The World Cup soccer tournament, the most watched sports event in the world, is going to begin on November 20th. The tournament will be played in Qatar, a small autocratic monarchy which, thanks to oil revenues, is one of the richest countries in the world. To build the stadiums needed for the World Cup, Qatar brought in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Their treatment of these workers, as well as other issues, has created outrage across the globe and elicited calls for a boycott.
Amnesty International has written a detailed report about what went on with migrant workers who worked on construction projects for the World Cup. Poor labourers from countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines were lured to Qatar by promises of well-paid work. When they got there, they were herded into dirty, overcrowded living quarters, with six to eight men in a single room. Most migrants had to pay exorbitant recruitment fees to scumbag agents to get the jobs in the first place, leaving them in debt and unable to quit, and some had their passports confiscated to force them to stay. They worked up to sixteen hours a day in savage heat, which in summer routinely reached 50 degrees Celsius. They were lied to about what they would be paid and many weren’t paid for months or paid much less than they were owed. Thousands of workers died, mainly from dehydration and heat exhaustion; the actual number is hard to ascertain because the Qatar government covered it up. I don’t know about you, but this sounds pretty much like slave labour to me.
Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA (the governing body of international soccer), held a press conference to respond to the protests. Infantino, a talentless petty bureaucrat who has been accused of corruption and misuse of FIFA funds in the past, used his platform to go on an hour-long tirade. Among the many stupid things he said, Infantino spit out this doozy: “I think for what we Europeans have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” It’s a classic deflection, using history only as a self-serving weapon in an argument where you attempt to drag your opponent’s morality down to your own level. The far-right uses this type of rhetoric to cover up their utter moral bankruptcy. The far-left (think Noam Chomsky) uses it to justify their sanctimony and utterly naïve idealism.
Infantino’s position can be summed up as follows: he doesn’t give a crap about the horrors the migrants endured, and if you do, you’re just a hypocrite. It’s an argument fit for a child, right out of the “No, you are!” school of playground repartee. Does ‘Europe’ have a long history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, conquest and subjugation? Yes. Does this mean that Europeans in 2022 have no right to protest one of the worst cases of human rights abuses in recent memory? Of course not. To my knowledge, no European government is employing slave labor today. Qatar, however, absolutely did.
It's not like Qatar is a wonderful place besides this little bit of forced labour, as the country has an abysmal record on many other issues. Women who have sex outside of marriage are imprisoned, homosexuality is completely illegal, flogging is used as punishment for minor offences and a poet was sentenced to life imprisonment for criticizing the regime. And it’s not like FIFA is otherwise an exemplar of integrity and morality; it's probably the most corrupt organization in international sports. The only reason Qatar got to host the event is because it paid bribes to FIFA officials (just like Russia did in 2018). FIFA rakes in more than 2 billion USD a year in revenue, most of which goes back to the football federations of the countries who participate in FIFA’s competitions. But 200 million USD gets paid out in compensation to its nearly 1000 officials, bureaucrats and executives. Infantino himself makes an annual salary of 3.2 million USD, or about 1213 times what the average migrant made (if he got paid at all). Who’s the hypocrite now, sparky?
Because of all this, I’ve decided that I simply won’t watch the World Cup. I’m a huge fan of Germany, and it will be hard for me not to watch them play. Television ratings drive sports, and FIFA has collected some 3 billion USD in TV rights for the 2022 tournament. If people refuse to watch, the low ratings might cut into that revenue for the next Cup and force FIFA to make changes. That’s being extremely optimistic. Realistically, I’m not under any illusions that a boycott will do anything to help the victims of this disgusting Qatari regime. The only thing that will benefit from my boycott will be my conscience, but that’s good enough.
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