by Mark Dyal
‘The press,’ Matteo said, ‘has an agenda, to promote the interests of Calcio Moderno, and to moralize against the Ultras. This happens all the time — well, anytime there is violence. We see the world from opposing vantage points: when they say virtue [virtu`] we say cowardice [vilta`], when they say moderation [moderazione] we say mediocrity [mediocrità].’ Jean-Paolo of Boys agreed, giving me some examples of how the press ‘has sided with a form of life which seeks to diminish the hardness [durezza] and clarity [chiarezza] of the Ultras. Among other things,’ he said, ‘the press had been pleased that Prodi and his government of neo-liberals and communists had passed [sic] a law that forces the state to recognize gay marriages, while the nation was aghast at such a defeat of the holiness of the family.87 It had also been silent when three Italian women were gang-raped, stoned [intentionally to death], and buried alive in Cape Verde by the very people to whom it would willingly give the nation in an effort to show how multicultural and liberal it can be. The same press had celebrated when Prodi was in India attempting to create more ways to import cheap fabrics from people that would hammer another nail in the coffin of [Italy’s] own legendary textile industry. So it is only natural that the Ultras are the true enemy of the press,’ Jean-Paolo said.
Protesting Calcio Moderno
With the resumption of the season came the return to normal routines as well, except that the Amato Decree forced the closing of all but four stadiums expected to host games in Serie A. Even Milan’s famed San Siro was to be closed to the public for failing to install electronic turnstiles. However, around-the-clock work crews insured the stadium could at least host season ticket holders. The closings forced AS Roma to play four consecutive away games in empty stadiums. The first of these, at Empoli, was attended by members of Fedayn and Ultras Romani, who hung their banners from a fence outside the stadium and listened to the game on a car radio. Their being outside the stadium was meant as a reminder to the players that, ‘we will never leave you,’ as goes a popular song of Curva Sud Roma, and to Amato, the government, the police, the press, and the monied agents of Calcio Moderno that, despite the bans and laws, the Ultras were going nowhere. Lorenzo of Ultras Romani, present in Empoli, prophetically (considering the killing of Sandri nine months later) made the point: ‘They will have to kill us to be free of us. We risk everything for the things in our hearts and because of this we are dangerous to the system [of Calcio Moderno] that wants passive consumers.’
Each home game in that eight-game span began with fifteen minutes of silent protest by Curva Sud. The first was against Reggina Calcio, the team from Reggio Calabria. As the game began, the Curva was instructed to remain seated and silent for a protest by way of a banner reading ‘15 min di silenzio ... sono urla di rabbia.’ (15 minutes of silence ... [as] shouts of rage). As no other sections of the stadium sing, cheer, or clap like the Ultras, it was noticeably quiet. Somewhere close to ten minutes into the proposed fifteen-minute protest, however, groups of fans in the section next to Curva Sud, began to sing. Their songs were quickly met with derisive whistles and a barrage of insults from the Curva. The Ultras were instantly as furious as I ever saw them in my time with them. Their derision began as whistles and yelled insults (destined to fall on deaf ears). It progressed into organized chants of ‘Distinti, Distinti, Vaffanculo’ (Distinti, go fuck yourself), and then, ‘Cantate solo quando volete’ (You only sing when you want) — the latter being an insult designed to show the bourgeois nature of those fans who do not support AS Roma as a duty. The Ultras ended the fifteen-minute protest with chants of ‘Curva Sud Alè,’ (Let’s go Curva Sud).
The short scene captured many elements of the Ultra phenomenon. First, the Ultras understood that they were protesting the media and its ability to portray them in unflattering ways. They had been portrayed as expendable for weeks. What better way to show what they bring to the games than by remaining seated and silent? Second, they must be well-organized to get a section of seventeen thousand people to go along with a protest that was unannounced to the vast majority of those in the Curva. Third, the distance between the Ultras and the ‘normal fans’ was made apparent. The song sung against the Distinti section was designed to show them the vacuity of their singing only ‘when they want’ instead of the Ultra-style of singing for the entire ninety minutes (and more) of the game. To sing at one’s leisure removes the sacrifice and commitment from the act. Fourth, the act of silence as protest is difficult for the Ultras. Contrary to how they had been portrayed in the press, their actions as fans are most dear to their movement, so much so that many long-time Ultras condemn anyone who puts political affiliations or ideologies above performance in the Curva.
