We drool. With this World Cup we drool. It must be the luxury, the glamour, the exotic. The different. It must be the spell of the extravagant insolence of extreme wealth. That dazzle of the unusual. The truth is that we drool. This World Cup can with everything. With blood, with the dead, with slave labor, with corruption, with the LGTBI community. And keep going. Resist. There is something of a shipwreck in this collective drooling. In this aberrant dislocation of reality.
In these times that are so inauspicious for utopia, the excesses of the dehumanization of the other arise from the classic underworld. That space of moral misery that inhabits us and discourages us. This is how this World Cup was born. Perfectly “designed”, with its visible face and its otherness. With his class grudge, parallel to his gender grudge, treasuring a tragic optimism.
We live in a time of interpretation of reality, with a certain orphan by the facts. Where are the facts? They hide them from us. But they are. The International Trade Union Confederation calculates around 5,900 deaths in the construction of infrastructure and stadiums for the World Cup in Qatar. The NGO Foundation for International Democracy declared two years ago: “The whole planet must know that the 2022 World Cup will be played in blood-stained stadiums.” The deaths are preceded by the continuous exploitation of slave labor – the Kafala system – a model sustained by the rigid control and monitoring of workers, which authorizes and allows companies to restrict rights and freedoms. In this quasi-feudal setting, thousands of immigrants from Southeast Asia arrive in Qatar as the new slaves of modernity. They come to build their cities, their hotels, their stadiums. They don’t want them, but they need them. The big corporations withhold their passports, prevent them from traveling through the country, prohibit them from mixing with the locals, contact, friction. They hide them. They are hollow, empty bodies, like tan-skinned Russian matryoshkas.
Callousness seems to be the emotional fabric of our time. Only one voice was raised. Just one. With its black sorrow and its desert solitude: “A World Cup here is unacceptable. This World Cup was granted under unacceptable conditions. We should think about the injured and the relatives of the deceased”expressed at the FIFA Congress in Doha, the president of the Norwegian Football Federation, Lise Klaveness. The rest of the 211 international federations kept silent. She was immediately crossed by the secretary general of Qatar 2022, Hassan Al Thawadi: “She must be more polite. Before talking about Qatar, you have to know its people and its culture. I invite you to visit us and let us show you the country”. Klaveness’s response was immediate: “We have been to Qatar before, you invited us. That is why we make this plea for human rights, we have to take advantage of the opportunity to do so.” The Organizing Committee spokesperson joined the “party”: “The country will welcome fans of the LGTBI community and allow them to attend matches. But displays of affection on public roads are prohibited.”, he expressed. A soft invitation to stop “being” to be “another”. To be without “being”. A miserable World Cup.
I leave it written Rafael Chirbes: “There is no medicine that can cure the origin of class, not even the money that may come later, or the social prestige that is acquired. It is a wound from whose pain you defend yourself, and even before your own already declassed children you pull out the animal nails from below”.
Us, we keep drooling. Drooling over the huge mountain of the dead.
