Hated and Proud- Ultras Contra Modernity

by Mark Dyal

  There is something wonderfully disjointed in the toothy greeting one usually gets when boarding an America-bound plane, as if the crew has taken on the ‘Wherever I stand is America’ attitude of an infantryman in Afghanistan (but without his solemn and ferocious dignity), and on this day I found in the contrast between the smiling, overly helpful, overtly American stewardess and my own anguished Roman pathos an affront to whatever nobility I felt my life had acquired in our time in Rome. In my silent, expressionless response to her ebullience I only wanted to convey, ‘I don’t belong in such a small space with anyone so happy to be leaving Rome … for Atlanta.’

  As we settled into our seats, I retreated to my noise-cancelling headphones so as to enjoy my misery in solitude. I wasn’t alone for long, though, as, somehow, Thom Yorke of all people, broke through my calcifying cocoon. As ‘Nude’ from Radiohead’s In Rainbows wafted into my ears, I began to relax and to embrace the moment for all the potentials it was blasting into my life. For we hadn’t even backed away from our departure gate and yet the distance that now separated us from the world to which we were returning couldn’t have been any starker. Just being in such close quarters with all the good people on board made me defiant, and all the anxiety that had built up to this moment surrendered to my renewed resolve to never, ever, live so happy to ‘broaden my horizons through travel,’ or to read ‘all the news that is fit to print,’ or to ‘think outside the box,’ or to take comfort in anything that made these people happy, justified, secure, hopeful, proud, sensical, or even sensible. Normal modern people of any shape, color, or creed, were no longer my people. I was bringing my enemies home with me. I was happy again.

  I knew I had to write the dissertation and finish school, but beyond that, and even why I was doing that, I could make no one any promises. The Academy had become less an aspiration than a rebuke of my aspirations. An ascetic approach to knowledge and to life was no longer in the cards — I was far more concerned with what I could do than with what I could know. In other words, I understood as we prepared for takeoff that I could never be an ‘expert’ on, or even an advocate of, the Ultras, the Romans, or the Romanità I had come to know and love. And this was all the Academy would ever allow: me as a middle-aged talking head, explaining multicultural Rome and its ‘invented traditions’ to a handful of disinterested teenagers — a caged wolf fighting a losing battle against the ease of satiation when being fed on a schedule, dreaming of what I once was, and stockpiling ressentiment as I waited either to die a shameful death or to become a hand grenade.

  Instead I wanted to continue to live as an Ultra, as one of the ‘last rebels,’ a derelict space in the heart of the West, a radical, unrepentant, proud, and aggressive outcast. When we reached Atlanta, I was steeled for what is normally called ‘culture shock’ but what is more like the revulsion an alimentary canal feels for salmonella infused chicken: I thought of Nietzsche hugging the neck of the horse in Turin, despairing and desperate in the face of so much power and vulgarity. (Encounters with rabble-strewn representatives of the State in Italy instead always seemed to inspire an image of a Viking band entering a sleeping monastery.)

  When we reached our abode — after all, one never goes home again — my wife and I both realized that something was irretrievably left behind in Rome: namely the people we were when we arrived there in 2006. What had we done in this space back then? Dressed up to go shopping?!? Dressed up to go to fine restaurants?!? Watched TV?!? Watched AS Roma games on TV?!? How? How did this add up to a life? We were beside ourselves. How had we been so docile? How had we been so mediocre for so long and not known it? Where was the aggression, the transgression, the squadrismo, the dynamism? We were thinking like Ultras and Romans.

  My new goal became to find like-minded people in America, even if, at the time, I was pretty-well convinced that they didn’t exist. Pretty soon though, I began to get an inkling that something was afoot. I found something of which I should have long been a part: hardcore and punk music. Hardcore (and its aggressive anti-social DIY message) became the blaring, jarring soundtrack to my seemingly endless writing sessions, although for editing I turned to the abstraction of glitch-based computer music. I also found Traditionalism and neo-paganism; and after finding Tyr on Amazon.com, I met Josh Buckley, who introduced me to Greg Johnson and John Morgan. The pieces of a radical, dynamic, dissident life were beginning to come together.

