Is oppression as simple as playing soccer?

If you draw a rectangle on a field, erect goalposts at each end, choose two teams in red and blue shirts and give them a ball they will compete to score goals, even risking injuries, wrote Prof K Basu. Onlookers will take sides and will take time out to watch the game. "Life is full of such created targets, and this has implications for how societies or economies function. Worryingly, electoral politics is often like this too. Democrats or Republicans, or Tory or Labor, after some time, it becomes like ordinary people supporting Liverpool or Chelsea." Are sports and politics similar? In amateur sports the prize is  thrill of beating, as in running or soccer, or subduing, as in wrestling or boxing, another. Every game is a battle. Even an unhurried, quiet game like chess was invented to resemble war. In India, where chess was invented, we have a king, a minister, an elephant, a horse, a camel and foot soldiers, called 'pyada'. The game ends when one king is captured. Men have been fighting each other since neolithic times and sports may have been invented as a substitute for actual battle. Men were playing with a rubber ball, and sometimes with human heads, 3,500 years ago in central America. Apparently, every civilization, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek or Mayan, invented its own ball to play with. If these are examples of "created targets" or just a human desire for entertainment we do not know. After all, human beings spend a lot of money to be scared witless by horror movies. "For politicians, corporations, and powerful organizations, this human faculty of created targets is an opportunity." "Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which many are garnered by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers," wrote David Hume. Does that explain why people informed on their own families in the Soviet Union, or the many reasons why people betrayed others in former East Germany? Both the Soviet Union and East Germany do not exist any more, proving perhaps that such tactics are self-defeating. Social norms of behavior control our actions. "In the Indian context, this is true of punctuality norms, certain kinds of group discrimination, and even phenomena like child labor." "Year after year, our Independence Day only seems to mark freedom from colonial oppressors. But the Indian state is free to oppress and expropriate -- by either ignoring private disorder or imposing public oppression, or most often, both," wrote Prof S Rajagopalan. The strong will always oppress the weak. Simple.