The David Icke Newsletter, September 9th, 2012
DIVERSION, DIVERSION ...
... DIVERSION
Some years ago I wrote a weekly column for a football (soccer) website and my theme was usually 'football-as-life'. I see sport as such a concentrated expression of life in general, or at least life as it is currently lived on Planet Earth.
Firstly there is a clear hierarchy with the world's leading football clubs like Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona attracting massive crowds and mega-money at the top end of the game while the vast majority beneath them are struggling to meet the rent and pay the wages.
Professional clubs play each other in a game called football, but the game itself is the only common factor. In every other way the few and the many operate in different worlds. Football and sport as a whole are little holograms within the bigger hologram - the global economic system in which we all live or play something called 'life', but that is pretty much the only common factor between the few mega-rich and the masses of struggling poor and deprived.
There are footballers in England and Europe who earn well in excess of £100,000 ($159,000) a week and some closer to £200,000 ($318,000) and that is only in their basic pay. This doesn't include their enormous product endorsement fees and other off-field income. The reported annual combined earnings of Barcelona player, Lionel Messi, is close to £30 million ($48 million).
It has all happened so fast. Since the English Premier league was launched in 1992 the pay of leading players has soared by more than 1,500 per cent while the average wage for the working population has increased by just 186 per cent in the same period.
Most telling of all is that the cost for fans to watch these staggeringly rewarded players has increased by 1,000 per cent and the cost of television subscriptions to watch football games has increased by thousands of per cent. Football clubs or television corporations, it doesn't matter. The fans are the cash cow that must be sucked dry. As with life, so with football.
Transfer fees paid by the world football giants are measured in tens of millions with the most expensive player, Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid, costing £80 million ($127 million) when he moved from Manchester United.
Cristiano Ronaldo
Top players in America's NFL are comparable and the leading golfers, tennis players, basketball players and Formula 1 racing drivers are also in the mix along with others. What they do can be amazing, but how do you compare kicking a bag of wind about, albeit skilfully, with someone saving lives like a paramedic at the scene of a car crash or firefighters putting themselves in danger to rescue people from blazing buildings?But then, still with the football-as-life theme, how do you compare the paramedic or firefighter with the global bankers who measure their assets in billions thanks to the criminal scam of lending people 'money' that doesn't exist and charging interest on it? Compared with them, kicking a ball between two goalposts is a major contribution to society.
I don't say that everyone should have the same income (that's what the Cabal wants, apart from themselves of course). Effort and achievement should be rewarded. Energy out = energy in. The question is what constitutes effort and achievement?
Is scoring a goal greater than going into danger to save a life? Is a life more important than a football score? Yes, of course, so there you have the answer. The paramedic and the firefighter saving lives is a greater contribution than the goalscorer; but the difference in financial reward today is stratospheric.
They are either paid by government or through insurance companies which fund the American medical system. The pressure is to hold down wages to reduce 'operating costs' and insurance costs which are passed onto the public in higher taxation and insurance premiums.
Footballers and other sports people are put on the plus side of the balance sheet, however, in that they attract big crowds paying big bucks for tickets - the same people (taxpayers and insurance payers) that fund the paramedics and the firefighters.
They also attract incredibly lucrative television contracts for their sports and sponsorship from major corporations to promote their products. Once again, the people who buy the television subscriptions and the products of the sponsors are the same people who fund the paramedics and the firefighters through taxation and insurance.
The income for footballers and lifesavers comes from the same source - the people - but the elite decide how that money is distributed. The football player is more important to them because the game makes enormous profits for corporations and provides a constant diversion for public attention away from what the same elite is doing to the world.
'Have you seen what the government is doing?'
'Shut up, we've got a free kick.'
Footballers are important to the elite because they serve the interests of the elite. Paramedics and firefighters save lives? So what? We have a population cull policy don't we?
Who would we miss most if they went on strike for a couple of months - footballers or paramedics, firefighters and those who take the garbage away? Exactly.
I played the game professionally in a different era and the most I earned as a basic wage was £33 a week and then only for a matter of a month or so before my career ended with arthritis at the age of 21. My team had won promotion the season before and I had been promised a big increase if we were successful. We were and so my pay soared from £30 a week to £33. I didn't know what to do with all that extra money.
Still today at many professional clubs the players will be getting much lower incomes than the top earners because they cannot generate the attendances and sponsorship that the big boys can, but these clubs provide the competition that allows the giants to prosper.
