ilovehorswill
Striker
Reading this I feel doubly embarrassed.Let’s have a look back at Caulkins piece about Di Canio…..
There is no place for intolerance in football
George Caulkin
April 02 2013 11:04AM
Full of hormones and righteous indignation, powered by a desire to fight half of the world and bed the other; that was me in the mid-1980s. I was an opinionated twerp back then (don’t say anything), convinced that I had all the right answers and that mine were the only answers which counted. I marched and demonstrated and wore badges (and didn’t have sex with anybody) and believed with ferocious sincerity that it would change things.
It was such a polarising era that it felt like you had to be political back then, certainly in the North East. I was lucky – my background was middle class, I was never hungry – but I grew up in pit villages in County Durham and saw how communities withered and died in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, how a region which was once known for industry and making things was left to rot.
We worried a bit about nuclear war and danced with abandon to Free Nelson Mandela (burgundy trousers, grey shoes, burgundy tank-top since you ask). On a couple of occasions, a little earlier in the decade, I caught the bus down to London with my family for those huge CND marches.
Once, I accidentally knocked a policeman’s helmet off with a placard (“watch ma ha’, son,” – he was Scottish). I hated Margaret Thatcher and still do.
Looking back, it took some doing to be a football supporter. We all were, of course – birthright, heritage – and it was great in its way, raw and vivid, but our grounds were grimy, unsafe and unpleasant, we were treated as undesirables, cattle to be herded and penned in. Some away trips were dangerous. It wasn’t fashionable. The glamour did not kick in until after the World Cup in 1990 and the arrival of the Premier League.
Amid that flux and displacement, the politicisation and unemployment, football was viewed as a recruiting ground for extremism and so us pimply idealists made that another battleground. It seemed wrong and hateful that the National Front should routinely distribute literature and sell magazines outside our stadia. Football, I believed, should unite towns and cities, not divide.
So I joined the – bit of a mouthful, this – Tyne and District Anti-Fascist Association (I think that’s the right name) and we stomped across the Tyne Bridge, baited by a gaggle of knuckleheads and took our place outside St James‘ Park, curled around our enemies. We gave out stickers that read “Geordies are black and white” and chanted the same. “Black and white, unite and fight, stop the fascists now,” was another. Cringe.
A copper gave me a shove and said “if you’re going to give out your puffy bits of paper, do it over there.” A bloke wearing a Newcastle United scarf leant through a police cordon, stuck two fingers in my face and yelled “F*** OFF.” I was spat at once, the phlegm dribbling off my chin, but that just made me shout louder. I felt like the world’s greatest freedom fighter; I was an adolescent doused in dribble.
There wasn’t much nuance in what I thought. Conservatives were bad, white South Africans were evil and fascism was fascism. My grandad died at the end of the Second World War fighting fascists. There weren’t good fascists and bad fascists or shades of fascism, there couldn’t be context; it was a term which, to my mind, was interchangeable with racism and intolerance, stifling democracy and hate. Black and white.
In the decades that followed, society softened again and football changed beyond recognition, shoved that way by the national outrage and personal tragedy of the Hillsborough disaster, and encouraged by Gazza’s tears, Gary’s goals, Bobby’s little jig and the rest of it. By comparison, our game now is welcoming and clean. Multi-racial, multi-cultural, safe for families.
You don’t get those magazine-sellers any more, but kids shaking buckets to collect money for charity or local teams. You don’t hear the monkey-chants or see inflatable bananas tossed at the feet of black footballers. It has taken effort to reach this point, effort and education by important groups like Kick it Out and Show Racism the Red Card and it took an uncompromising approach when flare-ups took place.
But there should not be complacency, either. So it is right and proper when a man who has described himself as a fascist takes a position of prominence at one of our clubs that this should be discussed and pored over.
What does it mean? What was Paolo di Canio getting at when he described himself as “a fascist not a racist” in 2005, after he had given a stiff-arm salute to Lazio supporters? Why the fascination with Benito Mussolini?
