Why do the Eagles get to play?

cc Getty
Bryan Habana scores his hat-trick against the American Eagles at the 2015 Rugby World Cup

On Wednesday the South African Springboks thrashed the American Eagles in the rugby world cup. I find it odd.

For 21 years South Africa was correctly denied the right to play sport in the free world because of apartheid, only being re-admitted in time for the 1992 Olympics. Before that, up to around 1965, its racially discriminatory policies (that indirectly killed millions in the Southern African region) were deemed okay by the big world, the First World countries, provided First World business wasn’t compromised. It was only when the global outcry against South Africa began to make a dent in gold and diamond sales that something was done.

Today the same criteria are at work. The USA is the biggest terrorist organisation the world has produced in its near 5 billion years of existence - a fact acknowledged, written about and apologised for by hundreds of thinking Americans.

Before his death Chalmers Johnson wrote on the horrors of revenge the USA can expect to reap in the future and Howard Zinn spent most of the second half of his life correcting the nonsense that has been put out as American history.

Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Daniel Elsberg, Benjamin Barber, Robert Reich and Craig Roberts are providing proper critique on the true America, and behind them the younger ones; Richard Wolff, Woody Harrelson, John Stockwell, Karen U. Kwiatkowski and so on.

Dozens of American TV programmes, radio stations, magazines and press releases attest to the terror activities of their nation. Democracy at Work, the Skeptical Enquirer, Daily Beast, Real News, Jewish Voice for Peace, Alternative View TV and Rolling Stone are all there at the coal face, telling it like it is. But the world is not yet listening.

As the recent past in South Africa proves, the move away from apartheid had nothing whatsoever to do with reforming society or making South Africa a better place to live. Instead it had all to do with expanding the Greed Capitalist, Maximise Profit at Whatever Cost, American Born and Bred strategy that underpins today’s conflicts. Today South Africa’s poor are getting poorer, and the ever shrinking pool of the well-off is hoarding more and more money.

The USA’s policies actually have little to do with the States of America or the people in those states, instead it’s the united conglomeration of big business that is doing the damage, wasting what little resources are left and destroying the world while the money flows one way. Barrack Obama has just ‘apologised’ for bombing a hospital in Afghanistan.

‘War is just a racket … It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses …’ said America’s most decorated soldier in modern times, Major General Smedley Butler.

Back in the 1990s William Blum wrote '... a few million people have died in the American holocaust and many more millions have been condemned to lives of misery and torture as a result of US interventions extending from China and Greece to Afghanistan and Iraq ... since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries.'

They’ve done a lot more damage since then as the flood of refugees attest.

Is the United States currently that version of South Africa before ’65, a country with policies that destory the lives of millions in the pursuit of maintaining privilege, that the rest of us somehow forgives? What, I wonder, will it take to make the world shake its head and see that America is a fascist dictatorship, brutalising the world? Why, I wonder, in the arena of global sports, is America welcome?

Instead of allowing the US to compete at events such as the Word Cup I say send them home, cancel their passports, and tell them to keep those funny bits of paper they optimistically call the ‘dollar’.

cc Getty
The 1981 Springbok tour to New Zealand was marred by protests due to South Africa’s racist Apartheid policies. Why are the American Eagles allowed to play at the 2015 Rugby World Cup?

* A former soldier and District Commissioner in then Rhodesia, Douglas Schorr is today a committed critic of capitalism and colonial legacies, citing them as the source of poverty in Africa. His first book, The Myth of Smith, an autobiographical account of his awakening to the reality of the Rhodesian Bush War while involved in it, is available for sale on Amazon Kindle. His second book Mr Boomslang & 7 Other Rhodesian Fireside Tales is available on the same platform. Schorr blogs at www.douglasschorr.com Follow him on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates.

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