Free Bobby Fischer!

Em The Hounding of a Chess Legend, by Richard Wall:

"Well, yes we are. Bobby Fischer was finally ‘nabbed’ in July this year at Tokyo’s Narita airport, as he was boarding a flight for Manila, his 1997–issue US passport (valid till 2007) having earlier been revoked by Uncle Sam, apparently unbeknown to its bewildered holder.

Why does the US government in 2003 cancel a valid passport, if it could quite happily issue that same passport in 1997, when Fischer was presumably no less in violation of the sanctions than he is now? It is hardly cynical to say that this officious measure betrays every sign of deliberate and petty victimisation of an individual citizen. Sign of the times.

So Bobby Fischer, 61, the eccentric and, as Deweyians and psychologists would say, never properly socialized chess champion, is now in detention in Japan. He has been so held since his arrest at the airport, while legal proceedings proceed slowly(...).

The barracuda press, primed with unseemly haste, took vindictive pleasure at his misfortune.

"Fugitive chess king Fischer caught," the Associated Press bulletin of July 16 obscenely exulted, informing us a little further on that "Fischer is wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 chess match in …Yugoslavia, in violation of international sanctions," for which he may face 10 years in jail, a fine of US$250,000 and confiscation of his prize money from the match, estimated at over US$3 million."

Murray N. Rothbard em 1992 tinha escrito:

"Why the unfair and out-of-line hysteria about Bobby? Well, it turns out that Bobby, an independent thinker in other fields than chess, is definitely not Politically Correct. Apparently, even chess players are not allowed to stray beyond the narrow bounds of PC without being severely punished.

Are we going to have to say, metaphorically, and even literally if he is nabbed for "violation of sanctions": Free Bobby Fischer and All Political Prisoners?!"

Boris Spassky, Appeal to President Bush, August 7, 2004

"Bobby is a tragic personality. … He is an honest and good-natured man. Absolutely not social. He is not adaptable to everybody’s standards of life. He has a very high sense of justice and is unwilling to compromise as well as with his own conscience as with surrounding people. He is a person who is doing almost everything against himself.

I would not like to defend or justify Bobby Fischer. He is what he is. I am asking only for one thing. For mercy, charity.

If for some reason it is impossible, I would like to ask you the following: Please correct the mistake of President François Mitterand in 1992. Bobby and myself committed the same crime. Put sanctions against me also. Arrest me. And put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us a chess set."