Let’s not pretend we have principles

Or, perhaps better: let’s not allow the elites the luxury of thinking that we believe that they have principles. We have to make it perfectly clear to them that we do not believe the fairy tales that they tell about themselves.

The article The World Cup Should Make Us Rethink Our Understanding of Human Rights by Neil Vallelly (Jacobin) writes,

“Whether spectators care or not is a different question, of course. But the signs are that most football fans would prefer that the World Cup was not taking place in a country with such a terrible human rights record.”

People don’t care enough about human rights to have said anything if the World Cup would have been in the U.S. Qatar is an easy and acceptable target. Everyone can congratulate themselves on standing up now, when it’s easy. No uproar when America hosts or takes part with a dozen active wars of aggression. Hell, I just found out today that the next World Cup in 2026 will take place in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.

Nobody cares how many wars of aggression that U.S. has carried out, how many millions it has killed and starved, how it treats its own people, how it treats labor. None of that matters because the world doesn’t have principles. It just does things that benefit itself. Hating whichever enemy the U.S. empire has selected to hate is what they do. It has nothing to do with principle.

2022 is a grand year for hypocritical and partisan virtue-signaling, starting with the collective west suddenly gaining a distaste for invasions, but, as with the World Cup, only if the perpetrator is an approved villain.