SA's 2010 World Cup Tops Google's Zeitgeist

As many optimists predicted, the single biggest successful world event this year by far turned out to be our 2010 FIFA World Cup, held on the African continent for the first time in history. This largest single-sport event in the world was a boon to SA's introduction on the world stage, kind of like SA's coming out party, after centuries of a dark, tumultuous and shameful history.

Like a doctor taking the pulse of a patient to gauge the state of one's current condition, Google Zeitgeist's data visualization (http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/) provides us with candid insight into what our world is really thinking by cutting through the media hype generated by pollsters and media conglomerates with a multitude of political and corporate agendas. As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words", and the power of Google's Zeitgeist is that is does exactly that through a graphic showing us how the world searched during the entire year. The top events that rose to the surface after aggregating billions of searches, turned out to be: "world cup" (South Africa), "olympics" (Canada), "haiti earthquake" (Haiti), "oil spill" (US Gulf of Mexico) and "ash cloud" (Iceland).

The graphic below (click to expand) is a snapshot of the summarized timeline of three recent world events that generated HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of searches through the year: "world Cup" (green), "olympics" (blue) and "oil spill" (yellow) and the green, blue and yellow dots indicates where these events took place.


Two things become glaringly apparent after viewing the world through the lens of Google searches. The first is the disconnect between what we see in the mainstream news media and what is really important to billions of people around the world on a daily basis. This disconnect is not surprising given that the majority of the world media are really owned by a corporate giants with hidden agendas that want to influence mass thinking. This internet has emerged as a bulwark against the total dominance of governments and media conglomerates of communication and media i.e. a true democratization of these communication channels for the first time in human history. The second, is the sheer scale of the 2010 World Cup, comparable the earthquake in Haiti, dwarfed the other events, and showed the importance of soccer a true world sport embraced by billions across cultures, geography, age, gender etc. The simplicity of the sport accounts for its scalability i.e. the same game that is played on some dusty field in some rural village can also be played in a state-of-the-art modern stadium viewed by billions across the world.

From another angle however, our South African perspective, there are many long term benefits for successfully hosting such an event.
1. Gaining the world's confidence of the execution ability of SA to host world events in spite of the naysayers in our own media that tried to sabotage the event with fabrications and whipping up hysteria about violence, xenophobia, vuvuzelas and whatnot. In spite of media negativity that contributed to a significant drop in attendance based on initial attendance estimates, it was nevertheless one of the safest and most successful sporting events ever!
2. The development of our infrastructure across the board. Heck, we're the first country in Africa to have Google Streetview - a testament to our openness and willingness to embrace technological progress. The short term thinkers, aka the naysayers, that complain of the billions spent on stadiums are unable to see the larger implications of these investments being leveraged to host other world events, like Durban's bid for the 2020 Olympics to attract more tourism, or being put to other creative uses.
3. An opportunity to market SA as a premier tourist destination. Just the long term benefits of this marketing has many positive implications for future tourism, business and cultural exchanges. The world had an opportunity to experience the graciousness of the South African people.
4. Using sport to rebuild of the fabric of our own polarized South African community. Many white rugby fans gained exposure to soccer for the first time in their lives! Even during Mandela's incarceration on Robben Island, we saw his love of the game and got a glimpse of how soccer indirectly influenced the course of our liberation from apartheid. Also, South African soccer fans felt a kindred spirit with international fans, many for the first time - an eye-opening experience for many in a country isolated for centuries from the international visitors.

We seized the golden opportunity afforded by the 2010 Fifa World Cup as another way to overcome our tragic physiological scars and regain our self-confidence. This self-confidence to realize that, as a country blessed with natural beauty, abundance and diversity, our trajectory towards societal transformation and progress is unstoppable. Its going to be a great ride!

SA radicals - our hottest new export?

In a recent development in the US, a group calling themselves "Guardians of the free Republics" apparently wants to strip Washington of its ability to tax citizens' income and dismantle the FBI and other federal agencies. The group created a stir recently since a letter to all 50 governors demanding they step down within three days or be removed, contained an implicit threat, triggering an FBI investigation.

What does this have to do with SA? Well, according to Mother Jones the websites for this lunatic militia group (goftr.com and guardiansofthefreerepublics.com) are registered to one Clive Boustred of Soquel, California—a British-educated former SOUTH AFRICAN soldier with an apparent knack for "anti-terrorist warfare". Both the sites and the group seem to have suddenly sprung up about two months ago. The youtube video of one of Clive's interviews, shows an individual in a state of confusion and paranoia. My sympathies are with his recently divorced wife and kids who have to put up with all his BS.

Anyway, the attraction of extremist South Africans to neo-conservative and militia groups around the world is a known fact and perfectly understandable given their apartheid indoctrination, army training and super-size egos. Furthermore, these like minded lunatics make effective use the Internet to advertise their groups with the view of attracting new recruits and are constantly exchanging ideas and strategies on how to propagate their false beliefs to a wider audience.

