Kristian Williams

For The Comics Journal, I’ve written a review of Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance.  I found the book a bit perplexing.  It is at times moving, but it’s extremely fragmentary — and not exactly a history.

In October, I delivered a lecture suggesting that the Trump administration’s approach to political repression represents a move away from the Counterinsurgency model and toward something more like McCarthyism.  The text of my talk has now been printed in Against the Current.

Earlier this month President Trump received a “Peace Prize” from FIFA, the cartel controlling professional soccer.  The prize was newly invented for the occasion, a naked bit of toadying before next year’s World Cup is (partly) hosted in the United States — in effect one bunch of gangsters paying tribute to the main boss for the right to do business in his territory.

The episode has been rightly dismissed as a typical piece of Trump pageantry, farcical at best, and actually obscene given the US military’s ongoing terror bombing of Venezuelan fishermen.

But the awkward conjoining of international soccer and international peace brought to mind “The Sporting Spirit,” a short essay by George Orwell, dated 1945.  In it, he remarks:

“At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue. . . .  There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.”

Perhaps it is fitting, after all, that such an absurd man as Trump would be the first recipient of such an absurd prize.  Let us hope he is also the last.

I don’t typically use this space to point people to reviews of my work.  But this review by Hossam el-Hamalawy captures very well what I was trying to do with my book Gang Politics, and relates it to my earlier book Our Enemies in Blue.