Interview - with Ljubodrag Duci Simonovic

E-mail: comrade@orion.rs
1. What is the purpose of spectacular sports manifestations such as the World
Championship in football?
From a historical point of view, each regime has had its own festivals celebrating its
highest values. Sport is the embodiment of the ruling spirit of the capitalist order and thus has a
cult character. Hence the importance of the sports stadium. It is a modern pagan temple, where in
the form of a sports competition spectacular services to the deities that rule the world are
performed. The calendar of the greatest sports competitions has become a pattern determining
the course of time just like the Olympic Games in ancient Greece. Pierre de Coubertin, official
father of modern Olympic Games, maintained that sports is the cult of the existing world
and as such the most important means for dealing with the political struggle of working masses
and for integrating the lower races into the capitalist order at the level of slaves.
Sportivization of the world has become the most important instrument of mondialists for
destroying the emancipatory heritage of the civil society and national cultures and for dragging
people into the existential and value orbit of capitalism. Considering the scope of misery and
poverty in Africa, it is a sad truth that increasing amounts of money are invested in Africa into
stadiums and the development of sports show-business, instead of investing in agriculture,
education, waterpipes, health.... Obviously, the black rulers use the same governing mechanisms
as their white colonial masters in recent past.
2. How should we direct children regarding their attitude to sports spectacles?
We should help them to develop from early years their creative powers, which means
their creative being. A developed artistic being is the best defence against primitive sports
spectacles. Schillers view that upbringing through art is upbringing for art should be the
guiding principle in their upbringing. In sport, we have established upbringing without
education, which is one of the most fatal postulates of Coubertins utilitarian pedagogy. It is no
accident that Nazis, particularly Hitler, were delighted with Coubertin and his Olympism.
3. It is not possible to isolate children from their environment. What do you think can be
done with respect to that?
Children cannot be kept under the glass bell of playgrounds and special
schools. The only answer to the increasingly inhumane world is to develop their humane being
and their will to fight for a humane world. Bearing in mind the ever more dramatic destruction of
nature, such an answer is not only a cultural and libertarian imperative it used to be at the time of
Goethe and Schiller, it has become an existential imperative. Hence the development of young
peoples emancipated ecological consciousness is one of the most important tasks of modern
pedagogy. Ecologically, sport has fatal consequences for young people. In sport, destructive
instrumentalization of the body, involving the development of a self-destructive character and
consciousness, has reached its peak. Sport is not only one of the most radical forms of
dehumanization, it is also mans denaturalization. It completely corresponds to the technical

civilization, which destructs nature and man as a human and natural being. In no other social
sphere has the monstruous idea of a man-robot been realized to such an extent as in sport.
4. What makes children decide to engage in sport?
Money and affirmation in the existing world these things make sport attractive for
young people. Millions of dollars, expensive cars, yachts, macho iconography, attractive girls,
spectacular photographies of super-built bodies, spotlights, yelling crowds.... Sportsmen appear
on TV as modern supermen, attractive to young people who are lost in a world where they see
no future. The grandiosity of sports spectacles stands in opposition to everyday misery of the
majority of young people. Coubertin was right: sport is the cheapest spiritual food for
proletarian youth, keeping it under control.
5. What is the role of parents?
Many parents are prepared to mercilesly push their children into the sports arena in
the belief that they will get rich, thus making them rich too. Only a small number of children
succeed others fall to the bottom of society. Those who manage to acquire some money lose
through that process the most important human qualities those which money cannot buy. Selfrespect, which is acquired from the development of ones own creative being and intelligence,
cannot be bought, and nor can love and respect.
6. What kind of sports activities do you recommend?
Children should not engage in sport, they should engage in physical culture. And this
means in such physical activities which develop their cultural being, enrich relations between
people and cultivize their natural being. Sport is predominantly characterized by movement of
man against another man and the absolutized principle of a quantitatively measurable
performance expressed in the Olympic maxim citius, altius, fortius (faster, farther, stronger).
(Genuine) physical culture is characterized by a movement of man towards another man and the
performance which affirms mans peculiar quality as an independent creative being as is the
case in art. In addition, sport creates an artificial (technical) space intended to enable new records
which are not manifestations of the development of human powers, but of mans destruction as
a human and natural being. In opposition to that, in (genuine) physical culture man seeks a
cultivated natural movement in a cultivated natural environement. As far as human relations
are concerned, it is legal and legitimate in sport to inflict serious injuries to ones opponent and
kill him. Likewise, there is a segregation with respect to gender, women being the symbol of
weakness, who are consequently treated as lower beings. Comparing boys to girls is the
most offensive thing a coach can say to his boys in order to make them fight in games. The
ways in which coaches humiliate and destroy young people are unbelievable.... This, of course, is
never talked about in order to keep the humane mask which conceals the truth that sport has
become the main spiritual drug depolitizing increasingly dissatisfied young people and ensuring
the survival of the ruling order.
7. Do you know what has happened with physical education in schools?

Physical education in schools is completely degraded and so is the pedagogical role

of the teacher of physical education. This is reflected in the change in the name of the Faculty
for Physical Culture into the Faculty for Sport and Physical Education. Instead of establishing
the much needed critical distance from sport from the aspect of a humanistic physical culture,
sport has been idealized, while pedagogy of physical culture serves to glorify sport. As far as the
expression physical education is concerned, even a lay man can see that physical exercises do
not educate the body, but the man. This was emphasized as long ago as in ancient Hellad, as well
as in the philantropic movement which developed in Germany after the French Revolution. Even
in the most developed capitalist countries in the West the dominant tendency is to eliminate
physical culture from the pedagogical theory and practice and introduce sports education,
thus dealing finally with the efforts to create space in school for the development of young
peoples playing being. At the same time, the so-called mass physical culture of the general
public has been abolished by a commercialized physical activism and various body treatments
aimed at healing the consequences created by the consumer society which turned man into
a consuming idiot and the body into a container devouring increasingly poisonous surrogates of
the capitalist civilization.