WAR MINUS SHOOTING
The
Sporting Spirit
About Author
- Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) , pen name George Orwell was born in Bengal and Educated in England
- He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic
- ‘Animal farm’ a greatest novel, which is a political satire about Russian revolution
- ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’ is a last work, written in the form of readable novel about totalitarianism
Introduction
- The Sporting Spirit" is an essay, published in
the magazine Tribune on 14 December 1945
- The essay became famous for Orwell's description of international sporting competitions as "war minus the shooting"
- Sports never generate bonds of friendship, politicized and hyper-nationalistic emotions ill-will between nations.
- The essay was considered a political symbolism
Summary
- George Orwell's views on competitive games in his
essay
- This essay starts with a critical view of the Great
Britain tour by the Dynamo Moscow football club
- He says, through this tour, little good-will existed
between “Soviet and British”
- He specifically noted that the fight incidents
between the ‘visiting side’ and the Arsenal Team Football Club
- Later, the Rangers team refused to play and ended
the tour
- Those incidents create embarrassment among the
countries
- Orwell does not hide his thoughts “Sports such as football, cricket and Olympic may create for goodwill between the nations”
- He continues to say, “Sport was never created bonds
of friendship between nations” but generated "orgies of hatred".
- He cites the examples of the Summer Olympic Games in
Berlin in 1936
- He used to say cricket as well-mannered and graceful like the “body line series “ (an England cricket team toured in Australia) and the Australian cricket team in England in 1921
- He calls sports like Boxing and Football are worse
- The boxing games between white and colored people are horrible
- The role of competitive sport in the National level is
new developments
- India and Burma should have necessary strong
cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field
- The first football match was played in Spain about 15 years ago, led to an uncontrolled riot
- Strong feelings of rivalry are aroused
- He states that the
audience of the games indulged in encouraging their own team and attempting
to rattle their opposition so they charged and accused of jingoism
- Sport does not have much fair play, it encourages violence called “war minus shooting”
- Most of the games were origin from “Roman Times”
- Dr.Arnold, the founder of Modern Public School, looked at “games
are a waste of time”
- Latterly felt that games are group activity is
essential for physical strength
- England and USA games build up with heavy financial
activity, attracting huge crowds for savage passion
- Nationalism shift to play sports, that involve competitive
prestige
- This infection has spread from country to country
especially in the games are Football and Boxing
- In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a
good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees,
riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as
fishing, cook-fighting, and ferreting for rats.
- Games are
taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome
and Byzantium:
- In the Middle Ages, they were played, and probably played
with much physical brutality but they were not mixed up with politics nor a
cause of group hatred.
- The rivalry began to develop especially, a series of
football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and
British, Russians and Poels, and Italians and Yugoslavs, each match to be
watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.
- He suggests that sport is one of the main causes of international
rivalry; big-scale sport is itself and produces nationalism.
- The author concludes by saying that, still mistakes are being committed by labeling a team of eleven men as the champions whereas another team is made to be the losers.
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