Editorial

Sporting organizations right to penalize Russia

Perpetrators of violence in marginalized nations deserve same treatment EDITORIAL

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of the largest military conflicts in Europe since the Second World War. By ordering an unprovoked attack on a country much smaller than his own, Vladimir Putin has placed millions of lives at risk. Putin’s motive for the harassment of Ukraine has been the subject of substantial speculation since he annexed Crimea in 2014, but his track record as president of Russia displays a pattern of corruption and lack of compassion toward human life that reflects the values of his regime.

The Russian government has not gone unpunished for its recent actions.

Leaders around the world have placed various sanctions on the Russian economy that have devastated its position in global trade and slowed its military’s advance. The sale of Russian gas and coal has been restricted in the largest European markets, the United States has blocked the export of American-developed technology to Russia and Russia’s richest oligarchs have had their international bank accounts frozen. Belarus has also faced similar sanctions for aiding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Members of NATO have placed troops in countries neighbouring Ukraine as a show of support and to deter Russia from further attacks on European nations.

General Motors, Shell and Apple are among the private corporations that have refused to do business with Russia.

Western governments and enterprises have demonstrated they will not stand with Putin and his government’s tyrannical actions. Further, solidarity with Ukraine can be seen in a variety of public spaces, including social media, community centres and college campuses.

In the sporting world, international organizations like FIFA, the Union of European Football Associations and the International Ice Hockey Federation as well as domestic western leagues like the NHL and NBA have cut ties with Russia and banned members from competing with and against organizations within the country.

These organizations all stand to lose a great deal of revenue from cutting ties with Russia. The immediate cost of cancelled events will hurt teams and organizations in the short term and in the future. A whole generation of Russians will certainly be impacted by the inability to watch their teams compete, cutting out a large chunk of the immediate sporting market in Russia and stalling the development of fanbases for years to come. Ukraine, where sports are now the last thing on the minds of civilians seeking safety.

Due to Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian athletics will now certainly be set back for years. The international sporting community’s decision to cut ties with Russia was the correct response.

Not only was it the right move morally for associations that oppose Russian aggression, but politically as well. These athletic institutions are deeply embedded in the culture of the nations they operate in. In an era where the movements and decisions of public figures are constantly analyzed under a microscope, having a passive stance on a crisis with the magnitude of this invasion could be detrimental.

Although the actions of these sporting associations will undoubtedly hurt their bottom line, the decision not to associate with any organizations under Russian influence could benefit their public image and relations. Cutting ties with Russian associations signals to critics that these international leagues and associations share similar values to their consumers, increasing support for them going forward.

For this reason, it should come as no surprise that these organizations took such a severe stance on Russia’s aggression. However, this position should be taken with other conflicts as well. Unfortunately, there have been numerous humanitarian crises that have not received a similar response from organizations like the Olympics and FIFA.

Since 2017, the persecution and killing of

Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar military has resulted in the displacement of nearly a million people and hundreds of thousands being placed in detention camps. Fuelled by Islamophobia, the death toll of Rohingya Muslims is in the tens of thousands.

In Yemen, millions of citizens suffer from malnutrition and displacement due to the ongoing proxy war between Iran and the U.S.-backed Saudi Arabian military. This conflict has been described as one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.

These catastrophes are only a small sample of state-sponsored violence that have put millions of innocent people in danger.

Unlike Russia’s invasion, these issues have gone largely unnoticed in the sporting world.

Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and Iran all competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games and are all currently playing qualifying matches for the upcoming 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

The west’s role in these conflicts have not been acknowledged, either.

During this year’s Winter Olympics in China, accusations of crimes against humanity inflicted on the Uyghur people by the host country were discussed by governments and human rights groups around the world, but the games went forward nonetheless.

Sporting organizations should treat these countries in the same fashion as they did Russia. Conflicts in marginalized nations deserve the same amount of attention as those in Europe and should be addressed with equal passion. Unfortunately, the last few weeks of war in Ukraine has already received more media attention than the last eight years of war in Yemen.

By not treating these issues equally, sporting groups demonstrate the lack of concern they have for racialized people. Those who are complicit in murdering the innocent and pursuing wars of conquest have zero place in athletics. It is time that the Olympics, FIFA and the rest of the sporting world take a stand against large-scale violence. If nations forge a path of destruction and division, they should not be permitted to participate in the unifying nature of sports.

graphic / Dallin Chicoine /

staff

words / Matthew Merkel/

staff

Suzuki’s keynote hit the right chords

Environmental activism must be anti-capitalist, too

COMMENT

Lucas Edmond, staff On March 3, environmentalist David Suzuki presented a keynote speech to the University of Manitoba about the dangers of global warming and Canada’s thus-far empty promise to curb fossil fuel emissions.

