Hunter S Thompson, the counter culture US political journalist, who probably got closer than anyone to the Ex President of the United States, Richard Nixon, wrote an unflinching piece on his funeral for Rolling Stone magazine in 1994, entitled simply, ‘He Was A Crook’. Of Nixon’s closest personal adviser during the Vietnam era and the subsequent ‘Watergate’ tapes scandal, Henry Kissinger, he wrote:
“It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that — but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end. Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.”
With that in mind, Guardian reporter, Matt Scott on June 2, says Kissinger will be “FIFA’s answer to the corruption problems that have shredded its reputation in recent months.” This is the same Henry Kissinger who conspired with Nixon to keep the relentless carpet bombing of innocent Cambodian civilians not just a secret from the press, but the rest of Federal intelligence. Documents falsified, military chiefs completely undermined…we shouldn’t forget the brutalisation of Cambodia opened the door for genocidal maniac Pol Pot to continue his own campaign of doom.
“We’ll do whatever it takes..we’ll kick the shit out of them,” screamed Nixon down the line to Kissinger, imploring him to “think big” on Nuclear in Vietnam, shortly before turning to US TV cameras in the Whitehouse to state categorically that he was not a crook. Without digressing too far from our central theme, we can all thank intelligence officer Daniel Ellesberg and his close allies, for exposing the whole filthy truth that lead to the eventual “self-impeachment” of one Richard Nixon. Ford was sworn in as President at noon the next day and pardoned the toad, knowing he too would “go to hell” for it.
Fast-forwarding to the present, even the most fanciful sports journalist could not have written this latest chapter in Sepp Blatter’s and FIFA’s current deep-rooted accusations of bribery and corruption. Rather than turning down the heat on the story, Blatter has turned it up to eleven by announcing his backing of Kissinger as the man to head up his ‘solutions committee’ whose job it will effectively be to open up FIFA to outside scrutiny and rid it of corruption.
The idea of Kissinger and transparency is about as convincing as Nixon’s desperate plea of innocence in light of all the evidence against him. Not least with all his Nixon Vietnam-era baggage, Kissinger remains a close personal friend to Blatter, so there’s already a major conflict of interest. The FIFA Family’s feeble attempt at opening up.
So what have the rest of the British media to say: Simon Jenkins of the Guardian and Evening Standard called Blatter a “villain” and claimed that the whole FIFA system was “corrupt.” Sitting next to him on the UK politics show, Question Time, was Sunday Express reporter Julia Hartley-Brewer whose reaction to the alleged individual payments of $40,000 to FIFA officials was to say, “I think we should have been paying higher bribes.” And Brewer likened Blatter’s business deals as the norm in global business, as if that somehow extricated the bastard. Short-lived Shadow Chancellor, Alan Johnson’s reply could not have been more spinelessly opaque beating his moral chest and relating it to issues like the NHS and the national debt, saying disingenuously, “I can’t get too excited by this…I don’t think it deserved to be top of the news agenda.” His sentiments entirely miss the point. He was esentially saying that corruption within a billion pound industry, within the most democratic sport in the world, was a small issue. Don’t ask a narrow-minded postman for his opinions.
The great HS Thompson was not afraid to quote someone else at length if it aided the story at hand, so I won’t be. As Blatter recently claimed to be the captain of the FIFA ship currently drifting through “troubled waters”, I’ll go out with this, aimed squarely at Nixon but just as relevant to the re-elected FIFA President: “He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him– and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.”
de spin 