Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague

Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing essay against the global phenomenon of sport, which he describes as both a "recent form of savagery" and "the opium of the people." The charges leveled against sport are damning and numerous: sport is an instrument for racism and the bolstering of repression, with global events such as the Olympics used to legitimize major political crackdowns; doping must be understood as an imperative rather than an aberration of sport. Most ominously, with its location at the very center of the society of the spectacle, globalization, and the liberal-capitalist system, the phenomenon of sport has become a new world power and an immense destructive force, a steamroller of decadent modernity.