Conclusion
The Ultras, as we are beginning to see, live and act within a distinctive form of life driven by a language of honor, sacrifice, glory, and daring — what they call ‘antichi valori’ or a ‘vecchia mentalità.’ They use a form of history that promotes the celebration of heroes and heroism while at the same promoting the particular at the expense of the universal. Thus, Romans and Ultras are glorified and magnified while others are ignored or vilified. As we will begin to see, the Ultras’ mentalità takes its clearest form as an understanding of the world in starkly oppositional or agonic terms.
Their monumentalism keeps history alive and present in their every action as Ultras. Whether it is the memory of fallen Ultras, friends, and colleagues, the glory of Ancient Rome, or the long history of Italian intercity rivalry, the past plays a powerful role in the way they understand themselves. On the evening of Gabriele Sandri’s death, when the Ultras of AS Roma and SS Lazio united to confront the police and rampage through the streets of Rome, they did so believing not only that Sandri’s death deserved a violent response but also that they were making their own history in doing so. In other words, they would not have acted as Ultras if they stayed passively at home, nor would they have set a proper model to be emulated by later Ultras.
The night of what the media called the ‘sack of Rome’ as well as the months following the February 2007 death of Filippo Raciti begin to make clear the relationship between the Ultras, the State, and media. The Ultras are adept at using the media for their own ends. The media coverage of performance of fandom, be it choreography, flares, smoke torches, or banners, is counted upon in order to gain notoriety for groups and curvas. For the same reasons, it is also hoped that the media will acknowledge the Ultras’ social initiatives and protests. However, there is a great distance between these and the expectation that the media will attempt to understand the complexity of the Ultras, their worldview, or their critique of modern bourgeois life. Likewise, the State had long accepted the Ultras and the small-scale violence they perpetrated amongst themselves. They made great shows of force in attempted to quell these but made no moves to prohibit Ultras’ access to stadiums. However, after the death of a police officer and a night of what was also called domestic terrorism, both in 2007, the State finally moved to rid soccer of the Ultras. Although the media and State play peripheral roles for the Ultras, whose self-conception, while political, is so insular that the impossibility of being understood by non-Ultras is often assumed, they are critical in determining the discourse of being an Ultra and the freedoms thereby advanced.
In the coming chapters, the media’s power to moralize situations will be analyzed more fully, as will the State’s ability to determine which forms of violence are legitimate and which are markers of subversion. All the while, the Ultras, their agonistic culture full of the language of pre-modern warriors, and their connections with neo-Fascism, Rome, and political philosophy will be examined. What emerges is a kind of cultural movement, very political and critical of modernity, also violent, and dedicated to preserving the traditions they feel sustain them and the people of Rome.
Chapter Four
Ultras, the State, and Violence
In the previous chapter I described some of the most extreme moments during my time amongst the Ul
tras. The deaths of Raciti and Sandri became the bookends of this project because they brought to light so many elements of the Ultras: their mentalità; violence; and their relationship with the Italian State, soccer, and Calcio Moderno. In this chapter, I continue the discussion of their relationship with the State, this time focusing on the distance between the Ultras and the State and media. While the Ultras maintain an ethic that focuses on the virtuous and heroic aspects of violence that are said by Sorel and Nietzsche to lead one beyond the bourgeois form of life, the State and media combine to create and disseminate against the Ultras, a counter-ethic that promotes the legitimacy of State violence and condemns instances of interpersonal violence. Because the chapter requires an examination of the discourses and moralities of violence I also explore the attraction of Nietzsche to AS Roma’s Ultras.
AS Roma’s Ultras and the State
In the Introduction, I explained that the State and media exist as meta-natural opponents of the Ultras for two reasons — they are not amongst the natural or soccer-related rivals of the Ultras, and they are able to comment upon and define the context of all of the Ultra rivalries. In order to best understand the contention between the Ultras and the State, it is crucially important to understand the ways in which the physical power of the State is bound up with the morality of bourgeois liberalism. Through both of these, the hegemony of the State is legitimized and maintained.
