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By Steve Almond Special to The Washington Post.

Over the past few weeks, Americans have been confronted by a slew of scandals besieging our most popular sport. Outrage over the off-the-field violence of star running backs Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson has been accompanied by the revelation that the National Football League expects almost one-third of its retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems at "notably younger ages" than the rest of the population. Amid all this scrutiny, the NFL remains enshrouded in myths. Let's consider five of the most stubborn.

1. The NFL is on its way to resolving its concussion crisis.

This talking point, trumpeted by league officials and routinely repeated by sports reporters and fans, relies on the notion that new helmet technology and rule changes will suffice. In fact, the number of concussions was up more than 50 percent in this year's first three preseason games compared with the same games last year.

And even if the league reduces concussions, the profound risks to its players will remain in the form of sub-concussive hits, the hundreds or even thousands of lesser blows that damage the brain without registering as full-blown concussions, and that are absorbed not just during games but in every full-contact practice.

The NFL doesn't have a concussion crisis, in other words; it has a violence problem. Players are bigger, stronger and faster than ever. When they collide, their brains soft organs smash against the inside of their skulls. No miracle technology or rule tweaking is going to undo the basic physics and physiology of the sport.

2. The NFL's economic model is socialist.

Pundits from Chuck Klosterman to Bill Maher have echoed this canard.

It's true that NFL teams share revenue generated by TV and merchandise deals. But this fact is a testament to the league's canny corporate ethos. In 1961, for instance, lobbyists persuaded Congress to pass a law that allowed the NFL to circumvent antitrust rules and to sell TV rights, collectively, to the highest bidder. In effect, the NFL became a legal monopoly. A few years later, lawmakers cut a deal with the league that granted it tax-exempt status.

Like most effective monopolies, the NFL has leveraged its power at the expense of taxpayers, who supply 70 percent of the funding for NFL stadiums along with millions in infrastructure according to Judith Long, a professor of urban planning at Harvard University. Team owners also receive lucrative "inducement payments" to keep them from moving their franchises to other cities. Billionaires shaking down cities and states for public monies? That's not socialism. It's crony capitalism.

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Commentary: Five myths about the NFL, from concussions to socialism

PyroFalkon #39;s Sims 4 Socialism Challenge Trailer
Let #39;s play The Sims 4! Jon "PyroFalkon" Michael, the writer of the IGN Entertainment strategy guide wiki for The Sims 4, has created a set of house rules to make The Sims 4 more challenging,...

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PyroFalkon's Sims 4 Socialism Challenge Trailer - Video

IN 1949, Albert Einstein wrote a short essay entitled Why Socialism? In it he made a compellingly simple case for why humanity had to build a new social order based on fundamentally different principles than those which prevailed in the capitalist present. Einsteins political views were not necessarily a secret during his lifetime, but in death he has been stripped entirely of his socialist politics.

The great man is, of course, not alone. In this country and all over the world, innumerable individuals who openly espoused rebellion against state and class power, patriarchy and national oppression, have been rechristened as dedicated loyalists after their departure from this world. Some icons have been perversely transformed into corporate brands, Che Guevara most obviously so.

Accordingly, a vast majority of ordinary people are exposed only to caricatures of figures like Einstein and Guevara. Hence their understanding of socialism is at best vague and at worst based entirely on mainstream propaganda.

Over the past few years, interest in the socialist tradition has undergone something of a revival amongst ordinary Europeans. Intellectuals like Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou who overtly celebrate the writings of revolutionaries like Lenin and propagate the original Communist Hypothesis have been important figures in this regard. Given what happened in the years following the collapse of actually existing socialism in 1991, the growing influence of a body of socialist thinkers is no small matter.

Having said this, the dominant trend prevails in most countries. Take India. From the late 1970s onwards, communist parties formed many successive governments in West Bengal and Kerala, and leftists were reasonably well-represented in the intellectual mainstream. Over the past decade, Indian socialism has taken a beating, and is now at its lowest ebb in decades.

The socialist project has suffered in no small part due to its own contradictions. At one and the same time viewed as the culmination of the Enlightenment principles and a rejection of capitalism, the socialist ideal has not yet fully freed itself from the cul-de-sac of modernisation.

Yet we cannot ignore just how many resources were dedicated to demonising socialism in the 20th century, and how this legacy continues to inform politics, culture and just about everything else in society.

