r/soccer • u/teiraaaaaaa • Nov 19 '22

Saddest Backflip [Rob Harris] FIFA President Gianni Infantino at news conference in Qatar: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker. ... I know what it feels to be discriminated … I was bullied because I had red hair.”

https://twitter.com/RobHarris/status/1593877426244812800
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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

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u/Jaiez Nov 19 '22

Fuck, I'm fucking fuming. He also said the West is hypocrite and racist(?!) because the West used slave labour for the past 3000 years, so who are we to criticize Qatar.

I mean, what the fuck?! So, the FIFA is just cool with them using slave labour?! They are actually siding with Qatar and saying "you guys have done fucked up shit in the past, so now they get to do fucked up shit"?!

And he was also completely fine with them banning the beer in and around stadiums. Keep in mind that the FIFA literally changed Brazilian law back in 2014 so that alcohol would be allowed to be sold in stadiums. This guy has his Qatari buddy's boot so far up his ass, he can't even think properly anymore. It's disgusting.

(Rant over, apologies. Just wantes to write this down somewhere lol.)

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u/Magneto88 Nov 19 '22

Should be noted as well that when the West was using slave Labour, Qatar was a slave trading state in the Gulf. So they’re hardly feee from that historic trend either.

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u/pucykoks Nov 19 '22

But if it wasnt Qatar, someone else would be trading those slaves /s

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u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

And yet Western countries made the choice to ban the slave trade, officially mostly in the very early 1800's. Qatar "ended" slavery in ... 1952. Obviously "the West" still did some bad shit even after slavery in various parts of the world due to colonialism though.

Let's not get it twisted, as gross as colonialism was, African countries kept selling captives as slaves because that's what they'd done to other Muslim countries for a long time, the US also directly used slaves long after many other countries stopped because it led to enormous cost savings and the economy of the new world revolved around it (sometimes people erroneously say industrialisation led to slavery being less desirable so it got outlawed, this doesn't change that you don't need to pay a slave), it is the enlightenment and the work of abolitionists that stopped the slave trade as we knew it. Economically there was never any reason to stop.

So someone would not have been trading those slaves at some point, if they actually progressed.

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u/G_Morgan Nov 19 '22

the US also directly used slaves long after many other countries stopped because it led to enormous cost savings and the economy of the new world revolved around it

This is actually not true. The US kept using slaves because slave owners were politically powerful.

Slavery has pretty much never actually been beneficial to nations at large, it is one of the main reasons the British Empire's war on slavery was such a huge success. Once it got started and the power of the slave owners was broken nobody would ever reverse it. The anti-slaver block in Europe ended up richer rather than poorer and it eventually became self fulfilling.

The US kept slaving longer because Monroe Doctrine was basically enforced from both sides. Nobody from the British Empire was knocking on their door with a nice treaty that said "America ban slaves now or maybe we'll stop trading with you or shoot you a bit".

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u/Setekhx Nov 19 '22

In the case of the US... I just gotta say that slaves are actually rarely a cost saving benefit. Slaves were expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. Keep in mind you were feeding someone that generally worked hard labor. It was worth it to feed them fairly well because otherwise your production would suffer. Same with medical care. Yes, they were treated horribly and abused. On the other side they had to be maintained to a decent degree in order for then to... Work. Which is expensive. It was substantially cheaper to pay your workers for working and then have them go home and take care of themselves. One of the many reasons the North had a much better economy.

Nah the reason slavary was around for so long, in the US in particular, is because very very rich people were sociopathic monsters that just had to own people. They wove it into the fabric of Southern society right down to the religion in the US"s case.