Hated and Proud- Ultras Contra Modernity Read online

  ARKTOS

  London 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  ISBN

  978-1-912079-23-0 (Softcover)

  978-1-912079-24-7 (Hardback)

  978-1-912079-25-4 (Ebook)

  Editing

  Martin Locker

  Cover and Layout

  Tor Westman

  Acknowledgment and Dedication

  This is a book that is still perhaps too close to my heart to be published, and it is certainly one that carries a unique burden. The Ultras, both those who are mentioned in this book and those who are not, do not take kindly to being represented or defined by those who do not inhabit their world. I did so once, and did everything I could to learn from them, and to respect their form of life. But even with that, the limitations of research and, in truth, my own Roman transformation made it impossible to include the vast multitude of unique and politically contrary viewpoints in Curva Sud Roma. All will admit that the Far Right was the dominant political force in the Curva, but it was never the only one. I could have just as easily focused on the radical Left, anarchists, socialists, or the various modernist-aesthetic groups that have carved out their own “derelict space” in the Curva. In other words, there is not one Curva Sud Roma but many. I merely chose the Curva that could be lived and studied on my own terms.

  Furthermore, the Ultras absolutely despise anyone who seeks to profit from their actions, and while I do not expect a substantial profit from this book, I must assume that Arktos Media does. For my part, it fills me with dread that publishing this book would taint my time as a part of Curva Sud Roma. I only do so now because enough time has passed to make the information it contains rather useless to the State in its war of capture against free spaces like Curva Sud Roma, and because I feel that it can contribute on many other front lines to the Ultras’ war against the homogenization and standardization that the liberal and neo-liberal State imposes upon its deracinated subjects.

  I would like to thank Arktos Media for giving me the chance to share this story with the few radical souls who are able to embrace its message. The journey to publication was long, painful, confounding, and disappointing, but ultimately triumphant; and I sincerely and respectfully thank Daniel Friberg, Martin Locker, Tor Westman, and last but not least John Morgan for helping to bring this to fruition. None of us can create the noble life we envision alone; every triumph and defeat is collective and I am happy to share mine with you.

  To have earned a Ph.D. and then, in the eyes of most (who have never read ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’), to have thrown it away running around with a bunch of crazy extremists, is something about which I am at once regretful and prideful. I regret that the members of my Ph.D. committee didn’t get the chance to welcome me into their fraternity after working so hard to help me become a scholar. Michael Blim, Jane Schneider, and Gerald Creed deserve all of the credit for my credentials and none of the blame for what I have done with them. That being said, I am proud that I as continue to negotiate the terrain that both conjoins and separates the American radical Left and extreme Right, I have encountered so many amazing people; none more so than Hugh Maguire, who’s intelligence, comradery, and friendship justifies whatever price I end up paying for rejecting my inheritance.

  To Lorenzo Contucci, Federico Esposito, my Ultra brothers and sisters who I continue to hold as deeply as possible in my heart, and to the other ‘keepers of the faith,’ I only ask your forgiveness for mythologizing or perhaps immortalizing my Curva Sud. I do so just as I lived amongst you: not to represent, but to experience and understand. As such, the Curva will forever be yours, but this story is mine: it couldn’t have been written by anyone else. I admit to changing names of both individuals and groups when merited, and to committing the common anthropological sin of making the implicit perhaps a little bit too explicit, and to being astonished every day by the potential richness of the Ultras’ critique of the contemporary world. In my defense, I will only ever say that; and that it was the Ultras themselves who taught me to love Nietzsche.

  To the present generation of Ultras, I ask you to work together to protect the Curva from the influence of il calcio moderno; to continue to oppose the foreign regime that seeks absolutely nothing but the most vulgar of financial profits from both AS Roma and a thoroughly emasculated Curva Sud Roma; and above all, to protect and adore the city, people, and history of Rome.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, without whom Rome would have been just a dream, to my son, in whose body flows the instincts and inspirations of the greatest heroes ever to fight for the Eternal City, and to Curva Sud Roma: nessun mai t’amerà più di me.

  Chapter One

  Ultras Contra Modernity

  This is a book about war; the war that has been raging in the West since the first of us gave control, power, and sovereignty over life to someone else in order to live more comfortably and securely. Better yet, it is the war that has been raging since one of us learned about this inequitable exchange while watching his children suffer its consequences, and yet hadn’t the courage to do anything about it. With brutal clarity and simplicity, Nietzsche called this war Roma contra Judea: the battle of a warring and violently noble form of life against the ideas cum forces that disarmed and recreated it as fodder for a marketplace of pious merchants and good citizens.1 This book is a study of a small group of men and women in Rome, Italy, that are engaged in re-establishing something ‘noble’ about life. These men and women have stopped being pious, good, or anything else that their enemies demand of them. Sure, like all of us who speak about destroying what keeps us docile, they have an ambiguous relationship with their enemy: they despise their mother, as it were, but still snuggle up close to her and fall asleep every night.

  And yet they fight: with words, counter-ideas and concepts, with fists, bats, and sheer will. This is a book about how they have turned life into a fight against what so very many of us begrudgingly or fearfully accept. It is a book about Ultras; the extreme. Ultras are fanatical soccer fans, at least, that is how the media knows them. But what makes them extreme is neither the soccer nor the fandom, and that is what this book seeks to explain. As such, one may be disappointed that it is less forthcoming about certain fan-based Ultra behaviors, and certainly that it is grounded in radical political theory. Likewise, the distance between the years of study and the book’s subsequent publication might seem a limitation, especially as so much has changed in the meantime — most notably the 2011 purchase of AS Roma by an American investment banker, and subsequent attempts to rid AS Roma fandom of the Ultras. But life is always in the meantime, in the middle, and if things have changed with Rome, the Ultras, soccer, political violence, and even the cuisine described herein, it is only thanks to the forces brought into the world by all that this book explains.

  This book began its life as a thesis written in order to obtain a Ph.D. in Anthropology, but even in that form it was far from what the American Academy has come to demand of its best and brightest students. Instead of an objective study that could innocently claim to be compliant with contemporary moral standards and political subjectivities, it was a defiant defense of men and women who have been deemed indefensible by those very standards and subjectivities; and it was a document of my own ‘becoming-Ultra.’ ‘Going native’ is a relatively accepted process within Cultura
l Anthropology: firstly, because it takes a certain amount of empathy to live amongst a different people, dig into their dirt, and ultimately champion whatever it is that one might find therein; and secondly, because who in their right mind would spend thirty-something years being molded, organized, conditioned, nay created in academia, only to find something beautiful, exhilarating, majestically critical, and even festive in such horrible things as Fascism, Futurism, ethnocentrism, and violence?

  That I did so, and did so without abandoning the margins of a still acceptable type of philosophy, political theory, and anthropology, still leaves me with a sense of wonder. Who knew that reading and living Nietzsche and Sorel in the shadow of an empire that had fallen to the power of ideas would be so transformative? Who knew what would happen when radically critical ideas were lived and embodied by violently unapologetic men and women? Who knew that standing together in defiance of the very core values and behaviors demanded of us by the State and its economically defined form of life would make every subsequent compromise with that form of life an act of degradation? And who knew that it was all there in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’; the path of my own becoming-useless to the world I inherited?

  Of course, that I had so much fun and learned so many things while becoming indefensible, didn’t make the Academy that I (reluctantly) rejoined after leaving Rome any more susceptible to accepting either my own thunderous process of self-overcoming and birthright ruination, or embarking on one of its own. However, at least it had an inkling of what I would and wouldn’t do in the name of a career spent molding, organizing, conditioning, nay creating the next few generations of ‘good’ Western people.

  And so, it is with this in mind that an occasional academic tone of voice and flourish of theoretical explanation still remains in this book; for it is as much a study of the mind breaking free from the functions of disciplinary words, ideas, and concepts, as it is an examination of Rome, Ultras, contemporary Fascism, morality, and belonging. Thus, it is still my intention that young scholars and thinkers who have been unthinkingly and enthusiastically herded into the Academy might find something useful herein. More so, however, it is hoped that they will read this book, be inspired to read thinkers far more valuable than myself, and then take to the streets prepared to overcome their own weakness in the face of tyranny. Or perhaps they will take to a stadium, for that is where I first met the Ultras.

  My first encounter with Ultras happened on Saturday, 22 April 2006, at Rome’s Olympic Stadium. My family and I were finally on a Roman holiday during the soccer season, and I forced our group to attend the day’s match between AS Roma and UC Sampdoria. As a proper, but necessarily deterritorialized,2 fan of AS Roma, I was absolutely giddy with the possibility of seeing the team play in Rome (pre-season games in New York City, I would soon learn, were mere simulacra of the real thing). Back in New York I had been active on message boards and did everything I could to watch or follow games. One of my undying memories of September 11, 2001 is that Roma were to play Real Madrid in the UEFA Champions League, a game to be shown live on ESPN; although the game was played, ESPN’s sportscasters were too busy discussing the day’s events to air it. I bought countless jerseys, shirts, sweatshirts, and anything else I could find emblazoned with AS Roma’s shield. I was, in the parlance of both capitalism and Italian soccer, a ‘good fan.’

  Figure 1. Curva Sud wishing Rome a happy birthday, April 22, 2006.

  So, one can imagine my pride as I settled into my swanky chair-backed seat in the Monte Mario grand stand, surrounded by the well dressed and well-mannered elite of good soccer fandom in Rome; and then … and then it all turned upside down. The Ultras began their festival, April 22, 2006, one day removed from the 2,759th birthday of Rome, and suddenly I was no longer in America, or Italy, but instead within two sections partitioned by eight-foot Plexiglas walls of the Curva Sud, the southern end of the stadium that is home to AS Roma’s Ultras. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I was only a few short months away from discovering just how far, in fact, I remained from the Curva, from knowing that the distance between Curva Sud and Monte Mario was equivalent to the distance between Achilles and the guy taking orders at Popeye’s Fried Chicken. But that Sunday, I felt only that I had made it; that I was home.

