I Support Quitting
In the case of Eastern European soccer fans yelling racist taunts.
The players should walk off the field if this occurs. The tribalism and racism in soccer refuses to die. It's not like we recently crossed the color barrier or something in the sport and fans need to come around. This is the resurfacing of ugly, reactionary impulses, and in the recent past was used as inspiration to genocide in Yugoslavia. Especially in Europe right now, where the economic collapse is threatening social stability, there should be zero tolerance for this type of extreme behavior, especially in a publicly accepted forum. If fans cannot regulate the "few bad apples" and instead become hotbeds of racism, the players should walk off the field together.
I'm reading In The Garden of Beasts. It is about Nazi Germany during the period of 1933-1934. The behavior of ordinary German's is so repulsive and disgusting, it literally makes me dislike German people of today -- that in their blood -- they could accept such day to day petty meanness. Many American individuals in Germany at the time were beaten up by "bad apples" when they refused to heil hitler. They said they were rouge young punks or overzealous storm troopers. Any attempt at finding justice was laughed off and spun and dismissed. Slowly, the Americans who refused to heil would leave Germany, the ones who begrudgingly did it, stayed. Small things. Everyone knows the rest of the story.
2 comments:
"It is about Nazi Germany during the period of 1933-1934. The behavior of ordinary German's is so repulsive and disgusting, it literally makes me dislike German people of today -- that in their blood -- they could accept such day to day petty meanness."
I think one might say the same about ordinary white southerners before the Civil Rights era. And it's the problem with movies like "The Help" that they don't grapple with the fact that nice people were complicit and even contributed to such nasty, inhumane behavior. A good movie idea would be to really explore how an otherwise decent person could, within a certain context, be a monster.
fair point, although to be fair - and not to justify the jim crow south or anything - but there was a brutal, nasty history there of slavery and racism - so you would expect racial problems to not be solved over night. the thing with nazi germany was the reactionary element combined with the absolute psychotic nature of hitler and the nazis which took it to a different degree. in any case, i imagine white southerners would take issue with the comparison, although the point about the small day-to-day unfairness is a good one.
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