I can't find decent coverage of the World Cup in the American press. It seems hard just to navigate to a page that shows scores/standings. You have to click through the human-interest garbage stories, which reminds me of watching the Olympics on network television when I was a kid. How many times did I sit there saying, “Get to the hockey game, for crying out loud!” while phony-baloney Frank and Kathy-Lee sat before the fire in their knit sweaters, doing up-close-and-personals to keep the people with the purse (moms) interested?
Plus, the level of journalism in soccer coverage is almost as bad as your local, dying American newspaper.
Here's a screen shot from FOX's coverage.
“Americans give one back, trail of 3-1”?? What the living deuce?
So I went to the Guardian, of all places, for a bit of WC coverage, hoping to avoid too much PC baloney. There was plenty of PC, but at least the writing met sophomore composition level standards.
Here are 3 stories for the current World Cup.
Wait, first off, why am I writing about sports? Who cares about bread and circuses while Western Civilization spirals down the toilet bowl? My journalistic job here in Montana is to cover and promote the resistance, spread the truth, and light a fire for potential freedom patriots and Knights of Christendom all across the land, right?
Well, yes, but one has to allow oneself an occasional break. So this morning I checked the world cup scores just for fun before getting busy. But now I feel I must comment, and I'm stuck inside writing this from the living room, while the sun beckons us to begin our outdoor work at the compound.
story 1- The Power of English when spoken by an angry Frenchman
Lukas reports that the coach of the Saudi Arabian team is a Frenchman who can't speak Arabic, so a translator is needed. Problem is, the only translator available, the Saudis being short on funding, is a guy who only translates from English to Arabic. So Frenchy has to bow to convention and speak the World Language. After a poor performance in the first half, Jean-Claude was furious with the poor performance of his squad, and double-furious that he had to express his displeasure in the language of the infidel (not the players on his team, who average 4.7 veiled, ball-and-chain wives each, but the uncultured Anglo-Americans), he ran onto the field and berated his team, screaming and gesticulating in broken English. Lukas said watching the poor translator try to put it all into Arabic was a good show. The players seemed to just stare dumbly. However, in the second half, Saudi Arabia came out like a bunch of Peter O’Toole-led, take-no-prisoner Bedouins and turned defeat into a victorious slaughter. Was it the coach, or the halftime, locker-room call from the King, who reminded the players that any one of them could be Kashoggied at his whim?
In any case, this leads me to wonder, which foreign accent makes angry-English the most persuasive?
story 2- Japanese fans at it again.
After Japan defeated Germany for the first time in World Cup history, the ecstatic Japanese fans went into a frenzy of destruction. Qatari authorities were caught off guard, as security was light and the riot police were all on duty at the England/France matchup across town. The Japanese fans knocked down the chain link fence set up between them and the German fans, and went on a violent rampage, killing 3 fans from Hamburg, one from Moenchengladbach and one from Sri Lanka, an innocent spectator who should have sat in the neutral zone. Then they left the stadium and proceeded to terrorize the town, setting mosques on fire and throwing rocks at windows. Two Starbucks sustained damage.
Just kidding, what Lukas actually told me was that the Japanese fans, after celebrating the win, proceeded to clean up the stadium, like they always do at World Cups. I know, you didn't fall for that rampaging violence story- Japanese and Germans have of course had the fighting spirit knocked out of them and since 1945 the social-conditioning (deballing) process has continued unabated. Castrated or not, though, it's cool to hear about the Japanese not leaving their trash laying around the stadium, and even picking up other people's mess.
Lukas asked me, “Were those Japanese fans just virtue signaling?”
I said, “maybe a little bit. They’ll probably make hay out of this again in the Japanese media, but I really think those fans would be happy to spend some time cleaning up, even without the attention.”
Story 3. In the battle of the WW2 losers, Germany is humiliated.
You thought I was too hard on the Germans for saying they've been gelded? Well, there's nothing more manly and cool in Germany than being on die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft. And in Germany you really don't even need to say 'Fußball'; just die Nationalmannschaft (the national team), or heck, die Mannschaft is enough.
Well, take a look at the national heroes previous to their 1st round match against Japan, with their virtue beacons set to ‘high’:
My first question is, hey, how many of these guys are actual Germans? The question, “How many of these guys are Japanese?” somehow doesn't pop into my head when I see a photo of the Japanese team.
I hear coastal voices to the west, across the Cascade divide, saying, “Heyyy. Stop thyat! Gyermany is a proposition nation, just like the USA. Anybody can be Gyerman!”