This unique brand of South African radicalism, courtesy of the previous apartheid regime, parallels the right wing militia groups and the neocons of Republican party in several ways:

1. They both paint the government as utterly corrupt, totally inefficient and morally depraved.

The recent spate of media headlines braying corruption at every level of the ANC, surprisingly turn a blind eye to corruption in our private sector, where fatcats pay themselves obscene bonuses while their companies stock price plummets and hundreds of thousands of workers are retrenched in the process. Our corporate fatcats seem to get a free ride from the media scrutiny. In the US, the necons in the Republican Party are constantly speaking of deregulation to the point that the capitalism itself has been pushed to the edge of the precipice while the fatcats on Wall Street, feed at the trough, paying themselves the biggest bonuses in history! The neocons in SA media, constantly fixate on government corruption to deflect public attention from companies bereft of any conscience, raping SA consumers on a daily basis. The abhorrant practice of price-fixing continues unabated in our economy due to the lack of consumer advocate groups and toothless government watchdog organizations.

2. They both propagate the myth that businesses and the rich pay a disproportional share of tax revenues.

The bulk of our taxes are derived from middle class wage earners and ordinary SA consumers. Big business and the wealthy have always had the best resources to minimize their taxes through planning and exploiting legal and sometimes illegal loopholes. This will ALWAYS be true due to the nature of the complex tax laws and its in democracies. Today in SA, one hears constant rumblings from the previously privileged to use "lifestyle audits" against political opponents, a strategy guaranteed to gut our tax system. Similarly, the "Guardians of the free Republics" in the US advocate abolishing the IRS and other neocon groups like the Tea Parties are well known for their tax protests and undercurrent of racism.

3. They both use the divisive politics of fear and personal attacks to demonize the opposition to win elections and cling to political power at all costs.

The racist element of the DA (Democratic Alliance) leadership with their cohorts in the media, have constantly engaged in personal attacks e.g. against President Zuma and Malema just before the elections and recently again when Malema brought up the issue of nationalization of the mines. Just recently, racist saboteurs used fear extremely effectively to scare of tourists to the FIFA World Cup and the media whipped up a storm both locally and the internationally until FIFA were forced to step in to reign in our OWN local journalists. The neocons in the US, under Karl Rove's masterful ocherstration, have repeatedly used the fear of terrorists attacks and outrageous personal attacks to accomplish the impossible - successfully elect George W Bush for TWO terms. Unfortunately these shortsighted strategies ultimately work against them, since Bush left in his wake a trail of destruction that will take the US decades to get out of.

4. They both vehemently oppose Affirmative Action.

The racist neocons of the US Republican party and the DA have both used the "merit" argument against the SA and US governments attempts at creating employment equity through AA. Civil Rights groups in the US have been instrumental in holding the government and companies accountable for the implementation of AA. Tremendous progress has been made over the years culminating in the election of the first African American President - a watershed moment in US history. In SA however, recent studies have shown that over 90% of CEOs are white, yet the DA still opposes AA! Go figure.

5. They are both Nazi sympathizers to varing degrees.
The far right elements like the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging or Afrikaner Resistance Movement), Afrikaner Broederbond etc. here in SA and militia groups in the US, have always had an affinity for Hitler's false belief of racial superiority. Ironically, here in SA, these Nazi sympathesizers are quick to compare themselves to the German Jews or the compare black leaders to Hitler, with the view of portraying themselves as being under assault by the black majority. Some elements in SA media use underhanded techniques like juxtaposing and comparing Hitler with Zuma, Mugabe, Malema to propagate their twisted fear based politics.

Unfortunately, due to the previously privileged's continued denialism, amnesia and refusal to take responsibility for apartheid, racism in SA has will take generations to overcome, but in the meantime, many our homegrown racists are voting with their feet and spreading across the globe since the end of white-AA in SA is imminent. Just like the Canadian government's fiasco in admitting Brandon Huntly, the "white SA refugee" fleeing persecution from "black criminals", the US government however, is also unwittingly allowing this cancer to infiltrate their society by not understanding the unique brand of racism that has been festering in our country for centuries. Like the jihadists, our SA racists are adept at manoeuvring through the bureaucratic morass of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Homeland with the help of militia groups, neocon organizations etc. made much easier through the Internet. By sheer serendipity however, the worldwide recession has in a strange way slowed down this movement since ALL countries have effectively closed their doors on immigration making it more difficult for these sometimes smart and determined radicals to exploit immigration laws to export their unique brand of extremism abroad.

Just like certain tourists and immigrants are subject to additional security clearances based on their nationality, one can only hope that the US government wakes up in time to stem the infiltration, influence and free movement of these undesirables from our shores into their free societies.