Fascism and Football: Death and Hatred in the Soccer Stadium

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast

31 December 18

One man is dead. One team sanctioned for abhorrent racist slurs. How Italy’s love for soccer turned to hate, and its stadiums became fascist circuses.

he trouble started hours before the soccer teams for Napoli and Inter Milan even ran out onto the pitch at Milan's San Siro stadium. The match, held the day after Christmas, was a crucial game in Italy’s Serie A on the way to the Coppa Campioni. Hundreds of Napoli fans chartered buses and carpooled in minivans for the seven-hour drive from Naples in southern Italy to Milan in the north of the country.

When a group of hard-core Napoli fans arrived at a designated parking area about a mile from the stadium, a group of “ultra” Inter fans were waiting for them with hammers, masonry mallets and pruning sickles.

The fight that ensued was brutal, to say the least. Four Napoli fans suffered deep stab wounds and an Inter fan, who had been banned from entering the stadium because of disruptions at previous games, died in the hospital after an SUV allegedly driven by a Napoli fan ran over him before speeding off.

Then things got really bad, and nobody should have been surprised. The way “the beautiful game” has turned ugly reflects darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic.

Tobias Jones, bestselling author of Dark Heart of Italy, has spent the past year traveling with and studying the extreme fandom for an upcoming book called Ultras. He says there are groups across the country with giant posters of Mussolini in their headquarters.

“They were radical fans who were, originally, apolitical and dedicated only to the colors of the team. In the mid 1990s however, the ultras became increasingly fascist in inspiration, introducing anti-Semitism, swastikas and overt racism into Italian grounds,” Jones told The Daily Beast. “The overt and increasing racism of the ultras is merely a reflection of the society from which they come, and which has repeatedly voted for neo-fascist political parties.”

Inside the stadium at the Napoli-Inter Milan match, the tension was high as word of the scuffle outside spread. Napoli's star defender Kalidou Koulibaly, a 27-year-old Frenchman of Senegalese descent who has played for Napoli since 2014, was just warming up when thousands of Inter fans started making monkey sounds from the stands.

Koulibaly has grown accustomed to such racial abuse, especially when playing teams from Italy's northern regions where soccer racism has become de rigueur in recent years. He and other black soccer players are often taunted with insults and pelted with bananas thrown by ultras in the crowds, apparently meant to imply they belong in a jungle. It is just as common for Italian players, giving in to the ultra fans' demands, to refuse to shake the hands of black players before and after the matches.

But this match was different, somehow worse than usual. The chanting was louder and spiked with abhorrent racial slurs that reflect the ultras’ far-right fascist views. This time the insults were more personal and went far beyond telling Koulibaly to “go back to Africa” or “go back to the jungle.”

Three times, an announcer warned the ultras to stop taunting the player over the loudspeaker, but it seemed only to energize them. Non-ultra fans tried to shush them but they were far outnumbered. Carlo Ancelotti, the Napoli coach, asked that the game be suspended while the ultras simmered down. His requests were denied and he later said that the next time—and there certainly will be a next time—he will take his team and walk off the pitch. Then at the 81st minute, Koulibaly understandably lost his cool and sarcastically applauded and insulted a referee over a foul. The ref responded with a red card, banning Koulibaly for two matches.

After the game ended with a 1-0 victory for Inter, Italy's soccer federation sanctioned the team, ruling that the next two games will be played in an empty stadium and a third game would be played without Inter fans allowed to attend. But many believe that more should be done and that teams bear some responsibility for the behavior of some of their fans, no matter how extreme or how important they are to their fan base.  

Ultras are not exactly the same as soccer hooligans, who are basically just looking for a brawl. The ultras emerged in Italian soccer in the late 1960s and as they have evolved from ultra-fans to ultra-right-wing thugs they’ve tended to focus their hate towards those on the field instead of those supporting rival teams. The scuffle with Napoli fans outside the stadium was a proxy of sorts, carried out almost entirely by those Inter ultras who had been banned from attending the game for previous offenses.

Italy's right-wing interior minister and vice premier, Matteo Salvini, who has been photographed with several known ultras, noticeably did not tweet support for Koulibaly after the post-Christmas game. Instead, he tweeted support for the ultras victim who was killed. “In 2018 you cannot die at a football match. At the beginning of the year I will convene the leaders of supporters and Serie A and B so that the stadiums and the surrounding area will once again become a place of fun and not of violence.”

