FORMER tennis great, John McEnroe, does not want a Saudi tennis tournament in the category of those that currently exist. He cites two reasons, the “big money push’ into tennis by the Saudis and player fatigue.

It is laughable that an American can even attempt to use the words, “big money” when, since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Americans have used big money to dominate not only world sports but the world in itself.

The Saudis are using “big money” to break into world football and they will expand their influence by the continuation of paying attractive sums to global star players. The Indians have used “big money” to climb to the top of the cricketing world. The advancements of the Saudis and Indians in global sports is a movement in a direction that the Japanese started decades ago and that the Chinese have followed.

Japan used its wealth to compete with the rich industrial nations in the automobile industry. Today that industry is ahead of car manufacturing in Europe and the US. It is only a question of time before the Chinese and Indians stake a claim to the car industry world-wide. It is an enigma why China and India are not exporting vehicles world-wide when they can make vehicles on par with those in Europe, the US and Japan.

Japan extended its global reach by entering the movie and music business in the US under the aegis of Sony. China and the Middle East have emulated the Japanese and now have substantial investments around the world. Whenever Western domination is threatened, you hear voices similar to the echo of John McEnroe.

Make no mistake; the huge Western denunciation of the Qatar World Cup had more to do with fear of the shifting of the world order rather than human rights. It was the first time, a World Cup was held in a small country outside the wealthy nations of the world.

When the cry of human rights reached its crescendo, here is what the chief of FIFA, Gianno Infantino said: “I’m European. For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,”

For too long, the West has dominated more than 7 billion people that live outside of Western culture and the non-Western world has been too slow to project its history and culture and take its rightful place in modern civilization. The world has an Australian Open, Wimbledon, a French Open and a US Open, so why not a Saudi Open if the Saudis can finance it?

We have the latest Western penetration of the Third World in the form of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) at the University of Gottenburg in Sweden. This a small university in Europe that has decided to rank all the countries in the world according to democratic governance. Each year it publishes a report ranking countries that are more and less democratic.

The V-Dem Institute is one of the most mysterious in the world. Depending on how you look at their work, you can deem it the most barefaced group of people in the world. Each year, European countries or Western countries top the list including countries that are way behind the CARICOM nations.

What criteria these people use and how they apply the criteria only they know but anyone who studies politics would know that their list is Eurocentric and an embarrassment to the study of comparative politics. For 2024, as usual, Western countries top the list. What is more democratic about Australia, which is number one, than Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean? Australia should be nowhere on the list muchless on the top because it is in constant violation of international law on refugees.

Israel practises apartheid, has been committing Nazi like atrocities on the Palestinians for over 50 years, and is one of the world’s leading violators of international law and Israel is number 26 out of a list of 182. Italy, one of the most shambolic countries in the world is at 27, above some of the top democracies of the world including the UK. There are academics who actually quote from these annual disgraceful reports. There isn’t one academic at the V-Dem Institute that can tell any academic in the Third World why Australia is number one.

Then we have Transparency International based in Germany. Read its annual report and all the Western countries are on the top of the list and the Third World countries are at the bottom. What Saudi Arabia is doing is what the non-western world should have done decades ago.