Sport is like war, except less fun

[andrewducker]

Following on from the discussion yesterday of sectarianism in Scottish football, here's a short advert against racism in football...

via budgie_uk

Comments

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

It's always fun to learn about racism around the world! Like when we watched Lars von Trier's Kingdom and learned that the Swedes and the Danish are racist about one another! Educational fun!

I have to ask, though: what is sectarianism? I mean, as far as football goes.

[andrewducker]

Rangers football club in Glasgow is associated with Protestants, Celtic football club is associated with Catholics.

Just over the water is a small island called "Ireland", where the Catholics and the Protestants are associated with Republicanism (whereby Ireland is one country, under home rule) and Unionism (whereby at least some parts of Ireland are associated with the UK) respectively, with paramilitary organisations on both sides (like the IRA, or (Official, Provisional, and nowadays the "Real") IRA on the Republican side, and the UVF, UDA and others on the Unionist side). Things have quietened down significantly since the Good Friday Agreement, but there's still a fair bit of unpleasantness under the surface, and areas of Belfast you don't want to wander into with the wrong look/accent/surname/colours.*

So when Rangers play Celtic things can get...excitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism_in_Glasgow has more details.

*I have almost certainly mangled the details there significantly. Growing up in the South of England in the 80s all I knew was that the IRA were eeeeeevil and were blowing things up because....they were eeeeeeevil. It took me a long while to realise that there was more to it than that, let alone that there was several hundred years of historical fun and games behind it all. I mean, I grew up with "Oliver Cromwell was a lovely man who freed us all from the tyranny of monarchy." while my friend Gordon from Dublin grew up with "Oliver Cromwell was an genocidal maniac who enjoyed nothing more than slaughtering Irish peasants for fun." History is fun!

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Oh! Wow, that's fascinating, thank you. I was here thinking, 'hm, I usually think of that as a religious term, I wonder what it has to do with football...'

History is totally fun. One of the reasons I love teaching it is for the ability to look at my students and go, yeah, you know everything they told you about that? Not so much.

Thanks again!