The Times, or at least The Sunday Times, has a history of getting things wrong about Hitler.
And it seems to have happened again. This was the response by Schalke 04, a German football team, to the latest mistake…
The Times, or at least The Sunday Times, has a history of getting things wrong about Hitler.
And it seems to have happened again. This was the response by Schalke 04, a German football team, to the latest mistake…
Most of the following things have happened. See if you can spot which one didn’t.
All of the above are examples of collective punishment.
Very few people would find the homicidal rationalisations that people give for such actions to be sane. In fact, they would generally be disgusted.
Or would they?
There are certain situations where some people actively support such actions.
I don’t mean they support the mass killing of anyone who happens to live near the person or people who have caused damage or offence, I mean that they suppport the principle of collective punishment.
And this is your example….
The level of violence at Euro 2016 has been alarming, but more alarming for me has been the willingness of both UEFA, the media and also individuals to support the idea of collective punishment.
Experts believe that there are around 150 Russian hooligans who are organised and have even trained for this. Bad people, no doubt. However, for me it does not follow that as a result of the behaviour of these people, 5000 Russian supporters should be deported and the Russian team should be expelled from the tournament. This has been threatened by UEFA and supported broadly across the media.
There have also been problems with England, Croatia and Poland.
Did the players do it? Did the majority of Russian/English/Croatian/Polish supporters do it? No. So why should the rest of them be subjected to collective punishment?
If you can’t justify it in the situations I gave above at the start of this article, then I don’t see how you can morally or logically justify it in the situation of this tournament, or, because it is widely done, in sporting situations in general.
A simple stark fact about a crime or an offence, whether it be real or only perceived, if you can’t find who did it, you cannot justifiably punish anyone. I know it is a difficult thing to accept in situations that are both volatile and emotional, when people are crying for someone’s head, but you can’t seriously make an appeal to justice and fairness by asking for revenge on a group of people, most of whom had nothing to do with the crime or crimes in question.
You find the people who actually did it, then you follow the law. Anything else is revenge, not justice.
This is the first in a new series of podcasts looking at issues around the world.
Future episodes will come from far and wide, but we start in North England, 27 years ago.
Mark Frankland was in the stadium on the day the Hillsborough disaster happened.
I asked him about his experience and what followed.
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I have an article on the Hillsborough situation that I will put out in the next few days but, for the moment, I have to say that James O’Brien’s comments about Kelvin Mackenzie are a pretty good summation of one part of the story…
Some West Ham fans showing Chelsea fans the correct train etiquette…
Don’t you just love Westminster.
BBC had the story in the image below up today.
The MP in question is Damian Collins (that isn’t him in the photo, that’s Chuck Blazer).
You might be interested in this article about Collins in the Independent. It’s about MPs who own homes in London yet still claim rent.
Those two links in conjunction makes me wonder about the other thing we learned about Westminster today, which is b
asically that they are destroying expenses records to make sure no one can look into them and some other MPs felt fit to comment on it.
I can think of another one who has had some serious questions about his expenses over the years, but given his current position of running for what no one has even tried to make an important post yet, I’m not sure any journalists will bother to bring it up.
In this little piece about the amazing story of the small Basque team SD Eibar, who have made it into the top division in Spain, there’s a little mural on the wall behind them at one point. You might want to take a look at their away strip too.
This is amazingly well done…
A short but interesting documentary on the subject of match-fixing from Al-Jazeera.