Listening to the negative commentary and sentiment about the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, mainly emanating from Western Europe, has been an interesting exercise in affirming the power of historical revisionism, especially in serving the interests of those who find themselves on the dominant side of the historical equation.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino, in his admittedly banal and irrational tirade against criticism of the World Cup in Qatar, made a telling comment that bears repeating as we are forced to deal with the self-righteous criticism of the Qatari FIFA World Cup from the West, “We have been told many, many lessons from some Europeans, from the western world. I think for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.”
Crikey mate, bull’s eye!!! Talk about the “pot calling the kettle black” to use a cliché, even at the risk of being accused of whataboutism in doing so. A cursory glance at history leads one to ask the pertinent question: do we (and the Qataris) really need a lecture from the West about upholding and respecting the human rights of “others” as well as respect for the human lives of the “others”?
Even looking at contemporary times and moving away from merely focusing on historical facts, here are a few hard truths that the self-righteous Westerners who are criticising and ridiculing the World Cup in Qatar will not want to acknowledge or perhaps they are conveniently overlooking: the United States of America and its European allies supply nearly two thirds of all arms that are transferred to the Middle East and these are arms that have been proven to be the tools that are used to fuel even more conflict and bring about more human rights abuses and loss of civilian lives in the region.
Between 2010 and 2019, the United Kingdom (UK) had a combined $125 billion worth of arms exports, with sixty percent of those being purchased by Middle Eastern countries such as Kuwait, Qatar (go figure okes), Saudi Arabia, Oman, with Qatar for example purchasing Brimstone missiles from the UK. The Middle East made up seventy seven percent of the UKs arms exports in 2018 and in 2019 that figure stood at fifty eight percent.
These arms supplies have not only played a significant role in perpetuating conflict within the region, leading to the loss of many innocent lives (for example, in Yemen, arms supplied by the UK and the USA through their alliance with Saudi Arabia have led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians), but they have also been instrumental in propping up brutal regimes with no regard for human rights like Saudi Arabia, all of which makes one wonder why all the self-righteous indignation about Qatar and its human rights record, from the arch proponents of human rights abuses and lack of respect for the human lives of the “others”, when one looks globally and historically, the West?
So, next time you hear a Westerner telling you how conflicted they are about this World Cup, whether they can indeed watch and enjoy it in good conscience, given what they claim is Qatar’s reputation for human rights abuses and lack of respect for the human lives of those labourers who they import from Asia and of course the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community. (I am not downplaying nor dismissing the significance of these issues, so we must not make the classic mistake of tackling a both/and issue with an either/or mindset here). Here one should remind them of these poignant words from the twentieth century American political philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr in his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics:
“The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterised by universal self-deception and hypocrisy. The unconscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values, which we have noted in analysing national attitudes, is equally obvious in the attitude of classes.
The reason why privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only, by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole.
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.”
Or, at the risk of sounding like a less enlightened (less erudite too one might add) version of one Archie Mafeje, when one sees all these hypocritical and self-righteous critiques of Qatar from the West, one is left with the question: does the West and do Westerners think that their historically unjust and immoral actions have become constitutionally acceptable and morally justifiable all because of the passage of time, hence their confidence in standing from the rooftop and preaching to the rest of the world about the wrongfulness and immorality of this FIFA World Cup being held in Qatar?
Mugabe Ratshikuni works for the Gauteng provincial government; He is an activist with a passion for social justice and transformation. He writes here in his personal capacity.