Sorel distinguished between the violence of a revolutionary proletariat and violence in the name of the State.88 Interestingly, Sorel includes the capacity of intellectuals and bureaucrats to act violently in the state’s service. Given their feeble natures, they do so primarily through the wielding of morality and an ethic that condemns violence. What we find in Sorel, then, is an acknowledgment that morality is a tool used by the bourgeoisie against any eruptions that would seek to disturb the peace of the modern marketplace.89
Agamben goes further in explaining the links between the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence and the incorporation of the modern political subject into a system of protection and happiness. The modern State, he explains, is able to bring all of the ‘objects’ that dwell within the State’s confines to ‘subjecthood’ by demanding that these (human) objects conform to the State’s inclusionary/exclusionary model of humanity.90 As a corrective to Foucault’s ‘bio-power,’ which proposed that the state lords over the care of the individual, Agamben says that in the modern State, the bare life, or natural life, along with morality and truth, coincides to the point of ‘irreducible indistinction.’91
Once the State makes a political issue of something formerly excluded from the political — as was the ‘bare life’ in the classical period, for example — it then has the right to decide in its interests and to bring these interests in-line with those of the State.92 The State then becomes the sole interpreter of a political meta-language that includes not only narratives of self, but also ‘the ability to define ‘good and bad,’ ‘victim and aggressor’.’93
Within this system, which is totalitarian by definition — in that it offers promises of personal redemption and happiness, thus providing completely for the individual’s wellbeing, at the price of mere unthinking devotion to the bourgeois form of life — the State and the individual are mutually affirming.94 What is good for the one is good for the other. However, Deleuze and Guattari propose that at the edges of modern States — if we momentarily conceive of their territoriality as a metaphor for zones of inclusion and exclusion — there are also marginal spaces or thinkers who offer cracks in the order and critiques of its functioning and systemic completeness. They call these ‘smooth’ or derelict spaces because they are contiguous to every one of the State’s spatial coordinates yet offer sites of such unorthodoxy that they cannot be brought within the State’s system of reality. One of the most important of these spaces, according to Brian Massumi, is the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, which he calls ‘an immanent outside,’ because it signals a plane of exteriority to, or a moving beyond the realm of, bourgeois capitalist modernity.95
In thinking of the relationship between the State and the Ultras, Curva Sud Roma exists as a derelict space. The contiguous nature of such a space to the reality of the modern State is important because of the circularity of power and discourse that exist between the State and its dissidents.96 This circularity is predicated upon the State and its media having the ability to control the dissemination of knowledge about its subjects, who then respond with a counter-vision informed by their dissident status.97 For their part, AS Roma’s Ultras respond to the State and its bourgeois prohibition against violence with a discourse informed by revolutionary philosophy that promotes the positive value of violence and aggression — precisely because of their opposition to bourgeois peace and security.
Not only is there a circular nature to the discourses of the State and the Ultras, but also of power and the use of force. According to Maurizio Stefanini, when the State began cracking down on Ultra groups following Raciti’s death in February 2007, there began an exodus of the hardest and most politically motivated fascist Ultras from the Italian curvas in order to act politically beyond them.98 The same phenomenon was witnessed in Curva Sud Roma.
Because of the ability of the State to make life difficult for Ultras whose political affiliations threaten the State’s security, some opted to fade away from the stadiums and fall in with the organized Far Right. Not all Ultras needed to respond in this way, however. Many of the smaller or politically unaligned groups shunned political commitments beyond the Curva or AS Roma, fearing danger to the future of the phenomenon. Those in Boys Roma and Padroni di Casa argue instead that the Ultras are threatening to the State regardless of political affiliation. Manuele, a thirty-one-year-old member of Padroni di Casa who works as a paralegal in a small industrial law firm, told me in 2010 ‘the Ultras represent a ‘free space’ in Italy that calls into question the rationale of consumption and civic irresponsibility that is becoming the norm.’ As the State closed in on that free, or derelict, space, bringing the curvas within the domain of its legitimacy, rightist Ultras felt compelled to act more aggressively in the outside world. This was the argument supplied by Fabio, one of the leaders of Boys Roma. ‘Many of the previous generation of Boys Ultras,’ he said, ‘didn’t bother coming back to the stadium after the policing increased in 2007. It was easier to go in the streets, or to join Forza Nuova or Fiamma [Tricolore]’ — radical parties of the Far Right. ‘It is easier to be a political extremist in Italy than an Ultra,’ he told me.
