Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-07-Speech-4-122"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20000907.2.4-122"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
At a summit in Davos, Zbigniev Brzezinski, President Carter’s adviser, spoke about the need to use sport, show business and entertainment as a pressure valve for the millions of marginalised people that unrestrained free trade produces every year in a general free market economy. A word was even coined for this new version of ‘bread and circus’. It is ‘tittytainment’, formed from the American slang for breasts and the word entertainment.
The lesson was learned and the idea of sport as an entertainment, as an industry and as the opium of the impoverished masses of the world, took off. There is an endless succession of world cups, European cup finals, Grand Prix competitions, the Olympics of Helsinki and Sydney, football, tennis, races, car rallies and horse races.
All this is done in the name of the social function of sport, which produces healthy minds in healthy bodies, to the point that the Treaty of Amsterdam now includes a declaration on sport emphasising “its role in forging identity and bringing people together”.
Indeed, we all know that, thanks to sport and to the Olympic Games, the Peloponnesian War never happened, that Athens and Sparta truly loved one another and that the circus brought the gladiators together. From the evidence of the Heysel stadium, with its death toll, to the British hooligans at the UEFA Cup in Copenhagen and elsewhere, not forgetting the case of Nivel, the French policeman murdered by German supporters, let alone the Turkish ‘tourists’, the French PSG and others, it is quite obvious that sport makes people more sociable, tolerant and cooperative and fosters all those other qualities which have been promoted so well by the French suburbs and inner cities, since the World Cup, through the festive bonfires created by setting fire to cars.
Nor did high-level sport produce dozens of cases of rape and sexual attacks in the Olympic village in Atlanta; and French tennis champion, Nathalie Tauziat, who wrote a book criticising the very emotionally charged atmosphere behind the scenes of the tennis courts, was obviously eliminated from the French team selection in Sydney in the name of the team spirit and significant social values fostered by sport, according to Mr Mennea, the rapporteur for the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport.
Once this balm and these nice sentiments have been applied to the galling wounds of real life, our rapporteur becomes well aware that sport is not a cultural phenomenon but a political and strategic instrument used to enslave the citizen, who is made to forget the loss of his civic powers through a form of televisual training developing age-old instincts.
Share-capital companies, sports-club factories, from Manchester United to AC Milan, not to mention the US basketball and golf circuits, doping, the industry of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, which have left Pankov’s Germany and the Soviet Union to spread throughout the world, Adidas, Nike and other sponsors who want to see results, transfers to the tune of dollars beyond our wildest dreams, the EU Court of Justice’s judgments, including the famous 1995 Bosman judgment that everyone criticised but that ensures the free movement of young sportsmen and women and sports merchandise, the huge commercialisation, the alleged re-broadcasting rights and the collusion between sport and business – that is the real face of the industrialised world of sport that comes under our Community legislation.
It is from that manipulated world that we must protect real sport, the amateur sport practised in thousands of clubs, which have limited resources and survive thanks only to the devotion, ability and generosity of a huge number of voluntary workers.
That is where we must put our public funding, instead of investing it for the benefit of the tin gods of world stadiums."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples