Football is a sport in which controversy is daily business,
however several incidents have stood out from the everyday shenanigans as worthy
of HPANWO-esque note. Here's one that I reported on a while ago:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/is-luis-suarez-zombie.html;
another happened several years earlier, but it has never been justly resolved.
Paolo Di Canio was one of the world's top football players; originally signed
up with Lazio in 1985 he appeared for ten other clubs across
Europe
and also his national team,
Italy.
Like many characters in the beautiful game, he has a hot-headed personality and
a short temper, but he was renowned for his skill, daring and endurance on the
pitch. Also traditionally for a footballer, he became a team manager after the
end of his on-pitch career, however it was in March 2013 when he was
shortlisted to coach Sunderland that a new and very unusual dispute broke out.
Di Canio had previously published an autobiographical book in which he
expressed his admiration for Benito Mussolini. Mussolini is an almost unknown
historical figure outside his native
Italy,
but is one of the country's most prominent political movers. He ruled as a
one-party dictator of the country from 1925 until his ousting and assassination
in 1945. He was known as
Il Duce,
"the leader".
Italy
as a single nation is comparatively a very new one, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/freedom-for-venice.html,
and Mussolini wanted to consolidate it into an aggressive and nationalistic new
form that employed many of the two thousand year old vestiges of the
Roman
Empire.
Italy
under his leadership was tightly controlled and the media was completely hooked
to his propaganda. He made life hard for many people and sometimes violently
crushed his political enemies. His regime was destroyed by the Allied invasion
of
Italy in the
endgame of World War II. He was captured by communist rebels who killed him and
hung his body upside down on the forecourt of an Esso garage in
Milan.
Paolo Di Canio describes Benito Mussolini as "basically a very principled
and ethical individual... He has been deeply misunderstood by history." Di
Canio also used to give a Roman victory salute during his Lazio days when he
scored a goal, just like Mussolini used to. He received a fine and one-match ban
for that. Ironically Mussolini himself had been a die-hard Lazio supporter. The
problem is that Benito Mussolini was a "fascist". I put that word in
quotes because it's very hard to define and is normally just used as a term of
abuse. I myself have been called a "fascist" a few times, for example
see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/marine-le-pen-at-oxford-union.html.
It is basically a generic dysphemism for anybody political left-wingers don't
like, for whatever reason. You'll normally hear it pronounced
"fathitht!" and have it spat at you by some scruffy, malodourous
student carrying a placard. This happened to David Icke when he went to
Canada,
see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/david-icke-loses-lawsuit.html.
I would never describe myself as a "fascist!", whatever you think the
word means, and feel offended by the people who call me that.
The response to Paolo Di Canio's appointment to the
Sunderland
bench was outrage. Several trade unions pulled out of their sponsorship deals and
had their placards removed from the Stadium of Light, the club's ground (The
GMB was one of them, which could mean that they might not be an effective
alternative to UNISON for striking hospital porters after all, see:
http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/jr-porters-strike-update-2.html)
The Durham Miners Association also disaffiliated from the club. The
vice-chairman resigned immediately; this was David Miliband, brother of the
Labour Party Fabian Boy Wonder Ed Miliband. Some
Sunderland
fans set up a Facebook group with four thousand members accusing him of racism
and demanding his immediate dismissal. This is despite the fact that his bad behaviour
has so far been exclusively of the usual football stars' kind; there is not one
reported complaint of any racist behaviour made by any player, fellow manager
or fan against Di Canio. Therefore his is completely and totally a thoughtcrime
in every sense of the word. He is being persecuted for having a particular
opinion; that's all. This makes him somewhat similar to me because when I was dismissed
from hospital portering I was told that I held views that "called into
question my ability to perform my duties without prejudice." This was
alleged to be racism because of my
Microchip
a Muslim Day video which is actually a comedy satire about propaganda
related to the agenda by the state to insert electronic implants into people,
see:
http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/microchip-muslim-day.html.
What's more, like Di Canio, I had never had any trouble performing my duties
without prejudice in the previous twenty-three years I'd been portering at the
hospital. I'm actually very opposed to racism of any kind, and I've never
behaved in such a way to anybody in the NHS workforce, which is famous for
being highly cosmopolitan, see here for more details:
http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/how-i-became-ex-hospital-porter.html.
We're entering a dangerous age if somebody can be persecuted in the workplace
because of beliefs they think of, regardless of whether or not they act on
those beliefs. The way Di Canio was spoken about in the media was very
worrying; there was little difference in tone between the actual reports and
the ones that might have been written if he
had
in fact racially abused a black or Jewish player etc, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiDxtnY2bF0.
Paolo Di Canio and I are not alone in that respect. In 2014 a witch-hunt was
organized against Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla. Eich is one of the pioneers
of the modern computer age; he invented JavaScript, the programming language
that allows you to read these words on this webpage. Despite his lofty and
revered position in the electronics industry and the history of information
technology, his career was ruined instantly and without mercy. Why? Because he
donated $US 1000 six years previously to a campaign group opposing gay
marriage, see:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/mozilla-ceo-resigns-calif-gay-marriage-ban-campaign/story?id=23181711.
This money was donated from his private purse, not from the company's money,
and he did it in his own time. Also he never exhibited any misconduct in the
workplace towards homosexual staff members. However that didn't matter and he
was destroyed overnight. This is why I've become an opponent of Peter Tatchell,
a former colleague of mine on
The
People's Voice; this is despite the fact that I agree with him over gay
marriage. I don't know specifically, but I suspect that he would support the
sacking of Brendan Eich, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/gay-marriage-usa.html. Andy Nowicki is another good example, see background article at the bottom. I don't know Paolo Di Canio; I've never met him, but if I did I'd ask him to
elaborate on what he said. If Benito Mussolini is misunderstood by history,
then in what way? I bet that most of the people who attacked Di Canio don't
know anything about Mussolini except that he's a "fascist!" and therefore
an "evil person!". Shouldn't Di Canio's statement instead be a
trigger for intellectual discourse that might make us think again? One of the
definitions of fascism is that it was an international political movement that
doesn't exist anywhere in the world today; it rose and fell in the first half
of the 20th century. It was set up as an attempt to halt the spread of
communism across
Europe following the Bolshevik
Revolution in
Russia.
Unlike his wartime ally Adolf Hitler, Mussolini did not blame everything on the
Jews, and until 1938 Jews were not prohibited from appointments to public
office in
Italy.
What's more the ban was only due to the influence of some of his ministers and
the need for German support as war approached. He also improved the Italian
economy enormously, opening state-run farms and factories all over the new
nation. He created millions of jobs, and built roads and railways across the
land. Also, amazingly, he was the first government leader to establish an
official UFO investigation agency, decades before Nick Pope's MoD UFO desk
(Good 2006). I'm not saying that Mussolini was a good man, or a bad man. I'm
just saying that there are different ways of looking at history; and history
has a habit of creating fictional angels and demons out of perfectly ordinary
mortal people; people with the same human virtues and flaws as everybody else. However,
we, the people are not permitted to think more than one-dimensionally in
today's world. Despite all the pressure to reject him, Paolo Di Canio was
signed up for a two-season contact at
Sunderland; the
club bravely resisted the edicts from the Ministry of Truth. However he was
sacked after just a couple of months. This was not due to him being "Nazi
fascist scum!", but because the team only won three games out of the thirteen
they played under his management.
See here for more information: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/political-correctness-portal.html.