What we see then, is that policing measures might unintentionally create spaces of possible Ultra action that are also more extreme and threatening to the State. It is too soon to tell. What is knowable, and what the rest of this chapter will demonstrate, is that the Ultras offer a form of life that is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the modern State.
Violence, the State, and the Media
Max Weber’s understanding of the modern State has influenced not only each of the above theorists, but Sorel, Agamben, Schmitt and even Deleuze and Guattari too. ‘A State,’ says Weber, ‘is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’99 The right to use force, he continues, is restricted to those authorized by the State to do so.100 Thus, Sorel says, true power is held by those authorized to use violence, and political subjects of the ‘dangerous classes’ (i.e. proletariat and sub-proletariat, but in reality anyone who stands against the bourgeoisie) exist largely as those capable of being victims of violence.101 If we take this as a given, that the State exists as the sole right to legitimate violence, what are the consequences for groups like the Ultras who practice a form of violence, often against the police, that, when coupled with a critique of the bourgeois form of life, puts them at odds with the legitimacy of the State?
The Italian State has had an ambiguous relationship with the Far Right since the fall of Fascism
in 1945. Although Fascism and its symbols have been outlawed since that time, the intellectual currents that flowed through the Fascist regime and ideology remained. By 1969, when the international student movement formally identified with the summer of 1968 reached Italy, the Far Right was re-organized as bands of urban guerillas and terrorists.102 Although the Christian Democrats, led by Giulio Andreotti, were firmly entrenched in control of Italian politics, this control was based on a shifting coalition of centrist parties of the Left that came to include the Italian Socialist Party. In the early 1970s, however, the socialists’ involvement was shaken by increased tension between unionized industrial workers and the State, causing Andreotti to move temporarily to the Right for coalition partners before turning back to the Left in 1973.103 In this environment, guerilla groups of the Far Left and Right (including anarchist groups that fit with neither) began exchanging terrorist acts in Italian cities, highlighted by the 1978 abduction and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro by the Leftist Red Brigades and the 1980 Rightist bombing of Bologna’s central train station that killed eighty-five people.104 The Rightist guerillas, however, were often aided, or at least unhindered, by the State, which sought to use the destabilized environment caused by domestic terrorism to shore up support for the Andreotti government.105
It was in this milieu that the first groups of Ultras originated. Despite having groups in major cities being founded along extreme political lines (Fedayn and Boys Roma in Rome, Fossa dei Leoni and Boys SAN in Milan), the State did not conceive of these groups as a threat. Instead, the Ultras were allowed to thrive as soccer fans, seemingly at a remove from the political instability of the day.106 However, that idyllic period came to an end when the Italian curvas began shifting from Leftist or apolitical leanings toward the Far Right in the mid-1990s.107 Ferraresi explains that, while the Far Right was able to thrive in the crisis years of the Christian Democrats, it was seen as threatening to the stability of the neoliberal regime of Silvio Berlusconi. Additionally, the Right from the ‘years of lead’ (1969–1980) had attempted to connect the Right with a ‘movement ideology’ in contrast with the Rightist radicals who developed in the 1990s, who instead sought a more extreme ideological form that championed ‘being beyond’ the State rather than a victorious turn to liberal power.108 It can be surmised that State officials felt the Ultras belonged to this new form of the Right — with its less clearly defined boundaries, allegiances, and pronounced sense of autonomy from the bourgeois form of life, especially as Ultra violence became endemic to soccer matches during the same period. And as the police presence at soccer games increased steadily from 1994 to 2004, so too did the tension between the Ultras and the police.109