Hated and Proud- Ultras Contra Modernity

by Mark Dyal

  If the Ultras act violently without concern for the consequential breakdown of law and order, or State legitimacy, then they must be dealt with as enemies of the State. As discussed in the previous chapter, the State is the sole purveyor of legitimate violence in the liberal order. Any violent individuals or groups are seen as a form of order breakdown. As Foucault demonstrated, the purpose of State violence is often coercive and is always dispersed throughout the institutions of the State.166 The most obvious institution of social coercion is the police, whose task he identifies with far more than mere ‘policing.’ Simply put, the police ‘see to the benefits that can be derived only from living in society.’ The police are charged with caring for the good of the body, soul, and economy of the State.167 What the police are policing amongst the Ultras is exactly this idea of order and the bourgeois ‘good’ that comes from the liberal State. What the State seeks, in other words, is to bring the Ultras within its own model of freedom.

  When scholars and journalists identify war as the dominant metaphor in the Ultras’ vocabulary (of fandom), perhaps they say more than they intend. Indeed, I have taken that metaphor much further and connected it with the overall mentalità and ethical structure of the Ultras. As war promotes the idea of an organic community united by commitment, suffering, and sacrifice, as I argue below, it is a threat to the system of rights which legitimizes and normalizes the relationship between State and individual, especially given the ‘peacetime’ context in which Ultra violence occurs. From within, a group of Ultras standing their ground and refusing to show fear to a rival group looks poetic and romantic, like an elite legion defending the honor of Rome to the (symbolic) death. From without, however, it looks like two gangs of thugs attempting to break the social contract that maintains the order of the State.

  Perhaps this is why I find the Ultras ambiguously concerned with the State. While they neither explicitly discuss the State, nor desire its overthrow as Ultras, they still act largely outside its legitimizing embrace. Weber spoke of State domination by virtue of a general belief in the validity of legality and the obligations it presupposes in the liberal individual.168 He also understood that the warrior castes of pre-modern Europe, with their honor codes, restricted halls of brotherhood, and heroic forms of violence, would have been, and were, out of step with the State’s technologies of dominance and institutionalization. Warrior coercion, as it was, became anathema to State coercion and its monopolization of violence and warfare, as did its codes of ethics.169

  It would be hyperbole to say that AS Roma’s Ultras are committed to a war against State legality. However, they are at war with the obligations that legality imposes on the person. This is precisely because their ethics fall closer to the pre-modern warrior than the bourgeois individual. Thus, physical transgression may have major consequences for the Ultras even as it plays a smaller role than their ethical transgressions. But while two nights of violence in 2007 were the rationale to begin the State’s suppression of the Ultras, it is the latter, ethical transgressions, I believe, that set the State against them to begin with, and the reason I have focused more upon the Ultras’ ethic of violence than actual violence.

  The Morality of Altruism

  Progress Towards the Universal?

  The Ultras’ ethic of violence not only puts them at odds with the State’s system of law and order but with the guiding ethical components of Western liberalism. The Ultras place little value on safety, security, or peacefulness — in short, the values of the marketplace. Yet they are not mere hoodlums bent on destruction for its own sake, but are guided by reverence for a form of life that simply does not fear violent confrontation. Because of this, and because of the rarity of violence in the lives of bourgeois subjects, the Ultras are condemned as criminals.

  However interesting the criminalization of non-legitimate violence is, I find the ways in which violence makes knowable the relationship between truth and morality more so. This relationship was central to Nietzsche’s works and, oddly enough, has become a major aspect of the Ultras’ conflict with the liberal State. This is because of the moralistic nature of the media’s portrayal of the Ultras’ agonistic form of life. As I demonstrated in the previous chapters, the Ultras seek to maintain a high level of rivalry and hostility in Italian soccer, primarily because these point to a form of interaction and experience that transcends the marketplace.170 The system they call Calcio Moderno, however, seeks to mitigate enmity precisely because it destabilizes the marketplace, as well as the peace and wellbeing of the bourgeois soccer fans.

