By James Dostoyevsky
Although Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not specifically invent his famous decapitation machine for the feudal masters alone but he launched it as a means of putting a “humane” end to anybody who faced execution: the ruling class was usually put to death by the sword, while the common people often faced a horrific end.
It took a while until the masses found leaders they could and wanted to follow – and who wouldn’t betray them. Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès were their leaders and the Revolution represented a range of political viewpoints, from moderate reformers to radical Jacobins, and included both politicians and intellectuals.
The end result of the French Revolution was the overthrow of the monarchy, radical social and political change, the establishment of the French Republic, and the spread of revolutionary principles across Europe. Long-term, the Revolution abolished feudal privileges and advanced representative democracy. It initiated reforms that dramatically impacted laws, administration, society, and the relationship between church and state.
Today, 233 years later, the Western world finds itself in a situation not dissimlar to what occurred in 1792.
This author believes that the symptoms are similar but the oppression is far wider reaching in this 21st century.
The feudal system of absolutist monarchies has since died (except for the Middle Eastern toy states where some are ruled by butchers and bone-saw aficionados) but the feudalism of the 18th century has remained: all it did was morph into a dictatorship of technology, centralised wealth and the systematic theft of opportunities, even for the so-called educated “elite” (give me a break) who used to be privileged and now experience the rapid disappearance of their possibilities that would allow them to flourish, to make ends meet and live a decent life.
We have experienced what many would call Western democracies ever since WWII, when the Soviet Union devastated Hitler’s armies. The Americans claimed victory, only to occupy vast parts of Europe ever since (as of early 2025, the United States maintains nearly 84,000 military personnel in Europe, a number that has fluctuated between 75,000 and 105,000 since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The US military operates more than forty bases across the continent, with the majority concentrated in Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom, along with additional bases and shared facilities in other NATO member nations).
Many of us keep forgetting that real democracies where ‘We the People’ have a voice and permit us to co-determine our future, have incessantly disappeared into a black hole of corporate greed, banking supremacy, increasingly useless fiat-money and the myth of self-determination.
The West has fed and keeps feeding the military-industrial complex – usually financed by deeply immoral bankers who supply the funds to both sides of a war. Our societies have rapidly turned into autocracies beyond the public’s control. Its participation is largely denied, policies are decided at roundtables where the 99.9% have no access nor say-so, and our vote – in Europe and the US – is solely an option of which ‘brainwash of the day’ should prevail for the next four or five years. Technology and hard cash determine our collective fate, not our vote. We are like the braindead sheeples who regularly vote against their own interests – and don’t even know.
What the hippies and the alternative movements tried in May 1968 onwards – at Berkley and Nanterre, later in Berlin, Milan and much of continental Europe – died with the one-time revolutionaries like Daniel Cohn-Bendit (who became a Green Party MEP) or Joschka Fischer, switching from their student radicalism to becoming staunch supporters of a systems they had fought only a couple of decades earlier.
What they, and many of their despicable successors forgot is that the guillotine of over 200 years ago was not only used on nobles, the clergy or political opponents, but eventually also on fellow revolutionaries themselves.
Joschka Fischer is a sad case in point, as was the afore-mentioned Cohn-Bendit who never figured out whether he was French or German, and the utterly repugnant Otto Schily, once a defense lawyer for radicals associated with the protest movement, who became Federal Minister of the Interior (of all things) in 1998. Lionel Jospin, a hardcore activist in France went a step further and became Prime Minister of France.
Why this excursion into Europe’s past (that also determined the reality of the US – at least initially)?
Because what we experience today is pretty much a pre-revoltionary reality as it occurred 233 years ago: the puppet masters have changed, I admit. Now, they are the US, Russian and Middle Eastern oligarchs. They own the capital and systematically deny the rights so many of us fought for in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century.
But it isn’t only AI that threatens to emasculate us and dictates the new future. It is those who created it, and social media, and the concentration of information in a very few hands.
What is missing today – unlike 1968 – are the leaders who stand up for the rights we had fought for: freedom of speech and expression, the right to demonstrate, the right for industrial action, our human rights quite generally.