Actually, that is pretty true today; one of my textbooks back at the Japanese high school I worked at said, “Germany is a multicultural nation.” Hmm. It didn’t really seem that way as late as 1988, when I was there, working on a farm. Thank you Frau Commandant Merkel for opening up the floodgates and turning Dusseldorf into Dar es Salaam. Still, it's not impossible that the excited, newly arrived 'war refugee' at the soon-to-be-closed public swimming pool considers himself more German than Afghan or Syrian and therefore should be able to earn a spot on die Mannschaft. In establishing whether these guys are actually Germans, maybe we should ask each player, “Well, do you consider yourself German?”
But I don't have time for that. For simplicity sake, let's just focus on the goal scorers. Let's ask the Japanese heroes first.
Hey, do you guys consider yourselves Japanese?
Asano: なんたる馬鹿げた質問だ! (from Japanese: What kind of goofy question is that, FCOL!)
Doan: その質問であなたがどこに向かっているのかわかりませんが、私の目標は、試合前にドイツで受けた挑発に対する愛国的な反応だと思います. (I don't know where you're going with that question, but I consider my goal a patriotic response to the taunting I got in Germany before the game [Doan plays in the Bundesliga].) *
How about you, Ilkay, do you consider yourself German?
Gundogan: O soruyu geçeceğim. Sonuçta bu futbol, siyaset değil. (from Turkish: Uh, I’ll pass on that. This is soccer, after all, not politics.)
Well, if Gündoğan is going to be evasive, I'll let you decide. Ilkay plays for Manchester City in the Premier League. In 2018, president Erdogan was in England and on his visit he made arrangements to meet with some top Turkish stars in the league. Erdogan, in case you didn't know, is the Turkish president who came to Germany and addressed huge crowds of Turks in Duesseldorf and Cologne, urging his admirers to not assimilate, and make sure their kids learned Turkish before German, etc., to the screaming approval of these expat compatriots.
After the meeting, Gundogan publicly announced that Erdogan is “my president” despite having only German citizenship. According to wikipedia, “The incident caused political controversy in Germany and Gündoğan was jeered by German fans when playing for the national team weeks later.”
A year and a half later, Gundogan was at the center of controversy again when he 'liked' a tweet by a prominent Turk who had praised the Turkish army's incursion in Syria to teach the Kurds a lesson. Gundogan removed his tweet after the uproar and said, "Believe me, after what happened last year, the last thing I wanted was to make a political statement."
Speaking of political statements, why are Gundogan and his teammates covering their mouths in the photo shoot before the game?
To really understand the full meaning of their gesture, you need to play this music while reading the following paragraph:
The reason, you see, is that the members of the German national team had wished to show their support for the persecuted LGBT community by wearing a rainbow armband with an LGBT positive message, but were denied, effectively gagged by FIFA. In protest the players wore rainbow tassels on their warmup shirts and covered their mouths in protest for the pre-game photo, and a spokesman for the team said, “Human rights are non-negotiable…That should be taken for granted, but it still isn’t the case. That’s why this message is so important to us. Denying us the armband is the same as denying us a voice. We stand by our position.”
(You can stop the music now, and come back after your gag break.)
I guess FIFA rules are non-negotiable too because none of the players dared wear the armband and risk being banned from the tournament. Roy Keane, former Ireland captain, said (I paraphrase), “Whattya mean, gagged? Who's gagging them? If you want to make a statement, do it! Who is stopping you? Crikey! Go out there and wear the armband, for heaven's sake!”
I agree, but I'm guessing Keane is saying this because he is woke and fully LGBTQRS...Z-friendly, and actually would support the rainbow-armband schtick, otherwise he wouldn’t be hired as a commentator. It’s likely he wouldn't be in favor of other bold political messages, such as, oh, let’s say, “German national team for Germans.”
Anyway, the ‘Germans' suffered a loss after this silly, virtue-signaling, timid protest, so justice prevails.**
As a side note, I have been 'pre-reading' quite a few YA fantasy books, of late [ with male protagonists ], to make sure they are as woke-free as possible, before purchasing them for my young nephew ( a voracious reader, I am happy to report ). Sadly, I have encountered a fair amount of conspicuous LGBT-positive / normalization messaging, which, moreover, is often inserted in the second book of the series (!), or near the end. Ex: Whispers of the Gods #2, Path of the Dragon Mage #2, The Saga of Hasting the Avenger #2, very end of Raven's Shadow #1, The Remembered War #4 or 5, Rivenworld #1. I guess this makes sense considering that, from what I have heard, publishers are hiring woke consultants, these days, to make sure their production meets all the DIE "representation" checkboxes, and many authors are willing, if not happy, to bend the knee, even when it isn't warranted by the needs of the story. What can I say, woke brainwashing, feminization ( "deballing" ), and capitulation [ ultimately, to globalist heteronomy ] starts early — in Germany, and elsewhere ( but not Japan! ☺ ).