  For example, when AS Roma’s Ultras explained their desire to ‘hate Napoli’ and to sing ‘I hate Napoli’ during the 2007 game between the two teams, they were condemned in the press as ‘racists’ and as representatives of a non-evolved and not-quite-modern aspect of Italy’s collective unconscious that the liberal cosmopolitan press found abhorrent (see Chapter Three). Seemingly as a consequence of the weeks of discourse around the AS Roma-SSC Napoli game of 2007, one of Italian soccer’s major sponsors, Volkswagon, produced a pamphlet that was handed to those entering Italian stadiums during the tenth round of games on October 31, 2007 (two weeks after AS Roma-SSC Napoli). Called the ‘Handbook of the Good Fan,’ it consisted of ten points, among them to ‘go to the stadium “armed” only with enthusiasm,’ to ‘never express joy in an aggressive fashion,’ to ‘never assume a racist attitude,’ to ‘appreciate the nice play of the adversary,’ (in other words, to clap for the opposition) and to ‘not imitate those who act in an “incorrect” and “miseducated” way.’

  Aside from cynicism about the intentions of a corporate sponsor seeking only profits from their involvement with soccer, the Boys Ultras with whom I spoke during the game understood the moral implications of the pamphlet. ‘The system’ said Manuele, a lithe twenty-three-year-old member from the ancient Testaccio neighborhood, ‘is telling children not to be Ultras, plain and simple. Each of the things presented as good are the opposite of what we do. The children are being told to live as good, modest, normal people.’ Fabio, standing next to us but facing the crowd and not the action on the field, as do most leaders so they may direct songs to their group, made the point more eloquently. ‘The children are to be good — that is enough to say multiculturalists, consumers, and desirous of comfort, fun, and peaceful coexistence even with mediocrity. But they will discover, at least some will, that the promises being made [by the marketplace] pale in comparison to the traditional Roman life.’ He then, referred to a list of Roman characteristics made by Evola that he and other members of the group had been discussing in the week prior to the game (examined in Chapter Six).

  With the pamphlet of the model bourgeois subject converging, in one place, with the raging fandom of Curva Sud Roma’s Ultras, I again began to wonder about the relationship between truth and morality, or more correctly, morality and altruism. I wondered how it made sense to the liberal world to propose ecumenicalism as a way to live a fulfilling life. As the bourgeois fans clapped politely, the Ultras supported AS Roma as partially as possible — as partisans. The distance between them was so great that Nietzsche and his understanding of the pathos, or great sensation, of distance came to mind. Forms of life, he said, were distinguishable, all things considered, by morality and valuation. This was certainly true of the distance between the Ultra and bourgeois forms of life: one seeking extremes of emotion flowing from a small cohort, and the other a steady mild stream of emotion flowing from a universal cohort.

  Linguist Philip Lieberman sought to explain the relationship between valuation and altruism by discovering from where the two entered the human experience. Resulting from the biological development of the brain and supralaryngeal tools needed to produce human speech, a new type of cognitive capacity evolved. This was the human ability to construct linguistically encoded behaviors such as those controlled by systems of morality and ethics.171 ‘These developments enabled us to induce the modes of altruism that bond us together as groups. I
n consequence, …in place of the genetic programs that regulate the behaviors of all organic species, we developed … culture-specific programs by which our human behaviors — cognizing, affective, and actional — came to be … regulated.’172

  Interestingly, this is the same conclusion reached by Nietzsche. After first exploring the link between language and consciousness, and concluding that conscious thought, that which takes the form of language, is the shallowest form of thought because it is designed only to connect one person to another, Nietzsche then seeks to understand how consciousness is connected to human social forms. ‘Consciousness,’ he says, ‘belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community and herd-aspects of his nature; it developed only in relation to its usefulness to the herd. Consequently, we may only know ourselves through what is average and knowable from the herd’s perspective. We know exactly as much as is useful to the human herd.’173

  Lieberman continues his explication of the development of altruism to demonstrate how technology has allowed the human to burst outward from its small (pre-modern) communities to populate every continent and harness the forces of nature. We have done so, however, having surpassed the still operational altruistic models of previous centuries. While slavery, for example, was once a universal component of human forms of life, it is now ‘universally outlawed’ (thanks to our ever advancing moral and ethical systems). Race, the bane of one of its later variants, American racial slavery, is still ‘unconquered.’174

  In arguing thus, Lieberman demonstrates not only that ethico-behavioral systems were narratively driven, but also that they continue to be. For nowhere in his book on the evolution of altruistic behaviors and their relationship to morality does he feel the need to quantify his own moral positions — nor his use of these positions to justify the idea that the species is progressing because of its moral-ethical aversion to slavery. Nor, obviously, does he need to explain that ‘racial prejudice’ is abhorrent.

  Indeed, language is not epiphenomenal to the social structures in which it acts, but a very part of those structures. Fernand Hallyn agrees, proposing that ‘frames of signification’ organize ‘poetically,’ that is, through language and grammar, to provide, among other things, the boundaries and boundary markers between ‘us and them’. He terms this process the ‘poetics of the propter nos’ — the ‘us’ on whose behalf ‘we’ act.175

  Utilizing a largely ‘epistemic’ version of culture (focusing on systems of representation), Sylvia Wynter explains the importance of the propter nos as the contextual basis of human altruism. She explains the history of various propters nos, showing how categorial models, such as those that came to be disciplines in the modern Academy — Geography, Anthropology, Psychology, Ecology, Economics, etc. — are often the barriers that must fall in order for altruistic advances to be made.176

  What drives this form of human advancement is intellectual revolution or ‘epistemic shifts.’177 However, like Lieberman, Wynter assumes that progress is made only when our altruistic models become universalized, or universally inclusive. She proposes that the motivation of an epochal shift in human understanding (in our lifetime) should be the universality of our ‘nos,’ wherein all forms of life are equally valid and valued, thereby conceptually cancelling discrimination between human ‘forms of life.’

  Or, Progress Towards the Extremely Restricted

  The Ultras represent instead another model of what we may call inter-altruistic co-identification — one that is exaggeratedly restricted. If the altruism of globalization is driven by a morality of total inclusion, wherein the universalization of women and men is made complete in a global market, the altruism of the Ultra is one of exclusion, exclusivity, and local particularity. These motivating forces will be made clear as the chapter progresses.

  I have described Curva Sud as a ‘kingdom of the word’ because there, at the center of the Roman Ultra universe, I found a place where language, rhetoric, and ideology were paramount.178 It is for this reason that I chose to use Sylvia Wynter and others who focus on the narrative element of human existence to explain the moral basis of altruistic behaviors. But where the moral thrust of the West is more and more associated with liberal civic and social principles like peace, stability, comfort, happiness, and equality, those of the Ultra can be identified in the words of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers like Nietzsche and Evola, for whom liberalism’s values lead to cultural degeneration.179

  ‘I brought a copy of La Gaia Scienza (The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche) to Antichi Valori,’ I was told by Mario, a former member of the group. ‘In that book is Nietzsche’s greatest lesson to the Ultra mentalità: that all good things come from oppositions. “La guerra è la madre di tutte le buone cose,”’ (war is the mother of all good things) he said. Our mentalità was to practice this everyday — not through fighting but through understanding. By giving up aggression and rivalry we thought that the great and beautiful energy of life would wither away.’ From Nietzsche, Mario went on to say, Antichi Valori learned to love hatred and have no fear of danger.

  As if writing a description of the Ultra agonistic form of life, Evola explained that ‘what is needed is a new radical front with clear boundaries between friend and foe. The future does not belong to those of crumbling and hybrid ideas but those of radicalism — the radicalism of absolute negations and majestic affirmations.’180 The idea of embracing ‘absolute negations and majestic affirmations’ is accepted whole-heartedly by the leadership group of Boys Roma.

