Paolo Di Canio

[TheHitman]

This is one of those rare instances where the media are absolutely right to pull someone up. I think people are so used to them writing and asking shit that when it is a genuine issue they almost blame it on an agenda.

 

This is a man who admitted he was a fascist and as the pics show he has reiterated this by his actions .

[BatChainPuller]

Interesting piece below that makes some good points (particularly the one about David Miliband):

 

Saving footie fans from their inner fascist | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

 

Tuesday 2 April 2013

 

Brendan O’Neill

 

Saving footie fans from their inner fascist

 

The increasingly unhinged moral crusade against racism in football is anti-prole loathing dressed up as high liberal principle.

 

Britain’s great and good get such a moral kick from opposing racism in football, from pointing a long and bony judgemental finger at foreigner-fearing Neanderthals in the stands, that if such racism didn’t exist they’d probably have to invent it. Oh wait, they already did.

 

This weekend, as the alleged scourge of footie racism once again elbowed everything from Syria to recession off the front pages, it became clear that there doesn’t even have to be evidence of racism for these fan-loathin’ moralists to get on their high horses.

 

The latest terraces incident to give these faint-hearted followers of football a fit of Victorian vapours involved England fans chanting allegedly horrible stuff about black brothers Rio and Anton Ferdinand. During England’s 8-0 win over San Marino last week, England fans are said to have shouted something about chucking the Ferdinands on a bonfire, in presumed vengeance for Anton’s role in toppling former England captain John Terry, whom Anton accused of calling him a ‘black cunt’. The England fans are also said to have chanted about Rio, who withdrew from the England squad in controversial circumstances, ‘We know what you are’ - apparently a cryptic reference (very cryptic, I fancy) to the fact that Rio, like his brother, is a ‘black cunt’.

 

Journalists who love football but loathe its lifeblood - its fans - almost smashed their iPads bashing out spittle-flecked columns condemning this foul anti-Ferdinands racism. The well-funded but not well-meaning ‘anti-racism’ industry that has sprung up to police fans in recent years shook its head in collective disapproval of England’s moronic chanters. This incident shows that ‘race hate is still part of our game’, declared the Mirror; it proves ‘English football is racist’, decreed the Guardian.

 

There’s only one problem with this puffed-up looking-down at racist English football: there’s no hard evidence that England fans chanted anything racist in San Marino last week. The Football Association, loving nothing more than to find some fleeting incident of fan racism it can be ostentatiously outraged by, has scoured video coverage of the San Marino game and has found no ‘recorded evidence’ of ‘discriminatory chanting’ by England fans. Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), the pan-European group that made the complaint about England’s fans to FIFA, admits it had ‘no eye-witnesses at the game’ and says its complaint was based ‘partially on media comments’. But it remains convinced - in the same way Mormons are convinced that Joseph Smith found a golden book under a tree, I suppose - that at least ‘a handful of [England] supporters’ chanted racist stuff in San Marino.

 

Got that? On the basis of unproven rumours about unrecorded chants allegedly made by a tiny number of fans, the whole of English football has been denounced as racist. It’s enough to make Torquemada’s evidence-gathering methods seem judicious by comparison. Let’s call a spade a spade (that is not a racist statement, I swear): it’s pure hearsay that fuelled these latest fulminations against England fans. As a BBC headline put it, ‘England fan claims are hearsay’. Like those witch-burners of old who just knew that the old crone at the end of the lane was guilty of something, today’s fan-bashing, pseudo-anti-racist elites will light upon any whispered claim or half-baked tale to prove something that exists in their hearts, if not in the real world: that football fans, especially the blobby, tattooed, En-ger-land variety, are racist.

 

When the moralists who watch football through racism goggles aren’t being guided by hearsay, they’re getting carried away by hyperbole. The other isn’t-modern-football-foul? story that hit the headlines this weekend was the arrival of the eccentric Italian Mussolini-admirer and football legend Paolo Di Canio to replace Martin O’Neill as manager of Sunderland FC. Reading the coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking a zombie SS had goose-stepped into Sunderland to set up a ghoulish new headquarters.

