“The similarities between sport fandom and organized religion are striking. Consider the vocabulary associated with both: faith, DEVOTION, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration.”
Since the earliest days of man, contests of athletic prowess, politics, and religion have been inextricably linked. This relationship goes way beyond surface level comparisons or similarities in linguistic terms. Sporting events — whether it be the Greek Olympics, the Roman Coliseums, or the Mayan ballgame — were not purely for entertainment purposes alone: they served as vital rituals to enforce societal order and cohesion. A ritual is quite simply an ordered process in which specific acts are repeated in a specific manner, whether secular or religious in nature. When rulers held these sporting spectacles, they served not just as a useful distraction, but also as a tacit display of the sovereign’s wealth and power.
This is a greatly updated version of a column of some years back on an unusual and intriguing people. Maya civilization was not 1850 Vienna, but neither was it the primitive horror lovingly imagined by the ill-mannered and barely informed of the web.
Inasmuch America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to me that people, or some people, might want to know about them, and what they are, and where they came from. Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian. We have some idea of the Spaniards. They were European. But what were the Indians? What is their contribution to the great numbers of–whether you like it or not–new Americans? In particular, what are their blood lines? Are they, as insisted by web louts hostile to Mexicans, of very low IQ–83–and has their Asian blond enstupidated the Spanish? Were they horrendously primitive?
It is good to see SSS being so proud of his fine organization and his favorite President. The 200,000 Mayans sacrificed so the CIA and the U.S. could expand their Empire was worth it. There was a Cold War to be won.
It looks like Dwight Eisenhower and our patriots in the CIA liked Eddie Bernays and his propaganda methods. The long-term impact on the people of Guatemala was devastating. It seems self interest and crony capitalism existed in the 1950s too. Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, and his brother were major shareholders in the United Fruit Company. I wonder if the CIA coup gave them a good ROI.
The operation, known by the code name Operation PBSUCCESS, lasted from late 1953 to 1954. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc “Liberation Army” of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled Guatemalan army officer, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. The CIA established the Voice of Liberation radio station, located across the border in Honduras relaying programming originating in Miami, and pretended to be the spontaneous voice of patriots opposed to the elected government. The operation effectively ended the experimental period of representative democracy in Guatemala known as the “Ten Years of Spring”, which ended with Árbenz’s official resignation. Following the coup, the Guatemalan Civil War began, a civil war involving some of the most brutal counterinsurgency of its time (including years of massacres of Maya Native Americans, since characterized by Historical Clarification Commission as genocide). 40,000 to 50,000 people were disappeared during the war and approximately 200,000 were killed.
Upon deposing the Árbenz Guzmán government, Castillo Armas began to dissolve a decade of social and economic reform and legislative progress, and banned labor unions and left-wing political parties, a disenfranchisement that radicalized left-wing Guatemalans. If you’d like to read up on the thirty six years of CIA created horror, click this link:
Guatemala ended up being in a 36 year civil war and it was the result of our CIA working in conjunction with the Father of Propaganda and Corporate America for the benefit of the few. I believe this is what they call corporate fascism.