The speech’s topics were broad, and Suzuki spent a prolonged period of time going into detail about the history of humanity’s influence on the environment and our distinct ability to contemplate the future, including potential disasters. Although Suzuki dwelled on this introduction for too long and perhaps lost listeners due to somewhat off-topic digressions, he nonetheless did a good job posing an important question: why, considering humanity’s unique capacity for foresight, do governments and leading industries continue to escalate emissions despite promises to curb them?

Instead of posing a reductively definitive answer, Suzuki opted to go a more philosophical route, mirroring the contemporary posthumanist turn in academia. He claimed that, more than ever, humans must start relating themselves to their natural surroundings instead of understanding themselves in opposition to it. Relating to the environment is a matter of care, and when value can only be discerned in terms of consumption and ever-expanding economic growth for anthropocentric purposes, we are bound to neglect that care and destroy the very environment we rely on.

When I initially read the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU) had selected a speaker to talk about the world’s most pressing environmental issues, I fully expected a liberal environmen talist to lecture students on the importance of ethical consumption. Instead, when Suzuki was posed a question about ethical oil consumption by a student during the question-and-answer period, Suzuki aptly responded that the idea is “a pile of crap.”

The idea oil companies could somehow manage themselves sustainably is ludicrous, and Suzuki was right to be direct in saying so. The very cornerstone of sustainability is the principle of balance — balanced inputs and outputs of resources in isolation, but also balance with ecosystems as a whole. Most university-educated students should by now be aware oil cannot be put back in the ground after it has been burnt, and it is certainly no secret that emissions are throwing our environment into a cascading feedback loop that threatens to destroy much of the world’s biodiversity. That isn’t sustainability.

As Suzuki pointed out in his speech, nations and oil companies have had ample opportunity to curb emissions since the mid-20th century. Suzuki drew on a famous quote from the former president of the American Petroleum Institute Frank Ikard to convey this message. “There is still time to save the world’s people from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out […] carbon dioxide is being added to earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts,” said Ikard in 1965.

But the issue of global warming persisted, and in 1977 one of the world’s largest oil companies, Exxon, recognized the damage fossil fuels had done to the natural environment. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” said Exxon scientific advisor James Black. The following year, Black estimated the world had about “five to 10 years” before nations had to start transitioning to different energy sources. This was a formal recognition by one of the most polluting companies on the planet that burning fossil fuels was a completely unsustainable source of energy.

Fast forward 44 years and, instead of cutting fossil fuel production and consumption, the world has nearly doubled its annual emission rate. Politicians from a variety of nations continue to promise environmental action for political advancement, but as soon as they are elected, backtrack on their promises in the interest of financial gain. This, Suzuki appropriately pointed out, is due to big business, a lack of political accountability and, as previously mentioned, our egotistic anthropocentrism. Who needs to take steps toward transitioning to a green economy when leaders and parliamentarians will be long gone before following through on any of the promises they made to their constituents?

Instead, oil conglomerates and governments tend to point out the benefits of local oil production, claiming it provides jobs, social development or that net impact can be reduced through environmental assessments and offset programs. Take, for example, Justin Trudeau’s absurd claim that to transition to a green economy, Canada must first invest in oil pipelines. Trudeau asserts the federal government should use surplus cash from the export of oil to create green infrastructure, as if creating more of a mess will make cleaning up that mess cheaper. This perverse logic is as misguided as the assumption that humanity can improve the world’s environmental condition while also expanding so-called ethical oil production. In short, we cannot have our cake and eat it too.

Suzuki’s holistic understanding of global warming, connecting environmental issues to political, social and economic shortcomings, makes him a public figure worth admiring. Where many politicians refuse to denounce outof-control economic growth and inequality as the main factor contributing to global warming, Suzuki expresses important anti-capitalist principles in his activism. “Don’t tell me that capitalism comes before very real biological realities,” he said to the Globe and Mail in 2011. He later doubled down on this statement after the Globe and Mail asked what social cause he would hypothetically donate $1 million toward, claiming he would give the money to “people working to find an alternative to capitalism.”

Overall, Suzuki presented a decent speech, and UMSU organized an informative event despite my initial pessimism. Students should be looking to Suzuki for inspiration regarding climate activism — the first step toward confronting global warming is challenging the powerful organizations that tell us we cannot solve the issue without their help.

staff

/ Dallin Chicoine / graphic

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