There are football and societal aspects and sometimes they conjoin. At previous elections, the British National Party have made Sunderland – staunchly Labour by tradition, but with high unemployment and pockets of real poverty – a target area. The English Defence League held a rally there last weekend.
And now a beacon of the city has a self-professed “fascist not a racist” as first-team coach. At the very least, there should be an explanation. Some did not wait for it. David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary and MP for South Shields, stepped down from his position as Sunderland’s vice-chairman because of Di Canio’s political views. The Durham Miners’ Association is demanding the return of the Wearmouth Miners’ Banner from its permanent loan at the Stadium of Light, which was built on the site of the colliery.
In a statement on Monday, Margaret Byrne, the club’s chief executive, expressed disappointment that “some people are trying to turn the appointment of a head coach into a political circus”.
Was that a reference to Miliband? The previous week there had been satisfaction when Miliband, whose Jewish family fled to Britain to escape fascist persecution, said he would remain in his non-executive role after accepting a new job in the United States. That delight was reaffirmed in Saturday’s match programme.
The resignation of a Sunderland director over the appointment of Martin O’Neill’s successor turned an issue into a controversy; it was not the work of a malicious media. “To accuse him now, as some have done, of being a racist or having fascist sympathies, is insulting not only to him but to the integrity of this football club,” said Byrne, but that was risible. Di Canio own words: “a fascist not a racist.”
The attempt to stifle debate is self-defeating and ludicrous, because the debate is important. Debate helped the game evolve to where it is. It challenges our perceptions, forces us to (at least temporarily) abandon our own certainties and listen to others. “We are a football club,” Byrne said and here she was right; one lodged deep in its community and with a responsibility to it.
From reading interviews with Di Canio and profiles of him, it is clear that this is not a man readily pigeon-holed. There is more subtlety in the opinions I’ve read than I believed possible as a teenager. He has written positively about immigrants who integrate (less so about those who don’t), and his admiration for Mussolini (also inked on his skin) comes with parameters. To my way of thinking, the whole Adolf Hitler thing was a bit of a deal-breaker, but I’m prepared to be educated further. I’ve got an open mind.
Life is a series of small compromises. As years go by, we can change. In the 1980s, the person I was could never have contemplated working for News International. My aunt did, but she stopped when the company moved to Wapping and stood on the picket lines. My dad had been offered a job and did not take it. When I was offered this role in 1998, I talked it through with both of them and sought their blessing. It was hard.
I still have touchstone beliefs – words like racism and fascism provoke an immediate response – and I’m still a leftie. I don’t march much any more and, in fact, the last demonstration I attended was against the war in Iraq, a war which David Milliband supported. That episode was painful and it just shows how causes and ideals you hold dear can be challenged.
But the war was debated and so should Di Canio’s views and if he is not prepared to clarify what he meant – he refused to do so repeatedly in his media briefing this morning – then it doesn’t help. I respect those people who feel that this is too much to bear, just as I respect those who thought something similar about Newcastle’s sponsorship by Wonga, the payday loan company, or a million other pricks to the heart.
We do not look to football to save our souls. Most of us do not look to it for moral guidance. We have a pie and a pint on a Saturday afternoon (Sunday morning, Tuesday evening, Thursday night), and wipe our feet on the way out. For some, that is enough. For others, turning up and singing your heart out whatever your club puts you through is the only point of being a supporter.
Just as Wonga made some Newcastle fans Google-search experts on comparative interest rates, so Di Canio prompts some at Sunderland to memorise the Wikipedia entry for Italian fascism. Fair dos. But claiming it is not an issue, after the journey football and North East football has undertaken, is blinkered, naive and offensive. It may not relate to his ability to set up a team, but it is a footballing issue to its core.
There is no place for intolerance in our game; my teenage self believed that and I agree with him (me). I have to be honest, I’m not sure about Mussolini’s views on rigorous questioning, open debate and a free press, but I hope mine are reasonably transparent.
Embarrassed for him, and embarrassed for everyone who actually has “touchstone beliefs”. They’re not something you abandon when someone opens their wallet.