 

Di Canio certainly has strange views, having previously claimed to be a fascist but not a racist, and having once being photographed doing an Il Duce-style salute while wearing a freakishly angry grimace. But the idea that his arrival into the game’s managerial elite will take us back to ‘the darker days of English football’, and is a sign that ‘football has lost its battle against extremism’, and is reminiscent of a time when it was acceptable across Europe to do fascist salutes (‘and we know what happened next’, warns one columnist, darkly), is bonkers. No, the moving to Sunderland of a balding, hotheaded Italian manager is not the same as the Night of the Long Knives. If you think it is, you need to read a history book. Or stop taking drugs.

 

The macchiato-spilling horror that greeted Sunderland’s employment of Di Canio is driven by the same prejudices behind the evidence-lite San Marino racist fans fiasco: the idea that English football is so brimming with dim-witted xenophobia, so close to going back to the banana-throwing days of the Eighties, that simply to have someone like Di Canio in a Premier League hotseat could potentially unleash mayhem. It is not really Di Canio, who after all is just one strange man, that observers fear; it’s the allegedly fascism-receptive seething pit of fans, the tattooed mob, refugees from the ‘darker days of football’, who might be marshalled by Di Canio’s wayward ideas and words.

 

What this weekend’s unhinged panic about football racism demonstrates is how much this debate is driven by prejudice rather than evidence, by elite fears rather than hard facts. In fact, the more that terraces-based racism fades into history, the more obsessed with it anti-racist poseurs become. There’s no correlation whatsoever between their moral crusading and historical, tangible reality. They desperately latch on to isolated incidents of a fan shouting something racist as evidence that ‘English football is racist’ - which is a bit like saying Morrisons is racist because someone from the BNP shops there. Today, racism in football is in the twisted eye of the beholder, or perhaps in the prissiness of the beholder: it is the fact that these fan-fearing prudes inhabit the shrink-wrapped worlds of politics, the media and quangos, where lingo is heavily policed and passion is virtually a crime, that they believe any expression of less-than-PC sentiment by 50,000 possibly sozzled blokes must by definition be hateful. More adept at adhering to linguistic rules than letting rip, they find stadium rowdiness utterly alien, and frightening.

 

The reason accusations of racism and fears of fascism can run ahead of any evidence is because the crusade against racism in football is not a response to any surge in hatred on the terraces, but rather to a lack in the lives of the crusaders themselves. This is really about addressing campaigners’ own need for a platform on which they can do some moral preening, and by extension their need for an inferior constituency they can morally preen themselves in contrast to.

 

This nurtures not only fact-free but also utterly inverted moral posturing. So for example, even though English football is brimming with black players, still it can be accused of being racist by the Guardian, a newspaper so white it makes FW de Klerk’s Christmas card list look like the census of Barbados. The last time the media industry did one of those self-flagellating ethnic-minority head-counts, the Guardian staff was found to be 4.9 per cent black or Asian - compared with English football’s whopping 30 per cent of black players. In the upside down world of moral panic about ‘football racism’, a sport peppered with and enjoyed by millions of blacks can be branded racist by a paper written and read predominantly by whites. Or consider former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband’s decision to resign from the board of Sunderland FC after Di Canio joined. Miliband has voted for or overseen wars on Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans, yet still he can score moral points by taking a stand against the alleged racism of a football manager. You know racism has been reduced to a mere issue of social etiquette when a politician responsible for the deaths of loads of brown people can be cheered for flouncing out of a club because it was taken over by someone with an Il Duce tattoo.

 

The war on so-called football racism isn’t driven by principle, but by an old-fashioned fear of yobbos, and a loathing of how they behave for 90 minutes a week. Well, to employ a bit of terraces-style talk, if you don’t like what happens in football stadiums, fuck off somewhere else.

 

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.

[Gym Beglin]

[Gym Beglin]

I don't give a fuck what DI Canios opinion on Mussolini or fascism is. If he abhorred it,I wouldnt give a fuck, if he loved it, I wouldn't give a fuck.

 

What were Rodgers' views on secretarianism?

