Our Own Gladiatorial Sins. AOL reports today that a boxer from my state may join the list of fiters killed for the audience's pleasure in the modern version of ancient Rome's gladiatorial combat, "pugilism".

Veteran boxer Leavander Johnson [of Atlantic City] underwent brain surgery and was in critical condition Saturday night after collapsing in his dressing room following his IBF lightweight title loss against challenger Jesus Chavez.

The bout, in Sin City (Las Vegas, Nevada), is just the latest in a series of endless crimes against decency committed in the name of "sport" — but basically just for money to be made from gambling. The grave injury that resulted should impel society once and for all to abolish boxing.
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The referee was apparently slow to stop the fite, despite loud calls from people in the audience to end it. In a civilized society, a referee who willfully lets things go too far would be subject to prosecution or, at the least, civil lawsuit, as a story from Britain shows:

Professor ["Hugh Bayne from Sunderland University [who] has examined the case law surrounding boxing"] believes a [1998] case in which an injured rugby player successfully sued a referee could have an impact on boxing. The player broke his neck in a collapsed scrum and took the referee to court, even though it was an opposing player who actually caused the injury. The court decided the referee had a duty to protect the player's safety "in a situation where he would have known that intervention was necessary."

British doctors have considered simply refusing to show up at boxing matches, which would effectively outlaw boxing unless British law were changed, since present law requires a doctor be present for any match to proceed. If U.S. boxing commissions have similar laws, we don't need to go the route of formal legislative abolition to get rid of this odious barbarism. Rather, doctors could just refuse to participate, refuse any longer to sanction a "sport" whose object is to cause such serious injury that a person is rendered unconscious.

A fighter's goal is a knockout. That's a concussion. That's an injury suffered by the brain when it is caused to slap up against the bone of the skull. The brain is traumatized; in shock it cannot function. Done with enough force, injury to a fighter's brain goes beyond bruising. The very best fighters deliver blows that cause the brain to slap the skullbone so hard as to rip the brain's tissue and its blood vessels. In which case the brain becomes a bleeding tomato.

The 1995 column from The Sporting News from which the quote above is taken observes that "assaults are legal in the U.S. if they occur in a boxing ring where, after all, homicide is the standard of perfection." The writer, David Kindred, goes on:

Only the latest fighter to die, Jimmy Garcia, a Mexican fighter of small renown, won't be the last. His death recently will be forgotten as "one of those things that happen" when, the truth is, he put his life at risk for the entertainment of barbarians.

Kindred says he once wrote "blather" about boxing being:

a symbol of man's courage and perseverance in rising above his life's barren beginnings.

Once upon a time, I wrote such blather. But, to quote Roberto Duran, no mas. No more. No sale here. Take your barbaric yappings somewhere else. The terrible truth is that anyone who steps into a boxing ring is a symbol of helplessness compounded by hopelessness. They are men with no way out of their lives except to give them up to a sport that wants nothing more than to kill them. * * *

The usual argument against the abolition of boxing is that they'll do it illegally. Well, OK, go ahead. Let them take their fights onto cruise ships in international waters. Let them fight in underground rooms hidden from our sight. We can not legislate away the bloodlust of human beings. Just don't bring boxing into our living rooms on television. Don't pretend it has a place in civilized life. It is beneath contempt.

This sport is no sport.

It is murder for hire.

Quite so. If doctors' withdrawing from this conspiracy of brutality will effectively abolish boxing without the need of a legislative remedy — which would be part of that endless enlargement of government that conservatives complain about — fine. Let the AMA revise the canons of ethics doctors must abide by to forbid enabling boxing.
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But even if the abolition of boxing should require formal legislative action, so be it. It's time for our civilization to forbid this dehumanizing, vicious activity, just as we have abolished bear-baiting and cockfiting. Sweden abolished boxing in 1970, and it is illegal in many other countries. Few people realize it, but boxing was not always legal in the United States but was widely banned until after 1920. You'd think we'd become more civilized, not less, over time.
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Instead, even more violent forms of combat "sports" have risen in recent years, from kickboxing to extreme fiting. All of them must be destroyed, lest we descend ever further down into the muck of barbarism.
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I have often wondered if the tales we hear about ancient Roman gladiatorial combats in which men were compelled to fite to the death, not in a single, unique contest never to be repeated but in day after day of bloody spectacle, ever really happened or were just anti-pagan slander by the early Christian church. It seems so out of keeping with a society from which we derive so much of the best in our own culture, a direct descendant of Roman civilization.
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Perhaps some criminals guilty of capital crimes were killed publicly in Rome, as many societies have held public executions, and pitting one murderer against another to kill them was one way Rome executed criminals. But to force poor people to kill each other for the entertainment of the mob? I wonder about that.
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Do we have reliable accounts of such things occurring as recorded by dispassionate outsiders? I don't want to hear Christian accounts of pagan misdeeds, nor Persian accounts of the misbehavior of their Roman rivals, whom they had good reason to paint as barbarians and savages who needed to be destroyed. I want accounts from India, China, or some other very distant country's ambassadors or merchants.
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History is written by the winners, and the loser's side of the story is often obliterated. Slanderous nonsense becomes historical "fact" if the victor wants to legitimize its conflicts by painting the loser as savage.
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Of course, it can work the other way around, too, whereby the victor portrays itself as noble and pure, and glosses over its own crimes.
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There was a most-bizarre twist on this in the case of Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare program in China during World War II that killed unnumbered thousands of Chinese and prisoners of war. I recently saw a documentary about it on some reputable cable channel.
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Unit 731 deliberately unleashed bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax, and other biological weapons against innocent Chinese by, among other things, spreading spores and infected fleas from airplanes upon rural areas and even towns, nearby and in parts of China that Japan had not yet conquered.
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It then dispatched teams of investigators (within occupied areas) to see how many Chinese died, how long death took, etc. It provided no medical treatment to them, but simply checked to see how effective these measures were. Those that worked well, were intended to be used against all of Japan's enemies, including the U.S., which was targeted for biological attack via balloons carried thousands of miles by the jet stream.
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Unit 731 also tied people to posts arranged at different distances and angles from a central point where a bomb was exploded, to see how much damage was done in the various positions; dropped temperatures lower and lower until people died, so they could know for sure how much cold people could survive; and conversely, raised the temperature higher and higher until people died of the heat.
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"Scientists" did "autopsies" before people died, by cutting into their flesh without first giving them anesthesia. The first time they did it, the screams bothered them. After a while, the screams didn't bother them at all.
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These Japanese 'men of science' kept careful records and over time amassed valuable scientific data. And all it cost was the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents.
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So valuable was that data that the United States Government, upon finding out about the program and arresting the guilty, actually gave amnesty to these monstrous war criminals in exchange for their turning over, and decoding, their records! Thus, the victor actually took over the spoils of war crimes and actively connived in protecting war criminals far worse than Germany's notorious Josef Mengele ever was, in the process becoming a very active accessory after the fact to horrendous outrages.
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Permitting boxing doesn't rise to that level of monstrousness, but it is nonetheless a crime against humanity that contributes to a culture of violence from which this country suffers badly. Our political leaders and doctors co-conspire in that crime. That must stop.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,900 (even).)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:43 PM