All that is rapidly disappearing: people get arrested in the middle of the night because of a tweet. A guy who never invented a thing and claims to be the father of Tesla (he isn’t: Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, founded Tesla Motors in 2003) and space exploration (SpaceX’s two key people were Tom Mueller, who designed the company’s engines and led propulsion, retired from SpaceX in November 2020 after nearly 20years while Hans Koenigsmann, the original chief flight engineer and later VP of Build and Flight Reliability, retired in 2021 after guiding SpaceX’s launch operations for nearly two decades).
What Musk does, is destroy free speech whilst claiming to guarantee it. And monsters who returned to power by dubious means, financed by people with fascist agendas, declare omnipresent peace, while they practise tariff wars everywhere (to the detriment of their own population).
And then there is this
Leaked files reveal secret Israel-Arab military alliance build under US watch while Israel was massively bombing Gaza (The Washington Post).
The documents show they were secretly training with Israeli forces for years, all under Washington’s nose. The files reveal a quiet network linking Israel with six Arab nations: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, through U.S. Central Command’s ‘Regional Security Construct’. The group met from 2022 to 2025 for joint drills on air defense, tunnel warfare, and countering Iran’s influence. Meetings took place in places like Bahrain, Egypt, and even Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base, where Israeli officers were flown in quietly to avoid public outrage. Here’s the link to the full article: https://tinyurl.com/5n7hr72v
Why, you might ask – and should – would I offer this piece to readers on a football platform?
What does any of this have to do with football?
Let me help
At a time when ‘We the People’ keep inundating public squares, streets and campuses, when a huge majority around the world is calling out to stop the ethnic cleansing in Israel, the genocide that has murdered tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and destroyed 90% of Gaza, at this time where entire populations around the globe are rising up in disgust against an occupying force that systematically murders women and tens of thousands of children, at this time, when FIFA is being accused – and rightly so – of standing by, doing nothing, while its useless president flies around the globe in a Qatari private jet to kiss Trump’s fascist backside, at a time like this, football’s nomenclatura, its ‘FIFA Council’ kicks the justified demands, the outcry of the many, into the long grass.
FIFA is no longer a functioning organisation but a tool of the oligarchy, obsessed by the greed of a few to the detriment of the many.
Those who attack UEFA in the same breath, are unaware of the limitations any of the six Confederations of Football are facing: they are not even Members of FIFA – their own Members are – and they are mainly competition organisers, not governing bodies. The sole governing body that must act and can act – but refuses to act – is football’s world governing body. But it doesn’t.
The Washington Post revelations, the article I quoted further above, tells you why: FIFA under Infantino has become a geopolitical tool without a conscience, without any morals and without the minimum of decency. Its boss thinks he is Louis XVI and doesn’t understand French – thus European – history. But: ‘a Qatari Jet respect does not make’.
UEFA did what it can do. It cannot suspend Israel from global football. The most UEFA can do is ban Israel’s clubs from European competitions – and its national teams from European competitions. It can, as it did, highlight the plight of children who have become victims of mass murder – only to be criticised, anti-semitised and aggressed by those who support genocide, ethnic cleansing and the new holocaust that we witness every single day on social media – except when the likes of Musk & Co. censor freedom of speech that doesn’t fit into their twisted, fascist world view.
At a time when millions are protesting in the streets of literally all countries, when ‘We the People’ make it clear what the vast majority of us want – an end to wars and inhuman devastation – at this time, we need to stand with Norway’s football, and Italy’s football and Spanish, Slovenian, Portguese, French and European football altogether.
And because our own corrupt, greedy and self-obsessed politicians deny us the most basic of rights – the right to be critical – and while they continue to trade with and supply weapons to Israel, at a time when flotilla after flotilla gets destroyed by the state built on stolen land, for trying to deliver food and medicine, at this time, we must think of 1792.
Before it’s too late.
James Dostoyevsky was a Washington-based author until the end of 2018, where he reported on sports politics and socio-cultural topics. He returned to Europe in 2019 and continues to follow football politics – presently with an emphasis on the Middle East, Europe and Africa.