 

What are Allardyces views on homosexuals?

 

What are Fergusons views on immigration?

 

Not a single fuck was given.

[zigackly]

What were Rodgers' views on secretarianism?

 

I think he'd quite appreciate someone to schedule his diary.

 

[Red Phoenix]

does fascist necessarily mean racist?that definition below says 'typically racist' Isn't fascist a elitist the opposite of a communist, would anyone care if he was a communist?

 

Fascist doesn't have to mean racist. It just basically means fuck everyone that's not part of the ruling elite. Fascism is rule by force basically.

 

I'd think it was awesome if he was a communist too.

[Red Phoenix]

However in terms of killing people, communists like Mao and Stalin were in a league of their own. Is facism linked to Hitler in a way that communism is not linked to Mao? Whatever the answer, I am not sure that there would have been a similar outcry.

 

Have been researching this recently and have had some really long winded circular arguments about it, but basically Mao and Stalin weren't communists, they were fascists. Lenin was a marxist and a socialist (step before communism.) and when he was ill and dying he wanted Stalin out because he thought he was insane, but Stalin didn't allow the government in Russia to let the public know and Lenin died without the message getting out.

 

See : Lenin's Testament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

North Korea isn't communist, China isn't communist, they're basically fascism disguised as communism. If you research a bit into what communism and socialism mean you'll probably see it soon enough. Try telling that to many Americans who've been conditioned to think that socialism and communism are evil though after the cold war propaganda, the arguments just go around in circles repeatedly with a lot of them.

 

The Bolsheviks in Russia were socialist, and you could say that was possibly one of the only decent ways it's ever been tried. (many workers got to own their land and places of work.) Several countries invaded Russia soon after though, possibly because the upper classes were freaking out at losing their power over the world's population if it spread.

[Red Phoenix]

Finally found what I wanted to post, it made me laugh earlier when reading it on the bus but wasn't sure if it was online. Talk about a fucked up press conference :

 

How Sunderland ‘dealt’ with the press conference for Paolo Di Canio

 

 

Q: A statement was put out yesterday, but what that statement didn’t include was a clear and simple answer to a clear, simple question. Are you a fascist?

 

Paolo Di Canio [PDC]: I don’t have to answer this any more. I can’t state every three weeks or three months. So 21 months ago, some of you, not you in here, had picked up some lines from a long interview.

 

I am at a football club. If I was working in the Houses of Parliament then I would answer a political question, but I’m probably never going to get there. I only want to talk about football.

 

This story has to finish. Paolo Di Canio is 45 and his life speaks for him.

 

Q: It’s a yes-no question.

 

(Press officers) I think we’ve answered that.

 

Q: He hasn’t answered it, that’s the key.

 

(PO) He’s answered it as far as he wishes to and as far as we want to. So let’s move on to football.

 

Q: North-east football has worked really hard over the last three decades to combat racism...

 

PDC: You are not offending me, but you are offending my family. I do not permit anyone to offend the values I have received from my parents.

 

If you want to talk about football then we can start to work. You in your area, me in my area.

 

Q: But Paolo, you did use the word fascists and people are wondering why you used that word.

 

PDC: I answer only football questions.

 

Q: Does that not make the issue worse because you are not clarifying it?

 

PDC: I have clarified it many times in the past.

 

Q: PR-wise, that just makes it worse because it’s not addressing...

 

(PO) Kindly do not tell me how to do my job... Paolo has answered the question as much as he wishes to.

 

Q: Would Paolo like to meet some of the fans who are saying that they don’t want to come to matches while you are manager? Would you like to sit down with them?

 

PDC: Not for one reason because it’s happened at Swindon. Once they saw Paolo Di Canio and discovered Paolo Di Canio, they were there with their children every day. Every few weeks we organised a meeting with the children and they were enthusiastic.

 

They were asking for pictures because they discovered Paolo Di Canio and the values he has got.

 

Once I have convinced people, they will stay in the queue and buy a ticket for Sunderland because they will see how I work and what kind of person I am.

 

So I don’t have to answer that question any more.

 

So I repeat the people who are talking about this offend my parents and I don’t give any chances to anyone to offend my parents.

