Sports are not apolitical, Dave Zirin told me that

Resist 2010: Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics. (HIGH RES) from BurningFist Media on Vimeo.

The 2010 Winter Olympics begin on Friday. The "convergence of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial forces" in Vancouver and the surrounding area begins today (Wednesday). Watch the video above for the 8 reasons to resist the Olympics, and a short documentary history of the direct actions of the last four years against the ecological destruction, infrastructure development, colonization, displacement, militarization, public spending, and corporate profit that has led up to the current games.

Reasons to resist:

• Expansion of sport tourism on Indigenous lands
• Increasing homelessness across the province and especially in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
• Misdirected public spending and debt totaling $6 billion while funding for the arts, educations, and health care are suffering cutbacks
• Corporate bailouts and profits for companies with some of the worst social and environmental records
• Threats to basic civil liberties and free speech
• Union-busting and vulnerable working conditions for migrant labour
• Unprecedented destruction of the environment
• Unparalleled $1 billion police and security spending that is turning our city into a militarized zone.

These types of convergences and direct actions always bring up questions for me about strategy. At what level do the direct actions actually have a chance of being successful? Will they actually stop a massive highway development, for example? Probably not, but it is possible they could alter it. And direct actions at their most basic level are empowering -- you know that you at least did something, it felt good to oppose the system, history will know that we weren't all tools, we helped expose the violent and repressive apparatus of the state, I refuse to be a docile body, and so on.

But on what level are "direct actions" antithetical to activist goals? Beyond being a material or psychological success (the first of which is unlikely), they are not necessarily good at what social movement people call "building the base." I'm thinking of the man in the video -- masked with a bandana, Zapatista-style -- who grabbed the mic at the opening event for the Olympic countdown clock, and shouted "Fuck the Olympics" until he was escorted away. What are you accomplishing here dude? I understand that soundbites are often all we get -- Twitter skills come in handy -- but you'd think you could come up with something a little bit better, no? It's possible that you reified the pro-Olympics mentality among people potentially sympathetic to your cause. Or maybe I'm being naively optimistic. I'm all for sit-ins to block unnecessary and destructive highways, but they will actually work if there are not just dozens but thousands of people standing alongside you.

It's a war of position, someone once jotted down in his prison cell in a fascist state. How do you get more people on your side? How do you be convincing? How do you seduce popular opinion? How do you promote something (yet still be open to being persuaded in new and other directions)? How do subordinated ideas gain widespread support?

These issues are all quite complicated and in need of endless dialogue, but I thought I'd raise a few questions.