Do the top clubs appreciate that? No. They are seeking to consume more and more of the massive revenue from television contracts at the expense of the smaller fry which are struggling to survive. They don't care about 'the game' (a metaphor for human society); they care only about exploiting 'the game'. See bankers and corporations.
Top footballers - the new bankers.
Football and other sports are a mirror of life in so many ways. Playing sport can be very beneficial, both in terms of health and as a great learning curve mentally and emotionally because it is provides such concentrated experience. The mental and emotional highs and lows that come along days, weeks or months apart in general life can do so in minutes or even seconds in sport.
Learning to treat triumph and disaster as twin imposters and redefining what constitutes triumph and disaster can be swiftly advanced through sporting experience if it is used that way. So I am all for sport and taking part, but professional sport is quite another thing. It has become another tool of the Cabal, another means to divide and rule and hijack focus and attention.
Cabal front man Carl Marx once proclaimed that religion was the opiate of the masses and there is much truth in that. Marx didn't say much that was true, but this is one exception, and conventional religion has major competition today from the new religion of professional sport which is clearly another opiate of the masses. This has been systematically done and was predicted long ago in the Cabal's own writings.
The plan has been to replace the waning power of conventional religion with a series of new religions, including that of celebrity-worship which today sustains a vast array of celebrity chit-chat magazines and television shows.
But sport, especially football/soccer, is the big daddy of the new religions. It is also a global version of the coliseum in Rome with goals replacing dead animals and gladiators as the focus of the crowd's delight in the same way that the Roman Catholic Eucharist, where they symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood as bread and wine, is a sanitised version of the real thing.
Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.
For bread and circuses in ancient Rome read beer and football today. There is nothing wrong with this as a hobby or pastime. I like to watch the odd game myself, but when it reaches the level of religion and the almost total focus of life it becomes a massive tool of the few to entrap the minds - the focus - of the many.
People have been caught out by the banking scam because, to use an appropriate analogy, they took their eyes off the ball, or the (engineered) balls-up, which had been creeping up on them for decades. The mind-set was that as long as their life was not apparently affected they didn't care what was happening in the banking system or bother to look.
But unless the ball and the eye have some form of relationship there is always a disaster waiting to happen and so it proved in the autumn of 2008. The consequences have been catastrophic for so many.
In the mind of the football fanatic, the club and the success of the club is all that matters (i.e. as long as my life is okay I don't care about anything else). This is the same mentality that has allowed the banks and corporations to take over the world and it has also led to same mega-rich banking and corporate families and billionaires to take over football clubs that once belonged to the community.
Mansour bought Manchester City and has pumped hundreds of millions into the club for wages, transfers and a £350 million debt write-off which has completely distorted the game and its finances and vastly increased the gap between football's elite and all the rest.
The football authorities in England nevertheless decided that Shinawatra was a 'fit and proper' person to own a football club and he was allowed to proceed with his takeover. Did the fans care about his background? No, the vast majority didn't - so long as he brought success on the field to their club.
The same is the case with Chelsea football club in London since it was bought by the Russian oligarch and billionaire, Roman Abramovich, who was handed his oil assets and thus his fortune by the Russian political leadership, especially the pissed-most-of-the-time Boris Yeltsin, when those assets should belong to the Russian people.
Did most of the fans of Chelsea care? Do they care now? No, so long as Chelsea are successful on the field. It is another expression of the Me, Me, Me society that got us into this collective mess.
The Glazer family, the American owners of Manchester United, did not have the money to buy the club and so they borrowed from banks against the United assets that they didn't then own, and in doing so submerged the previously debt-free club in a debt of nearly half a billion pounds which could be fatal if it went through an unsuccessful period on the pitch which diminished income.
United began as Newton Heath Football Club in 1878 and have been playing at their present home, Old Trafford, since 1910. Generation after generation of local people, and more latterly farther afield, have supported the club with their fanaticism and money. United has a long history of success and disaster - most famously the loss of almost an entire team in a plane crash on take-off at Munich airport in 1958.
It is not just a football club - none of them are - it has been woven like all the others into the fabric of the community since Victoria was on the throne. But in walk these Me, Me, Me's in suits and robes to use them as a piggy bank or plaything depending on the scale of their wealth.
How many businesses with a long history of service to the community all over the world have been taken over or crushed in the same way by the corporations who have no interest in community or service? As in football, so in life.
