nationalism and war

Nationalists are moderately intellectualised football hooligans. Politicians enjoying wars, as they all do, are popular nationalists. Only in Gordon Brown's case, not that popular. Brown's war is the one he inherited from Blair of course and as unsurprisingly the PM has made one of those 'surprise' visits (that really surprise no one) to the battlefront in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan, hitherto eclipsed by its sister conflict in Iraq, is not going at all well for the occupying forces. Resistance units have recently inflicted relatively heavy losses on western forces, most notably this week after an ambush left ten French soldiers dead and scores wounded. Three Polish occupiers have also been killed along with a Canadian and a Briton.
The war is 'justified' by threadbare talk from Paris, London and Washington as defending democracy, protecting 'our values' and so on, talk that nobody believes or is meant to believe. The British PM's rhetoric, though, has got so desperate that he has fallen back to using sporting metaphors for the occupation. It is rendolent of Major's sad talk of Englishness as being cricket, nuns of bikes and so on. Brown's time as PM is over but even so one would think his speeech writers would try a bit harder than this,

"Addressing around 300 troops who gathered in the 39C heat, he said: "You are the heroes of our country ... You are the frontline against the Taliban... What you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain.
"This week we are celebrating the Olympics where we have had great success. People have been winning medals in areas where we have been breaking ground. But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication. You make our country proud every day of the week, every week of the year."

To compare sport with occupying foreign countries is an intellectual failure of a thing to do. On one front, though, it is revealing in the sense that it shows precisely what the elites really think about the overblown sports day dragging on in Bejing atm. None of that spreading toleration and understanding htrough competitive but friendly sporting activities. No. This is about winning, supremacy and humiliating your opponents. One must win at all costs. It also reveals the elites' ideas about what war is - a great game vicariously played out by the untermenschen, but ultimately bestowing glory on them and their great nations. The league table for occupation has the US at the top and the correlation between that and the actual medal table is striking enough.

The Olympics is dead and was only artificially reanimated in the nineteenth centruy to generate jingoism and nationalism. The undead Brown playing homage to it and to the dead in Afghanistan is too necrophiliac a thought to carry on with.