Bonzo Goes to Bitburg: NBA Edition, on Media Madness
Bonzo goes to Bitburg, earning the NBA and The Undefeated a T
As I mentioned briefly in some of my previous writing, I am still struggling to find coping strategies for writer’s block, burnout and depression – unfortunately, personal issues arose yesterday evening that kept me from working on any one of the five pieces I have on the go right now.
One of the things I’ve discovered during this process is that it’s pretty easy for me to fall into an ever widening death spiral if I don’t stay engaged with my work and my audience – I may not always be able to write essays, but that doesn’t mean I have to lock myself in a closet and avoid interacting with other people until I can turn the engine over again.
In that spirit, I thought I’d take a brief moment to talk about what is quite possibly the most ridiculously tone-deaf, sycophantic and disgusting article I’ve seen in sports media this year:
Rwandan president Paul Kagame makes grand appearance at Oracle Arena
Yes, that’s right folks – murderous Rwandan human rights abuser Paul Kagame got the rock star treatment during Oakland’s second round playoff contest with the Houston Rockets and Marc J. Spears, working on behalf of ESPN’s The Undefeated, wants you to know that’s just grand. He certainly isn’t the only one however – let’s look at a few absurdly shocking quotes from the piece itself:
“NBA commissioner Adam Silver was thankful for Kagame’s show of support.
“President Kagame and his family are very knowledgeable NBA fans, and we appreciate his support and that of other African leaders to grow the game across the continent,” Silver told The Undefeated.
Kagame was given tickets by the NBA, a league official confirmed. He was accompanied by about a dozen people, including his own personal security and Oracle Arena security, when he arrived during the first quarter, sources said. It was a scene reminiscent of the fashionably late arrivals of Prince, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Rihanna that have caused commotions at Warriors games in recent seasons. A restroom was also cleared for Kagame to use during the game for safety reasons.
“That is cool that someone like that will show us some love,” (Kevin) Durant said to The Undefeated.”
In August 2018, Kagame helped open the Giants of Africa camp in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, with Silver, Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri, NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum and NBA Africa managing director and Sports for Education and Economic Development founder Amadou Fall.
“President Kagame shared with us that he is a strong proponent of using sports, and basketball in particular, as a platform to promote physical and mental well-being across the continent and that he also sees the sports industry as an economic engine for future growth in Africa,” Silver said.
Ujiri, a native of Nigeria, added that Kagame has been “key to the development of the game on the continent.”
“He’s always been a big fan of sports, but I think the past few years his interest and love for basketball has grown more and more,” Ujiri said. “I know he loved basketball when I talked to him one time and he said he had been watching our game at odd hours in Rwanda. He asked me about load management.”
“When you talk about progressive and visionary,” Ujiri said, “that is President Kagame.””
This is, to put it politely, all sorts of objectively monstrous bullsh*t.
In one godawful piece that reads like a marketing insert for the NBA’s service to the Pig Empire, we’re presented with the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the President of the league’s most forward thinking franchise Masai Ujiri, the league’s most dominant team (the Golden State Warriors) and the NBA’s best individual player (Kevin Durant) falling all over themselves to lick boots for a genocidal goddamn war criminal – because he likes basketball and he’s interested in helping the NBA break into developing markets in Africa. The absolutely bloody stones on Ujiri when he calls Kagame, the former leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the architect of numerous massacres against Hutu tribesman in the nation he now leads, “progressive and visionary” is enough to make you want to vomit all by itself.
Spears himself and the Undefeated fare no better in this analysis either; the author’s attempts to explicitly tie Kagame to popular (and largely liberal or progressive) African American celebrities like Prince, Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Rihanna would make a CIA propaganda flak at the height of the Cold War, blush with immodesty. Hell, that rat bastard even manages to work in a subtle plug for former Bush Secretary of State and fellow war criminal Condoleezza Rice – there’s practically no bottom here in terms of how sh*tty this piece of PR work (for the NBA and a sociopathic mass murderer) really is.
As disgusting as “the Black Grantland” showing out for a man who literally ordered the slaughter of thousands of black Hutus is however, it probably isn’t all that surprising – especially in light of the NBA’s openly symbiotic relationship with ESPN, the sad formative history of The Undefeated, and the site’s rebirth as a pro-establishment mouthpiece pushing warmed over respectability politics hot-takes – after all, if honorary African American royalty like the Clintons can forgive Paul Kagame for a little genocide in Rwanda, why can’t you?
So how bad can Kagame really be, if all these “respectable” liberals and media folks are so jazzed about him? Well, you can certainly google his record of Pig Empire-backed slaughter for yourself, but here are a few places to start:
Exposing the Crimes of the CIAs Fair-Haired Boy, Paul Kagame, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front
Paul Kagame’s War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, and Crimes of Genocide
Did Rwanda’s Paul Kagame trigger the genocide of his own people?
4 Reasons Rwandan President Paul Kagame Is Not ‘Papa Africa’ Saving Slaves
Rwanda’s Paul Kagame – visionary or tyrant?
Rwanda’s Paul Kagame warned he may be charged with aiding war crimes
The end of the west’s humiliating affair with Paul Kagame
It has long been said that the National Football League is “the last bastion of fascism in America” and after watching Roger Goodell bend over backwards to appease Downmarket Mussolini, the only part of that statement I disagree with is the word “last.” In light of how hard the NBA, its league affiliates and its business partners at ESPN groveled when Paul Kagame came to Oaktown however, perhaps it’s time to admit that there’s a larger problem at work here – in pursuit of the almighty dollar, there’s no limited to how low capitalists in the Pig Empire will go and it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the grabbing hands are black, white or red all over.
– nina illingworth