'I own Manchester United.'
'Really, where's that?'
'I don't know, somewhere in England.'
'I see on the news that they're bombing Libya - there weren't half some big bangs. I think NATO will win 5-0, Gadhafi's got no defence.'
We have to stop being spectators in life and start being players before everything's gone. Once more we see the parallels with football. The 22 are only on the pitch earning weekly fortunes because the fans buy the tickets, the television subscriptions and the merchandise. If they stopped doing that, even for months, things would have to change.
Ticket prices for the top clubs are outrageous with prices anything between £25 and £80 depending on the stature of the club for a game lasting 90 minutes. The tickets are largely bought by people struggling to pay the bills and while they complain at the cost they still turn up week after week.
If they refused to go in large numbers the clubs would have no choice but to drop the price and with it eventually the wages they pay the players. If humanity in general refused to cooperate with its own exploitation then the same would happen - things would have to change.
But mostly we don't - just like the football fans.
Zoologist and football fan Desmond Morris published a book in 1981 called The Soccer Tribe in which he described the tribal nature of football clubs and the whole ethos that surrounds them. He was dismissed and ridiculed by many in football and media, but he was simply too deep and intelligent for them - and too accurate.
The soccer tribe has its camp or village - the home ground. It has its leaders and warriors who go into battle with other tribes. They may use their feet and heads instead spears and bows, but the theme is the same. They have their heroes who score the goals or stop the other tribe scoring.
The greatest conflict between tribes involved those that lived closest to each other - witness the ways that tribes living in the same area have sought to destroy each other the world over. The most hatred and bitterness between football tribes involves those closest to each other - the 'derby match', as it is known.
No game is more important to Manchester United fans than when they play Manchester City a few miles away, and vice versa. The same with Liverpool and Everton, a short walk from each other across a local park, and Tottenham and Arsenal who are close together in north London.
Portsmouth and Southampton football clubs are not far from me and the hatred between many of their fans has to be seen to be believed. It's a game for goodness sake. But then, it's not to their DNA. It's a war between hostile tribes.
Tribal rage can be seen in the fury of fans when their club is not successful. This is, genetically, a defeat for the tribe and so they call for the sacking of the team manager (leader), often with great hostility and abuse. Fans of successful clubs bathe in the reflected glory of their team (tribe) even though they have not kicked a single ball for the cause.
You can arrive at a football ground as a neutral and join a tribe simply by buying a scarf or hat in one of the team's colours. Now you immediately become one of 'us' to the tribe that you have chosen to display around your neck and on your head, and you are one of 'them' to supporters of the other team.
When you play well for a team you are the hero of the tribe, but if you choose to be transferred to another club (tribe) you are now a traitor to the tribe and you will be booed every time you touch the ball when you return to your former home (village) to play (fight) with your new tribe.
This mentality can be seen when a player is booed and abused by opposing fans when he plays for his club, but the same fans will cheer him when he plays for England in an international match. This is because when the national team plays it represents all the tribes as one. It is a bit like cheering the king of kings - those who were crowned to collectively represent a group of tribes.
The tribal attire and painted faces of the England tribe.
All this suits the Cabal perfectly because it can exploit the tribal instincts to divide and rule without having the downside of tribes, which is decentralised decision-making. Football tribes don't do debate and discussion. The owner (dictator) calls the shots and the members of the tribe are there to buy the tickets and the replica shirts.Football in Europe is now moving ever closer to a super league in which the top few teams from each country will break away and play only each other. The rest can take their fate while the elite take the money. Football, too, has its own globalisation.
Still more power is handed by the many to the few when football and sport become more than a pastime and entertainment and become some religious and tribal focus. There are so many examples where people become focussed and passionate, even seething and violent, over things that simply don't matter. We have just been programmed to believe they do.
Manchester United beat Manchester City? So what, really, in the greater scheme of things? Manchester City beat Manchester United? Same. It might be entertaining to watch a group of men in red shirts score more goals then a group of men in blue, or vice-versa, but what does it really matter?
Why does it matter so much that people hate other people simply because they prefer to watch the men in red rather than the men in blue? What does it matter?
The diversions of football, sport, television and celebrity are dots to keep us occupied so we never see how all the dots connect. They are the light on the porch to capture the attention of the moths and flies while the guy with the swatter takes aim.
How are we ever going to come together as we desperately need to if a ball full of air is going to divide so many? How the Cabal must laugh and laugh.
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