By Marc Perelman
Globalized recreation as savage spectacle and “opium of the people.”
Marc Perelman pulls no punches during this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the “recent kind of barbarism” that's the international wearing occasion. disregard the Olympics and think about, below Perelman’s assistance, the ledger of inequities maintained via such supposedly innocuous video games: they've got supplied a smokescreen for the forcible removing of “undesirables;” aided governments within the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an the place doping is extra an relevant than an aberration; and built the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs ‘sporn’, an extra twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.
Drawing examples from the trendy background of the overseas carrying occasion, Perelman argues that today’s colosseums, upheld as examples of “health,” became the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on pageant, status and elitism.
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Extra info for Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague
Sample text
All the contestants have to do is run, jump, throw and swim ever faster, ever further! Athletes’ bodies in consequence are increasingly subjected to a regime of permanent training, of early specialization, of the extreme visualization of bodies deformed by sustained effort in a restricted range. ’ This principle lies at the heart of Olympic ideology. It aspires to place Olympism on the level of the other human rights recognized by sovereign nations. In the case of competitive sport, this is absolute nonsense.
At that already remote time, the very idea of objecting to the increasingly globalized reality of sport, or suggesting a critical understanding of it, seemed outrageous to many, for sport was a social phenomenon that did not permit reflection, let alone thought, and aroused absolutely no opposition. For although in the post-May ’68 period most of the main institutions (school, army, family, art, justice) had been subjected to uncompromising criticism, sport seemed to have escaped opprobrium and was regarded as above suspicion, despite the participation of a few sportsmen in, for example, the occupation of the French Football Federation (FFF) headquarters.
The new sporting order Obviously, sport is not quite ‘as old as the world’. It was born in England, the ‘classical’ place of origin (according to Marx) of the capitalist mode of production, now planetary in scope. Originally a class practice, sport developed during the nineteenth century in tandem with the consolidation of imperialism. The different sports (rugby, cricket, soccer, athletics) spread to other countries and took root in new territories often colonized through military conquest. Competitive sport owes its rapid development to reduced working hours, the rapid expansion of cities, the establishment of good transport networks and latterly the deployment of an immense media infrastructure.