Euro 2024: The Football Tournament That Wasn't
‘‘Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided […] will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual, and economical exhaustion.’’
That is a line from an apocryphal letter claimed to have been written by the 19th century American freemason, Albert Pike, in which he made a few amazingly accurate predictions about the future of civilisation. He never wrote those words, but by the gods, someone should have. Does that sentence not perfectly describe the state of the West right now? Divided and fighting to the point of complete exhaustion.
Exhaustion.
You feel it when riding a bus filled with the circus noises of rowdy passengers, little black devices in hand blaring a cacophony of jungle beats for everyone else to hear.
You feel it when logging on to social media and are immediately beset by adverts from OnlyFans “online sex workers”, and the ramblings of emotionally incontinent journalists— each one trying to outdo the other in posting the most melodramatic provocation.
You feel it when sitting down to watch a film, only be to ambushed by feminist and anti-white propaganda delivered with all the subtlety and grace of a drunken homeless schizophrenic.
We live in a society. And it is exhausting.
Like a soldier defending a fortress from a besieging army sending wave after wave of squadrons towards the parapets, it’s almost impossible to enjoy a moment’s respite from the attacks on your physical, moral, and spiritual constitution. Not even festive sporting events provide refuge. In fact, they have now become the battering ram used to smash the walls of your mind.
Three years ago, when Euro 2020 was held in 2021 due to Covid-19, the tournament was saturated in exhausting politics. There was controversy over the vaccination status of players and fans. Yes, remember those days? Race politics smothered the event more than anything else, however. From the England and Belgium team still ‘‘taking the knee’’ in the name of George Floyd and ‘‘anti-racism’’, to The Economist magazine asking why the Italy team had no black players, all throughout the tournament, the storm clouds of racial politics hung over every match. The British government and media class probably were the most obsessed with ramrodding race and immigration into what should be, what used to be, just a month-long football competition between European peoples. London Mayor Sadiq Khan and even members of the Conservative-In-Name-Only party celebrated the ‘‘diversity’’ of the England team and went so far as to say that the team’s success (England reached the Euro Cup final for the first time in its history) was thanks to the country’s immigration policy and black players with migrant backgrounds. When those very same black players failed to score decisive penalty kicks in the final against Italy, a maelstrom of race grievance-grifting and race lecturing swept through the country.
A year later, the football played at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was more like a distraction, a backdrop, to the political matches taking place off the pitch. This time, race politics gave way to gay politics, as liberal progressives from Western nations protested the host nation’s no-tolerance stance on homosexuals. The German squad pulled a stunt by covering their mouths during their team photo, an act meant to represent the oppression and restrictions on freedom of expression gays and other people considered social abnormals suffer in conservative Qatar. The tournament’s Qatari organisers warned the captain of the England team not to wear a rainbow coloured ‘‘One Love’’ armband or he would be punished with a yellow card and ultimately a match suspension.