Jones says that the ultras are tolerated because they have become such a powerful group of supporters for many teams. Their potential for violence is also so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order. “The ultras receive free tickets, jobs within the grounds and political support because the force of their numbers is so great, and the threat of public disorder ever-present,” he says. “By now, all the major curves or terraces of Italian stadiums are dominated by neo-fascist groups which have become criminal gangs, repeatedly involved in drug-dealing and violence.”

Ultras support almost every Italian soccer team in some form or other. Last year, ultras supporting Rome's Lazio team were scorned after producing stickers and T-shirts with their rival Roma team members’ faces superimposed on a picture of Anne Frank. Lazio was fined $60,000 and the team played excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank and wore T-shirts with the words “no anti-Semitism” and a photo of the young Holocaust victim at subsequent games.

Koulibaly surely knows that this won't be the last time he faces insults, because the ultras are not likely to be banned from attending matches he plays in any time soon. In October, Turin's Juventus team was fined $12,000 and part of its own stadium was closed to fans for similar insults against him. “I’m disappointed by the defeat, but above all at leaving my brothers,” Koulibaly tweeted in Italian after the game, referring to his two-game ban. “But I am proud of the color of my skin. Proud to be French, Senegalese, Neapolitan: a man.”

Still, the game goes on. Napoli coach Ancelotti says he believes that given the mood in the stadium, Koulibaly should not be banned from two games, but the team will not formally contest the call.

“There was a strange atmosphere. Koulibaly was certainly irritable," Ancelotti said after the offending match. “Usually, he is very calm and professional, but he was subjected to monkey noises throughout the game. We asked three times for some sort of action to be taken, but the match continued. Maybe we have to take matters into our own hands next time and stop play ourselves. They’ll probably make us lose the game if we walk off, but we are prepared to do it. It’s not good for Italian football, seeing this.”

The Trump Administration’s War on Wildlife Should Be a Scandal

By Nick Tabor, New York Magazine

31 December 18

 

he Trump administration’s policies are leading to wholesale destruction of certain birds and other wildlife. This fact has escaped most public notice amid the broader damage the Cabinet is causing to the environment. Among other measures, regulatory agencies have been working to lift protections on endangered animals, open up vast animal habitats for drilling, encourage more trophy hunting, and repress treatment standards for farm animals.

Granted, Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan’s, with their contempt for federal regulation, have often been unfriendly to the animal kingdom. George W. Bush’s administration, for instance, only added 62 kinds of animals to the endangered species list over the course of 8 years, compared to 700 animals each under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But several veteran policy advocates we reached for interviews this week said Trump’s team has been unusually aggressive about regulatory rollback.

“I think that what’s different this time is an across-the-board, no-stone-left-unturned, no-holds-barred approach to rolling back environmental safeguards — including for wildlife,” said Andrew Wetzler of the Natural Resources Defense Council. George W. Bush’s advisers, he added, picked their targets more selectively. “It was more like a rifle-shot approach. This is more of a shotgun approach.”

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Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the Interior, has made his office a shrine to the pointless killing of animals, decking it out with a taxidermied grizzly bear, a bobcat, and the heads of bison and elk. One of his first moves in office was to sanction the use of lead bullets in national parks — a triumph of “ignorance and stupidity,” in the opinion of Noah Greenwald, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Using lead ammunition for hunting — if you bring that food home, you’re poisoning your own family,” Greenwald said. “It’s astounding to me that that’s even an issue.” The Humane Society estimates that lead bullets also cause the deaths of 10 to 20 million non-targeted animals each year.

However, Zinke’s deputy, David Bernhardt — who’s likely to succeed the secretary when he steps down at the end of the — appears to be the architect of the department’s most sinister work. Bernhardt was the Interior’s top attorney during the last three years of George W. Bush’s administration, and by all accounts, he knows better than anyone there how to effectively navigate the bureaucracy. He spent the Obama years working for a lobbying firm that represents oil and gas interests, leading Democrats to call him a “walking conflict of interest” at his confirmation hearing last year.

Under Bernhardt’s leadership, the department has enacted the biggest changes to the Endangered Species Act since it was passed in 1973. It has moved to drop most protections for “threatened” animal species, i.e. species that are dwindling in number but not quite at the point of facing imminent extinction. It has said economic costs should be taken into account anytime a species is being considered for endangered status; and like the Bush administration, it has been ignoring petitions to add new animals to the endangered list — such as the American wolverine, which Greenwald said has fallen to critically low population levels. It has also eliminated a number of small conservation programs, such as a breeding project for whooping cranes, of which there are only 500 left in the wild in North America.