 

Not Paolo Di Canio. If I were alone, without my family previously and my daughters now, I would answer every single question, I would say a few words – some of them might be bad words – I have to be honest.

 

But now the story has to finish.

 

Paolo Di Canio, in 45 years, never had a problem in his life with anyone.

 

There is no one story about Paolo Di Canio that has to be clear.

 

What counts for you in life? The world of fact.

 

Q: Why use the word fascists?

 

PDC: Word or fact? What counts for you? OK, that has to be clear.

 

Q: Why did you use the word fascist, though?

 

PDC: This has to be clear.

 

Q: Why did you use the word fascist then?

 

(PO) We are now moving on…

 

 

How Sunderland ‘dealt’ with the press conference for Paolo Di Canio | Football | Sport | Daily Express

[Trumo]

That interview sort of reminds me of an article I once read which was talking about an interview Johan Cruyff had with a couple of Dutch journalists while he was Barcelona's coach. They apparently had a source high up in the KNVB (Dutch FA) who told them Cruyff had been offered a contract to coach the national team, but was reluctant to sign it. When the journalists put this to Cruyff, he was so evasive about it, thus turning the interview into a farce and confusing the fuck out of the journalists. Cruyff even told them at one point that "if I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better". While that interview had nothing to do with political beliefs (or otherwise), the evasiveness of the interviewee is present in both examples.

[Red Phoenix]

That interview sort of reminds me of an article I once read which was talking about an interview Johan Cruyff had with a couple of Dutch journalists while he was Barcelona's coach. They apparently had a source high up in the KNVB (Dutch FA) who told them Cruyff had been offered a contract to coach the national team, but was reluctant to sign it. When the journalists put this to Cruyff, he was so evasive about it, thus turning the interview into a farce and confusing the fuck out of the journalists. Cruyff even told them at one point that "if I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better". While that interview had nothing to do with political beliefs (or otherwise), the evasiveness of the interviewee is present in both examples.

 

Yeah it's a total joke. Fascism is clearly one of the worst things on the planet, but the way that interview is such a mess makes me laugh each time I read it. Respect to the press for repeatedly asking questions and not moving on even though the press officer had told them several times.

[Red Soul]

He is obviously a dodgy character, but also a fucking incurable loon as is invariably the case with these silly right wing extremists.

I am looking forward to his press conferences to be honest and hopefully the clubs relegation for appointing a racist, lying cunt.

[VladimirIlyich]

 

Have been researching this recently and have had some really long winded circular arguments about it' date=' but basically Mao and Stalin weren't communists, they were fascists. Lenin was a marxist and a socialist (step before communism.) and when he was ill and dying he wanted Stalin out because he thought he was insane, but Stalin didn't allow the government in Russia to let the public know and Lenin died without the message getting out.

 

See : Lenin's Testament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

North Korea isn't communist, China isn't communist, they're basically fascism disguised as communism. If you research a bit into what communism and socialism mean you'll probably see it soon enough. Try telling that to many Americans who've been conditioned to think that socialism and communism are evil though after the cold war propaganda, the arguments just go around in circles repeatedly with a lot of them.

 

The Bolsheviks in Russia were socialist, and you could say that was possibly one of the only decent ways it's ever been tried. (many workers got to own their land and places of work.) Several countries invaded Russia soon after though, possibly because the upper classes were freaking out at losing their power over the world's population if it spread.

 

If you go so far right and so far left you actually meet in the middle.

Extreme left wing or extreme right wing,the only word that means anything is extreme.

[Red Phoenix]

If you go so far right and so far left you actually meet in the middle.

Extreme left wing or extreme right wing,the only word that means anything is extreme.

 

Have read that a few times actually. It might be that we get to try it properly at some point in the future, but it's clear that we're not currently ready for anything like a stateless and cashless society! You might be right though, am not going to pretend the little research I've done has enabled me to understand that it'd be a good thing.

 

A regular argument is that people just wouldn't accept it on a big enough scale, and if they won't then it either doesn't have the support it needs or we go back to fascism to try and enforce it, which makes it utterly fail. Something truly socialist-leaning could be refreshing after what we've had to endure for so long though.