In Pakistan the combination of the American Empire, Pakistans establishment, and right-wing political forces hounded anyone who harboured even sympathy for leftist ideas. Communists were openly decried as atheists, and therefore enemies of Islam and Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was not a communist, and the extent of his commitment to socialism can be debated. Yet he, Pakistans elected prime minister, suffered acute character assassination due to his socialist leanings despite his initiatives to prove he was no less a Muslim than any other Pakistani.

As a teacher in a public university, I am reminded everyday of just how deeply anti-socialist propaganda has seeped into the veins of society. Only ignoramuses would ignore the contributions of Marx and others in that tradition to the corpus of modern social theory, yet even the slightest mention of Marxist writing draws gasps from a scandalised student body, convinced that socialists and communists seek to de-fang Islam and corrupt societys moral fabric.

It is ironic that since it was Islamised in the 1980s the same period in which socialism has been most vilified Pakistani society has become more individualistic and amoral than before, ie the more we wear our Islamic morality on our sleeves, the more we tend towards transactional practices in which theres no pretence of collective betterment.

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Interest in the socialist tradition has seen a revival.

Much has been said about the impact of Scottish independence on British politics. With the predominantly socialist parliamentarians from Scotland gone, the Conservative Party would likely come to dominate British politics for the foreseeable future. The much needed economic reforms and, perhaps, withdrawal from the European Union would become very likely.

What about the impact of independence on Scotland? The breakup of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic some 21 years ago provides an interesting example.

The 1992 elections produced dramatically different results in the two parts of the former Czechoslovak federation. In the Czech Republic, the election was won by the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) led by Vaclav Klaus. Klaus was a highly regarded former federal Finance Minister, who later became Prime Minister and President of the independent Czech Republic. The ODS was dominated by economic reformers whose main goal was a speedy transition of the Czech Republic from a centrally planned economy to capitalism.

In Slovakia, the election was won by the left-leaning Movement for Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) led by Vladimir Meciar. Meciar, a former communist who instinctively opposed dramatic economic reforms favored by Klaus, won by promising the increasingly nationalistic Slovaks some type of a confederal arrangement with the Czechs, but not outright independence. Since the HZDS, with support of smaller Slovak National Party, had enough votes to block all legislation in the Federal Parliament, the future of the federation would depend on an agreement between the ODS and the HZDS.

While demanding an increased autonomy for Slovakia, the Slovak leadership did not bother to find out how far the Czechs were prepared to go. The Slovak leadership seemed to believe that the Czechs, who were more emotionally attached to the continuation of the Czechoslovak federation than the Slovaks, would simply accede to whatever demands the Slovaks chose to make. That turned out to be a colossal miscalculation.

The Czechs were determined not to have their economic reforms hindered by the more socialist Slovaks. If the federal government in Prague were to be rendered ineffective by the Slovak veto and thus prevented from reforming the socialist economies of both parts of the federation, then the two nations would have to go their separate ways. As such, the Czechs flatly rejected a confederal arrangement that would provide for a common currency, but autonomy of economic decision-making in the two parts of the federation. As the Czechs saw it, Slovak statism would destabilize the Czechoslovak crown, and thus harm the Czech economic prospects.

The Czechs called the Slovak bluff and the two republics went their separate ways.

It turned out that many of the concerns that the anti-independence Slovaks had were well founded. Slovakia was not ready for independence. Virtually all the ministries of government were in Prague and the Slovaks working there did not return to Slovakia. While the Czechs simply repainted the signs on government buildings from Czechoslovak to Czech, the Slovaks would have to do everything from the scratch.

The Czechoslovak federation was dissolved on January 31, 1993. In the Czech Republic, Klaus introduced his far-reaching economic reforms. The Czech Republic pulled ahead and became one of the early post-communist success stories. Even better, the Czechs no longer had to feel that they were subsidizing their younger sibling.

Slovakia, in contrast, suffered years of economic and political decline. Meciars style of government became increasingly authoritarian, leading the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright refer to Slovakia as the black hole in the heart of Europe. The Slovak economy remained unreformed. While some of the more lucrative enterprises were sold off to Meciars friends (who, in turn, financed his political campaigns), most of the obsolete state-owned firms kept on losing money. By 1998, when Meciar left office, Slovakia was near bankruptcy.

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Scottish Independence Will Kill Socialism on Both Sides of the Border

From Radical Socialism to the Rise of the Hollywood Right (1997)
The Horowitz family broke with the American Communist Party after the publication of Nikita Khrushchev #39;s Secret Speech in 1956. According to Horowitz, "The publication of the Khrushchev...

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From Radical Socialism to the Rise of the Hollywood Right (1997) - Video