Originally Published October 28th 2023 for For Green Fields clients
Captured sports, politics, economic systems and power all exhibit illiberal dissonance - a restriction in freedom of thought or behaviour but with a lack of harmony between the malicious forces overseeing the hyperreality.
So.
When Forensic Architecture revealed that the bomb that destroyed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza at the cost of hundreds of innocent lives was fired from Israel, this cut across the narratives of the illiberal dissonance underpinning the brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip.
It is also, of course, a war crime.
Forensic Architecture are a parallel entity to Football Is Fixed - it is an independent university-based agency undertaking media and spatial research into state and corporate violence.
It is frequently the case that the chaos underpinning illiberal dissonance infrastructures reveals itself through 'absence' together with the disaster capitalism chaos which forms the foundation for what counts as a strategy.
So.
The blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline where 'evidence' allegedly shows that Russia was behind the corporate terror or the killing of people in the Gaza hospital where state 'evidence' allegedly proves that Hamas fired the rocket themselves both have a logical disconnect at their core - in both cases, if such 'evidence' exists, why don't the US, the UK and Israel share such proofs?
The reality is in the absence.
The military industrial complex, the fascism of the military elite and the complicity of kleptocratic states produces realities that, academically, are exactly the same as we find in the takeover of English and UEFA football by mafia groups.
One example would be a comparison between two recent issues relating to the PGMOL.
After the wrongly disallowed goal by Luis Diaz led to the unthinkable - a Liverpool defeat, the mainstream sports media went into overdrive - questions were asked at the United Nations, Klopp suggested that the game be replayed, mafia groups tried to use the case as an argument for the deconstruction of VAR and Liverpool were promised rectifying corruptions in the remainder of the season.
In the Merseyside derby, the PGMOL also got it wrong when Konate wasn't red carded for a second bookable offence.
But here there was no media outcry. No ripple on the seismometer. No supportive leveling up statements and no momentum towards the match being replayed.
Furthermore, in what other universe would the Premier League have announced that Everton should be hit with a 12 point deduction over financial issues the very day after club chairman Bill Kenwright died?
Can any football fan seriously suggest that such a response would have happened if it were Manchester United or Liverpool who were in Everton's position?
Whether a non-functioning media distorts reality in the fields of politics, war or sport, we are dealing not with journalism but state and / or corporate propaganda.
Hence.
Gaza is Fucked...
... and Football is Fixed.
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