- Jun 16, 2011
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Thanks for articulating with such clarity exactly what a lot of people think. Not enough that I can "winner" this only onceI know that you've not posted since this, and it was 60-odd pages ago and likely other far cleverer posters than me have already commented, but on the off-chance you're still reading and they haven't, but I feel too strongly to avoid chiming in:
Your comparison doesn't hold water. Discussing the relative merits of the different brands of a consumer good, like a phone, is not the same thing, because those entities are competing in a comparable manner. If one compares Samsung and Apple and mentions the use of Chinese sweatshop labour, they're both doing it - so that's a common factor that isn't germane to the conversation as there is no variability.
The difference is that your club's owners are the ruling family of a regime that destroys lives, that dehumanises human beings and every single microsecond of entertainment, success, moments observed bringing supposed glory to the name of your club is steeped in the blood of innocents. And the primary objective of your club's owners is to try and wipe the blood from their hands by having individuals such as yourself think kindly of them for the joy they have provided you. No other PL chairman has that particular characteristic.
Let me ask you this: if you witnessed someone mug another in the street and then walk into a shop and buy you a Mars bar with the money they'd just robbed, how comfortable would you be taking the chocolate? Would you be quite so eager to discuss the relative merits of Mars over Twix?
That's not to say that the other club chairmen are all squeaky-clean characters, but none of the others (not even Abramovich) has built their wealth off the back of a zealously pursued murderous, racist, sexist and homophobic philosophy and then using that money to try and cover their reprehensible behaviour. Certainly Abramovich is guilty of robbing the wealth of people during a febrile period of post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and he should be condemned for that (and I do condemn him for it), but he still didn't devolve so far as to engage in what the Al-Nahyans do, which they do willingly, happily and with the utmost zeal.
So, yes, any discussion that involves City, in any capacity, must include the owner's record of extrajudicial murder, the disappearances of people whose only sin is their political dissent, the repression of anyone who dares to be attracted to a member of the same sex, or has the temerity to be born with female genitalia, or is so cheeky as to have been born in a different country.
You may wish to divorce yourself from it. You may wish to cover your eyes and ignore precisely what your club has become - a vehicle designed to provide cover for the worst humanity has to offer. We've actually seen members of a Man City forum trying to claim that condemning City is racist; the cognitive dissonance in evidence there when City's owners are themselves among the most actively and viciously racist people in the world and actually put their bankrupt ideas into practice, is breathtaking. That's precisely what your owners love to see - normal human beings, who would ordinarily be sickened by the horrors the Al-Nahyans perpetuate, rushing to their defence, because their criminality happens to have helped the club lift some trophies.
Maybe it's understandable: sometimes some things are too big for us to care about. Fine. But if you don't want to involve yourself in that aspect, you can't deny that the fundamental issue exists nor that everything Man City does as a club is designed for a specific objective; therefore any discussion of the club's activities must include that objective, as any club's overall objective is implicitly part of a conversation about their activities. Trying to divorce the horror of what the Al-Nahyans are just because its uncomfortable is simply denying the truth.
The Al-Nahyans don't want to buy Kane only because he would increase the club's success. They want him because it will help perpetuate their objective of deflecting attention from the inhumanity they perpetrate far away in their gilded desert gulag.
Apologies to all for restirring an old post, but I really feel very strongly about this aspect of Man City's current existence.