  During the game, as the good fans surrounding me clapped and cheered politely, the Ultras sang defiant and devotional offerings to Rome and AS Roma, waved flags in the shared giallorosso (red and yellow) colors of both, and held aloft emergency flares and smoke bombs that burned in the same colors as their flags. At various points, they displayed homemade banners throughout the Curva. None of this related very much to the on-field action of the day. That no one scored for AS Roma seemed not to dampen the Ultras’ enthusiasm. Nor did it matter that no one else in the stadium joined in their songs, flag waving, or any other exhibited behaviors. They stood and cheered on their team from the opening to closing whistle, resting only during the twenty-minute halftime break.

  All of this action took place behind a fortress of long banners, each of which displayed the name of a particular group. More than a curva of thousands acting in unison, what was happening instead was several groups of approximately one hundred persons each singing as a group — their group. It was evident that each person holding an emergency flare did so as a member of his or her unique group, as these were not universal in the Curva, but only in front of or near a group banner. Similarly, the songs were begun by one group and then spread through the Curva, becoming more widely audible. And, as one looked more closely, the flags being waved, while sharing the colors of AS Roma and the city of Rome, more often than not glorified the group over which it was being waved.

  This encounter with the Ultras mirrors that of most persons, whether as soccer fans (rival or compatriot), journalists, or academics. It notes the most obvious aspects of their behavior: aesthetics, performance, and organization. I had known of the Ultras for some time before encountering them in person: I had heard them on game broadcasts and read about their exploits in newspapers — most of which painted a picture of violent thuggery, hatred for the police, and of soccer games being reduced to general mayhem. Interestingly, it was largely along these lines that the other good fans on the message boards discussed the Ultras, when they mentioned them at all. But even as a good academic American, with credentials including an advanced degree in African-American and African Studies, who was in the process of joining one of the most influential Marxist-based Anthropology programs in the country, there was always something about the Ultras, specifically Curva Sud Roma, that enchanted me; that perhaps gave me a premonition of the possibility of another form of life — and I wanted to know why and how they did what they did.

  But it wasn’t until an innocent conversation with Professor Jane Schneider — several years after their behaviors caught my attention — in which I explained that a soccer game had been stopped by Ultras in Rome, that it dawned on me that I could actually go to Rome and find out.3 And what I discovered, explained in the pages that follow, is that there exists in this world men and women of a certain type that instinctually and willfully fail to conform to the norms, subjectivities, and moralities of the bourgeois form of life; and that, in their freedom — or dereliction — they are no longer affected by prohibitions against violence, moralities of altruistic inclusiveness, or the reduction of life to an economic rationality.

  What is more, I discovered that in order to explain these men to the world — in ethnographic terms — I would have to abandon the very same norms, subjectivities, and moralities of the bourgeois form of life. These two currents intersect to form the ferocious spirit of this book — a spirit that could be called ontological and epistemological, if both of these terms could in fact be separated. For indeed, the ethnographic story that follows seeks to demonstrate above all else the impossibility of the one without the other. Before we get to that, however (and in order to make this clearer), we must meet the Ultr
as and some of the concepts they use to create their festive, violent, and derelict form of life.

  The most visible aspect of the Ultras is their various ritualized behaviors relating to the attendance of soccer matches: the singing of songs for their city and team and against those of their opponents, waving of flags of city and team, performing large choreographed displays of sometimes remarkable complexity and beauty, lighting of emergency flares and powerful bombs, and displaying homemade banners with various messages intended for opponents, contiguous fans, and the broader public.

  If the aesthetic elements of the Ultras are their most visible and superficial, given that most who experience the Ultras from afar delve no deeper than their in-stadium performances, then my search for the ‘how and why’ of the Ultras’ behaviors demanded another approach. Understanding the Ultra phenomenon in aesthetic terms of carnival, ritual, performance, and fandom is at best partial, and leaves us wondering how to explain the full set of behaviors witnessed on the evening of February 2, 2007, when police officer Fillipo Raciti was killed during rioting after a game between Catania and Palermo. That evening the Catania Ultras targeted the forces of the State’s law and order and engaged them in a relatively contained but deadly guerilla skirmish.

  Nor do the Ultra aesthetics, as symbolically violent as they may be, allow one to expect the larger, but less deadly, war against the State, law and order, and the business of soccer, witnessed in Rome, Milan, and Bergamo following the police killing of Gabriele Sandri on November 11, 2007. Both of these killings brought to light the relationships between the Roman Ultras and the hegemony of the State and media, and between the Ultras and a political-philosophical discourse of radical and Counter-Enlightenment ideas.

  In essence, I had to move from fandom and the carnivalesque aesthetics to deadly guerilla attacks on armed representatives of the liberal State. The trail that connects these two phenomena is clearly marked, however, assuming that one can read the signs that the Ultras leave throughout their cities. For instance, in Rome the Ultras marked a wall with graffiti reading, ‘Enough immigrants, homes and work for Italians,’ and signed the message AS Roma Ultras (thus taking credit for the sentiment as Ultras).