  It was through Tyr and the world of ideas in which it is situated that I began to make better use of Evola and his understanding of Roman paganism; although no one impacted my thinking — or life — as much as Nietzsche. To have known Nietzsche as a philosopher among other philosophers and critical theoreticians left me as he does many other students: bemused, amused, and rather unimpressed. But to have been forced to return to him in Rome, amongst an aggressive, virile, cadre of ‘free spirits,’ was the most momentous event of my intellectual life. With Nietzsche I had a weapon, a way to understand the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ of the Ultras and the modern West; a way to appreciate the physiological dimension of language, truth, and political position; a way to explain degeneration and the distance between the Ultras and the normal Romans; and a way to facilitate my own becoming-Ultra: in finding happiness where others find their downfall: in harshness, in trials, in self-overcoming all of the mediocrities that had made my life so useful to our enemies.379

  Many now know of the journey that ensued, and of my travels to and from the farthest reaches of American dissident life: from the blinding rays of the dawning Right, to the soothing traces of the setting Left, both pushed me on to attempt a true transvaluation of what I so enthusiastically and repetitively call the bourgeois form of life. The highlights of the journey have been the birth of my son — and what my wife and I have attempted to create through him — and what became of a rather innocent suggestion by Greg Johnson that I return to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to see what value they might have for the extreme dissident Right. What I learned is that Nietzschean transvaluation cannot mean merely a transvaluation of what our enemies think, but also and more importantly how they think; I learned that the State and Capitalism must be integral to our analyses of our enemies; and I learned that counter ontology and epistemology only have limited value if they remain separated from a counter ontography and epistemography.

  Just after making this leap with Deleuze and Guattari — after what amounted to attacking the overly clichéd and lazy explanatory models of the Left and the Right, as well as my own putrid, slavish, fascistic analyses and judgements — I was contacted by a man named Hugh Maguire, a veteran of America’s Iraqi regime change, and the most dangerous man I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. Maguire had been impressed by my essays on physiology and violence — the ideas for which began to take shape during my time in Rome — but when we began our correspondence and friendship, I was in the first stages of becoming unable to explain anything without using Deleuzian concepts: an affliction found amongst most, if not all, ‘Deleuze scholars.’

  Instead of chafing at my ham-handed use of theory, though, Maguire would ask for a definition, say of the ‘territorialization of desire flows’ by which we become conscious, thinking, acting expressions of a form of life — each with a rhythmic and dynamic relation to apparatuses of power and counter-power. In more cases than I can remember, Maguire would then say something like, ‘Oh yeah, we do that in the Army, only we call it canalizing: we restrict people’s options for movement by funneling them through terrain or obstacles that we control. It’s the same thing the State does with infrastructure, or that Capitalism does with marketing.’

  And just like that we would be on our way to completely reterritorializing Deleuze into a new terrain that has yet to be captured or controlled. Now, instead of contemplating and thinking to create abstract, static, and formal manifesto-ready truths with which to judge and condemn life that fails to conform to our vision, we attemp
ted to make thinking a part of a larger revolt of incessant movement, aggressive struggle, and speed against the staid, docile, and pedantic nature of the slavish men who attempted to control both our enemies and our friends. We began to move away from the Right; but instead of going back to the Left, we created and traversed as many nec plus ultras between us and bourgeois politics as we could. Eventually we stopped trying to explain why people do things because we no longer cared what they do. As Hugh once said to me, ‘The wolf pack cares nothing about the cleanliness of the shearing shed.’

  Thus, my life became the actual living of a counter-form of life: at first very Ultra, very Roman, and then more focused on what was happening right here and now: which in the end was far more Roman than most people could realize. Ken Gemes once said that Nietzsche is a ‘local rather than global’ thinker because what he condemns or affirms is only ever a particular case: sometimes History, for example, might seek to emasculate and enslave; at other times it might seek to strengthen and liberate: its only value is the use-value of each of its expressions.380 What can I do with what is at hand right now?

  And so, ‘right now’ prompted my wife and I to find strengthening and liberatory forces closer to home. Rome began to fade into memory, and mercifully I found some peace in that, as we turned north to Southern Appalachia and the enthralling frontier it still offers. Ultras gave way to mountain homesteaders, moonshiners, and bushwhackers. America gave way to the tenuous hold that the shibboleths of the State have on the violent and dangerous fringes of its subject-citizenry. And the South became home for the first time in my adult life.

  Because of my extreme-liberal political positions, the South was always something I was in, but not of (or so I thought). When we moved north to Ohio and New York to attend a few graduate schools, I not only remained hostile to my roots, but was given immense approval for doing so; at least during my Black Studies years. Anthropology, to its credit, never seemed to care, but by then, we were all assumed to be very much the same liberal humanist cattle. And even in Rome, it was far easier to tell people we were from New York than to try to explain our nomadic odyssey from the South. Then in 2007 my paternal grandmother died, and because I couldn’t return to America for the funeral, I wrote an open letter for someone to read on my behalf. While doing so I came to realize how closely my family had always lived to the values and ideals with which my wife and I had fallen in love in Rome — and in the name of Rome; my Nanny, especially.

  For her there was no joy that was too small to be shared, no travail too burdensome to embrace, and no beauty too difficult to appreciate — as long as one’s surname is Dyal. Just like our Roman friends, my grandmother had no use for a universalized conception of altruistic grace. As has become clear to many, it does not matter that one might exclude by race and another by culture — and yet another by family or behavior — the type of liberalism under which we are now living cannot tolerate any exclusionary logic employed by our people — unless of course, it is used to exclude us.

  The principle of exclusion functioned on a local level in most non-State forms of life as a way to ensure exogamy, the proper delineation of social and religious spheres within the included group, and the maintenance of the distances required between peoples to induce warfare. But as Pierre Clastres explains, for the extremely war-like Indians of the Amazon, the necessary ‘outside’ of the included group is not always a mortal enemy, but nonetheless forms the crucial partner in a violent dance that envelopes the shared boundaries of a larger territory in some form of perpetual warfare; a warfare that wards off both the accumulation of an overarching and universalizing power, and also the type of acquiescence to State power that comes with final victory.381

  In place of a principle of exclusion, though, the State mandates a right of exclusion that is implemented at the level of the Law and imposed on its subjects just as much as its enemies. For the sake of simplification, let’s say that the ability to exclude, full stop, has been taken from the people and the local communities that the people create on a daily basis, and given to State sponsored pillars — not of our communities, but of multinational corporations and their political and cultural lackeys; and be they in commutations, finance, retailing, or education, they all preach the same moralized logic of near universal inclusion that serves their interests as profiteers. And as this logic has hardened into totalitarianism, the only exclusion permitted is of people like the Ultras — and ourselves — who refuse to bow down to the intellectual disarmament now being demanded of all Western subjects, just so, as we will see, they can do something as innocuous as watch a game of soccer: and so a perusal of Internet articles written by good, loyal, safe, sure, secure, sound, consumers that comment on the Ultras will show a patterned logic that celebrates both the use of fabulatory community symbols — soccer teams — as corporate profit-machines, and the aggressive policing and exclusion of those who offer a radical critique of what is happening to our lives.

  And what is happening is doubly problematic for the Ultras. Firstly, as this study has shown, the Ultras are actively involved in the fabulation, or active creation, of a community that is based on shared commitments to Romanità; an aggressive celebration of having, and being, an enemy; and a brotherhood born only of these shared commitments and experiences; so much so that they refuse to unite with other Ultras and will only tolerate other groups in their own curva. But, unlike the State, they will tolerate them. They will allow space for dissent and disorganization. It might not always be pretty, and it is often violent, but Curva Sud Roma will allow a person or group to bring whatever they want into the Curva, asking only that one be willing to fight for it, and for Rome and AS Roma. And secondly, to that end, the State demands that it be the arbiter of what a community is, thinking only in demographic and socio-economic terms, making it the abstract counterpoint to active fabulation.

  The Ultras demonstrate what has long been apparent in Italy, and that which constitutes its lesson for the rest of the West: The State is an imposition by a particular type of human life and made for a particular purpose. It is the enemy of local autonomy. It is the enemy of collective, communal organization. It is the enemy of a type of strength that is smothered by the State’s homogenizing economic utilitarian needs. Its enemies are to be your enemies; its need for order is to be your freedom; its need for bodies to feed as laborers to capitalism is to be your culture; and its right to violence is to be your right to obey.

  But, like the Romans, my grandmother was inclined to stand defiantly opposed to any harsh judgement by outsiders. It didn’t take too much effort to connect her life — and our inherited traditions — to a larger Southern context. But whereas those traditions had always been easy for me to question, — perhaps I was born either a good Anthropologist or a bad Leftist because I was never comfortable condemning that which I knew little, or nothing, about — in Rome I was a visitor, and what’s more I had forgotten to pack the bag containing my trusty American academic conceptual tool box through which the world is condemned for either being racist, classist, or sexist; or more likely, all three. Whatever was going on in Rome amongst the Ultras, I was certainly not going to get to the bottom of it by focusing on race, class, or gender; although as I’ve said elsewhere, the Ultras made the decision for me: what I didn’t say is how thankful to them I am for having done so.

  I will admit to being genuinely taken aback by the lack of guilt or shame that I found amongst the Ultras, their friends, and families. In many ways, their freedom to live the joys, travails, and beauties of Romanità with nothing to corrupt their affects, liberated me from the confusion and self-mortification that had dominated my academic life to that point. I remember being schooled in ‘political symbols as floating signifiers’ by a middle-aged woman selling Ultras’ gear in a shop in Rome. One item was a patch of the Confederate battle flag but stitched in the yellow and red colors of Rome. I asked her somewhat incredulously, ‘What is this?�
� To which she explained, first, that the colors were those of Rome and AS Roma; second, that the symbol is a symbol of the South; third, that the South is the home of AS Roma’s Ultras — as in Curva Sud; and fourth, that the South is also a term of resistance to Northern economic and social policy, just as it is in America. ‘We are,’ as she said, ‘Sudisti:’ of the South.

  Figure 19. AS Roma Ultra at the Stadio San Siro, his scarf reads: ‘I hope that God strikes you all with lightning,’ Milan, 2007.

  As she began speaking I immediately felt stupid for having asked, but as she continued, and connected Curva Sud to southern Italy and its struggle since the creation of the Italian State to maintain its own values and traditions, I was overjoyed that I had asked. For how could I have hoped to understand anything I encountered in Rome if I had been content to go by the prejudices that I had lived — and loved — in America? Imagine that: I first came to appreciate the Confederate battle flag in Rome, both as a minor symbol of Curva Sud and as a broader symbol of Southern Italy’s defiance of Northern neoliberalism; and now back in Georgia I get to point reverently to a symbol that inspires so much hatred and devotion, but for reasons that would be foreign even to those who know me well.

  Meanwhile, Curva Sud Roma continued to fight against the multicultural and neoliberal morality regime that was being imposed upon the Italian populace. The strike that was in effect when we departed in January, 2008 lasted 3 more weeks. We returned to Rome in May of that year to witness AS Roma’s Coppa Italia triumph over Inter Milan. Although we got to visit the River Bar and to embrace some of our friends before the game, we watched the match while roving along the lower level of Tribuna Tevere: a long-standing haunt of the most violent Ultras during big rivalry games because it allows access to opposing Ultras. Because we had season tickets until the summer of 2009, we returned to Rome for several more games, unwilling and unable to give up on the life that we had begun creating there, to say nothing of the danger and dynamism that we had come to crave.