Oil companies aren’t the only groups that don’t like the Endangered Species Act — it’s also a nuisance to safari hunters. Though Trump once called trophy-hunting a “horror show,” it didn’t sound sound like his heart was in it; his own sons, after all, are avid safarists and have posted photos of themselves with dead leopards, bulls, rams, and alligators on social media. Trump didn’t stop Zinke from reversing a ban on importing elephant and lion carcasses from Africa. The Interior Department also tried to kickstart the first grizzly-bear hunt at Yellowstone in more than 40 years, only to have it halted by a judge. All the while, Zinke’s “wildlife conservation council” — stacked not with wildlife conservationists, naturally, but with gun and trophy-hunting lobbyists — is making the improbable case that safaris are somehow good for animals.

Less horrific on its face, but more destructive overall, is the administration’s opening of animal habitats for drilling, mining, logging, and other industry uses. For instance, it has announced plans to strip protections for the sage grouse, an awkward bird with an overgrown breast and a peacock-like tail, which is native to the American West. There are only 200,000 to 500,000 of the creatures left, said Sarah Greenberger, the Audubon Society’s policy director. Currently some 9 million acres of Western land, rich with oil deposits, have been kept off limits to industry, for the sake of protecting the birds.

The Interior Department has also reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — so that 2 million more acres can now be leased to oil and gas companies, to the peril of countless animals, including a number that are endangered. And it’s working to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, likely the site of the biggest untapped oil reserve in North America, but also home to 800 or 900 polar bears, not to mention porcupine caribou and other species that native peoples depend on for food.

To Greenberger and other bird-rights advocates, the most galling development is the dropping of penalties for recklessly endangering birds out in the wild. Greenberger said the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, on the books since 1918, is responsible for all kinds of protective measures at sites around the country. It’s a reason companies often put blinking lights on their towers, or place nets over oil pits: so that birds won’t fly into them and die, triggering corporate fines. But in the spring, Interior announced companies won’t be held responsible anymore, so long as killing birds isn’t the culprit’s primary goal.

To clarify, the department sent around a memo with some rather grotesque examples. Say, for instance, someone wants to burn down a barn that happens to be full of owls. So long as the deaths of the owls are merely collateral damage and not the purpose of setting the farm on fire, they won’t be subject to fines. “All that is relevant,” the memo reads, “is that the landowner undertook an action that did not have the killing of barn owls as its purpose” — a startling conclusion from the standpoint of legal theory alone.

Greenberger called this rule change “totally unnecessary,” even for economic growth. “It’s not the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that’s driving the ups and downs of the oil and gas market,” she said. But she noted that two oil companies, Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, have borne the vast majority of the fines — and were no doubt eager to get the rule reversed.

Beyond these broad environmental measures, the disregard toward animals also affects Trump’s USDA. The Obama administration had created a rule, set to take effect in 2017, that would have raised the requirements for a farm to be certified as organic. It said birds would have to be kept in cages large enough for them to move freely and stretch their wings, and cows would have to get year-round access to the outdoors. Of course, the rule would have hurt large-scale organic egg farms, some of which house three hens per square foot. The Trump administration halted it in the spring.

Often during this administration, liberals have comforted themselves with the thought that an army of bureaucrats — career workers, with no party attachments — might be able to quietly blunt the worst excesses of Trump and his advisers. Greenwald, the advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, said this is decidedly not the case when it comes to animal rights and conservation. Across his 20 years working on policy, he’s noticed that Republicans tend to be more strategic than Democrats on environmental matters. They tend to pick their own administrators, down to the state level, to make sure their priorities are being carried out everywhere. “With Clinton and Obama, it’s been like, ‘Well, leave them alone. We’re not going to interfere with their jobs or their science, but we’re not going to go in and bring new leadership either,’” he said. “It’s been hard to watch.”

Polls bear this out; when questioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, workers at the Fish and Wildlife Service tend to report at a higher rate than most that politics get in the way of their work.

Trump’s stealth war on wildlife has gone under the radar. It’s hard to get worked up about the gratuitous death of, say, 200,000 sage grouse. But Greenberger, of the Audubon Society, argues that everyone has a stake in what happens to the sage grouse. “They’re are an indicator for a much bigger landscape — where there are pronghorn and mule deer and other iconic species,” she said. “If we allow these birds to go extinct, what that signals is something much bigger that will impact all of us.”