[Rough Rider]

I don't give a fuck what DI Canios opinion on Mussolini or fascism is. If he abhorred it,I wouldnt give a fuck, if he loved it, I wouldn't give a fuck.

 

What were Rodgers' views on secretarianism?

 

What are Allardyces views on homosexuals?

 

What are Fergusons views on immigration?

 

Not a single fuck was given.

 

Exactly who gives a shit .Hes a football manager not the new prime minister.

[VladimirIlyich]

 

Exactly who gives a shit .Hes a football manager not the new prime minister.

 

They evidently have a lot in common.

[Gym Beglin]

That press conference was a farce.

 

Where were the national press when he took over at Swindon? Does the town of Swindon not deserve to be saved from facism?

 

DI Canio also did one of the most sporting things on a football field in recent memory, probably the last sporting gesture seen in this ugly game, but obviously it's not a meaty story.

[moof]

That press conference was a farce.

 

Where were the national press when he took over at Swindon? Does the town of Swindon not deserve to be saved from facism?

 

DI Canio also did one of the most sporting things on a football field in recent memory, probably the last sporting gesture seen in this ugly game, but obviously it's not a meaty story.

 

Yeah, let's forget the fact that he openly supports racists and murderers; he caught a ball once when he might have had a chance of scoring.

[BCM]

Everywhere you go in this country now. There is :-

 

Fake grief

Fake outrage

Fucking shit the way soceity is going.

[xerxes]

"If Adolf Hitler, flew in today, they'd send a limousine anyway"

[Code]

Its a plot from an underground facist organisation, they have put Di Canio in place at Sunderland, while they prepare to take over the world.

[njackets]

Two blokes found guilty in court planning on kidnapping and cutting the head of a World famous singer is deemed less news worthy than this story, the fuckng News At Ten! The worlds gone mad!

[Kevin D]

Interesting piece below that makes some good points (particularly the one about David Miliband):

 

Saving footie fans from their inner fascist | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

 

I think that's a tremendous article. It perfectly describes how utterly farcical the whole thing has become and how utterly perverse the racism argument is, so much so that when genuine racism occurs people are going to be inclined to dismiss as PC bullshit because a lot of the headlines and debates are a total fraud. It has subverted any rational debate.

 

That brings me to a point I think the writer overlooked, or, I think should have included. It's advantageous to complain about racism, even if it doesn't exist. It's advantageous to both the writer the and the paper; because it then allows you to posture heroically about something needing to be done, write solemn article after solemn article about the agony it causes you and condemn others. The condemnation part is vital; that's how you create villains and protagonists - that allows you to bait thousands of people on twitter into clicking on your website to call you a cunt, which brings career advancement. If you're the most viewed writer at your paper and you have other "journalists", who also ache at the racism problem they invented, praising your work that's how you win awards and get to become football editor.

 

The fact that there isn't a hint of substance to the content, or that the whole thing becomes a grotesque pantomime is neither here nor there. When there's a chance at the limelight and to make sober declarations, any football journalist who has been well trained knows to grab onto it with both hands.

[Nunavut Patrick]

Interesting piece below that makes some good points (particularly the one about David Miliband):

 

Saving footie fans from their inner fascist | Brendan O’Neill | spiked

 

Good read and correct.

 

Media falling over one another looking for the next racist, fascist, etc.

 

I wonder what this Miliband's bloke salary is going to be at the 'charity' he is going to in NY. Charity is an industry and, just like capitalist bankers and hedge fund managers and thier slimy ilk, the salaries and perks are quite good at the top.

 

I'm not saying charity should be Mother Theresa-like but let's call it what it is:

 

An industry.

 

As for politics and football, well football was a working class game. No more. I reckon even those St Pauli supporters probably all fuck off back to decent houses after the match.

[Nunavut Patrick]

Yeah, let's forget the fact that he openly supports racists and murderers; he caught a ball once when he might have had a chance of scoring.

 

No need to bring Mugabe into this.

[Unrighteous]