  On a sweltering summer evening in late-July, 2007, I met this group of four, plus other members of Boys, to discuss Evola and the new government initiatives against the Ultras for the upcoming season. (Soccer season in Italy is from late-August to mid-May.) On this night, the topic of discussion was the opening section of Evola’s Imperialismo Pagano, in which he dismisses the ‘petty aims’ of the liberal State and its economic, military, and industrial foundations but without embracing European Fascism as such. Instead he proposes Fascism based on the Roman Imperium, an ancient right to rule based on spiritual superiority. This Imperium Romanum, he says, ‘can only be attained by those who have the power to transcend the petty lives of petty men and their petty appetites, national pride, values, nonvalues, and gods’181 In a room of young, impressionable Ultras who considered themselves European-style Fascists, this was a bold choice of discussion. Fabio, second-in-command at Boys, explained to me beforehand that he hoped Evola would ‘decenter’ the group’s understanding of Fascism and even its affiliation with neo-Fascists like Forza Nuova. ‘We must put Rome at the center, not Fascism. I want our Ultras to be critical of the world but in a way that puts them and their future in focus. Roberto Fiore [founder and leader of Forza Nuova] might be a good guy, but Forza Nuova will always do right by him, not Rome. No, it is up to us to look out for Rome,’ he told me.

  Looking back, I missed a perfect opportunity to discuss the absence of the State and nationalism in the worldview of a Roman Fascist. At the time, it just seemed obvious that Rome and the Romans would be the basis of the type of radicalization and political action the Boys Ultras were pursuing. As Michael Herzfeld described, Rome has a unique ability to (still) feel like the center of the world.182 To the Romans, especially those thoroughly imbued with Romanità, there is very little of value in the world beyond Rome’s walls. Ecumenicalism and the relativity of forms of life are ‘recipes,’ I was told, ‘for living without pride’ (see Chapters Three and Seven).

  David Nugent describes the ways in which Peruvian peasants sought to diminish the racial categories imposed by colonialism in order to fully embrace, and be embraced by, the nation; as he says it, they ‘erased race to make the nation.’183 These Ultras were taking the opposite approach, openly embracing the idea of a Roman race, in order to disconnect themselves from the Italian nation and the ‘empty promises of liberalism.’ Indeed, it was not just Boys Roma that was pursuing such a course. Two small pol
itical groups, Razza Romana (Roman Race) and Romulae Genti (The Race of Romulus), invoked the same ideal of the Romans and what it means to carry such a marker of identity today.

  The Ultras — Being Made Hard

  A Mass Amongst Warriors

  Earlier I explained that the Ultras use a conception of history that places high value on myth and tradition. Their history is a monumental history, not only because they live closer to heroism and memorialization than other fans, but also because it is highly selective. As Nietzsche explained, monumentalism makes use of neither objectivity nor linear narratives but instead picks and chooses aspects of history to celebrate and diminish.184

  How the Ultras use history is exemplified by their in-stadium activities like unfurling banners or devoting the act of fandom to the honor of fallen Ultras or Romans. One can observe it, too, in their actions beyond the stadium, such as the 2007 mass commemorating the most important capo (boss) in the history of Boys Roma, Paolo Zappavigna. At this mass, which took place in the Basilica San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, it was clear that the level of respect for the Ultra being honored went far beyond compassion. It was true veneration by those who were witnesses to the life lost.

  After the mass for Paolo, I sat in a dingy San Lorenzo café as a cold rain poured outside, speaking to Augusto of Boys Roma and Marcello of Padroni di Casa. These were two Ultras I did not know well at the time. They stayed to speak with me for two reasons. One, it was raining too hard for their journey home by scooter to be comfortably made; and two, because ‘Duce,’ the boss of Boys Roma had encouraged them to do so.

  I revisited, with them, the respect and commitment I felt I had witnessed earlier as approximately one hundred tattooed, t-shirt and jean clad Ultras performed the mass. The ceremony had been mundane until the priest said something about the excesses of youth which had misled Zappavigna into a dark period of violence — words that provoked the congregation to ‘erupt’ with hushed whistles and looks of derision, just as a stadium might explode at a hard foul by an opposing player. The shocked look on my face was met with a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘pezzo di merda’ (piece of shit) murmured by Filippo the long-time Fedayn member whose flags I waved in Parma and Milano.