Mob Rule
I enjoyed this article written by David Aaronovitch in The Times recently - because it reflects my own views these days that the way to deal with people on the extremes of politics - is not to shout them down or deny them a hearing.
So to hound someone like Paolo Di Canio out of football for his alleged support for fascism and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini would be a complete overreaction - a kind of mob rule - and in some ways akin to what happened to the author Salman Rushdie for publishing his book, The Satanic Verses.
To my mind the difference is that while Salman Rushdie would always have acquitted himself well against his detractors - given the opportunity - the new Sunderland manager, as we have seen, suddenly lost his appetite for explaining his reported admiration for Mussolini.
Little wonder, since the subject has no place in football and, of course, when put under the spotlight of public debate and scrutiny - fascism is a completely discredited political philosophy.
We can’t limit free speech. Even for Di Canio
By David Aaronovitch
Once I proclaimed ‘no platform for fascists’. Now I can see that toleration is a far more potent weapon
We’d had the speeches: the professors, the Conservative MP, the activist and author, and me. Now it was time for questions. The audience, mostly students, sat in the lecture theatre in the East London college and a few raised their hands. The subject was political extremism and four or five questions into the discussion a casually dressed man in his thirties was chosen, stood up and announced himself to be Gavin, from Croydon — and the National Front.
My first reaction was to check the exits. If a fight broke out, this man in his fifties with a huge, relatively recent abdominal scar might need to get out quickly. I waited for the inevitable rumble of anger followed by shouts from some in the mixed-race audience. But they didn’t come. Gavin of the NF, an organisation once described by a leading member as the beginning of “a well-oiled Nazi machine”, burbled on a bit about immigrants and sat down to complete silence. Then someone else asked a question.
No one but me seemed in the least surprised. But a lot of my early political life was spent discussing what is known as the “no platform” policy. This stance — “no platform for racists and fascists” to give it its full title — was adopted by many “progressive” organisations in the 1970s, and exists still. It states that the body concerned will not share or offer a platform to those who would use it to advocate racist or far-right anti-democratic views.
There was always a problem with it. Sensible, mainstream no-platformers like me were clear that it was just organised fascists and obvious racists who were to be shunned. Unfortunately others had more elastic definitions. After the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3379, capriciously determining that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”, several far-left outfits argued vociferously for the Israeli Ambassador and pro-Israel college Jewish societies to be banned from right-thinking campuses. For some reason, which I now forget, there was even an attempt to ban the Conservative frontbencher Sir Keith Joseph for being, in some convoluted sense, a racist or a fascist. Things could get awkward.
We would have all agreed, however, on Paolo Di Canio. The new Sunderland manager famously and televisually gave a fascist salute to supporters of the Roman team Lazio in 2005. He has “ DUX”, meaning Duce, or Mussolini, tattooed on one arm (the other has “West Ham” on it). While in the past he has given interviews saying he is not a racist — and yesterday said that he is no believer in fascist ideology — he remains something of an admirer of the late, badly misunderstood Benito.
It isn’t a clinching argument, as some believe, that because no one much complained about Di Canio becoming manager of Swindon Town some time back, they shouldn’t complain about the Sunderland job either. Sunderland are much bigger and a principle that might not have been worth applying in one situation may be more proportionate in another.
It’s also the case that, when he was appointed England manager, no one much cared that Fabio Capello had praised the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Spain, he told Italians, had “Latin warmth and creativity regulated by rigorous order. The order which comes from Franco.” Along with the repression and firing squads.
Just as no one worried about the German international Paul Breitner, now a director of the biggest club in Germany, Bayern Munich, who was an avowed supporter of Mao Zedong — whose policies caused many times more deaths than the Italian dictator’s. As no one worries now about the Italian forward Cristian Lucarelli, who glorifies the memory of that iconic executor of class traitors, Che Guevara, and gave communist salutes to partisans of his own team, Livorno.
Again you might argue that Di Canio deserves less toleration because of his behaviour on the pitch. When playing for Sheffield Wednesday in 1998 Di Canio actually pushed over the referee — for which he was suspended for even longer than his political hero, but less terminally.
Again it isn’t so simple. He also won a Fair Play award for sportsmanship in 2001 and once worked all night helping staff shovel snow from Swindon’s pitch so that a match would not be cancelled. Maybe these were characteristics that persuaded that famous footballing socialist Alex Ferguson to try to sign him for Manchester United.
Many Italians are funny about Musso. They include senior democratic politicians such as Silvio Berlusconi, who (idiotically) agree that the absurd tyrant has been traduced. As a Der Spiegel report on Musso-love in January concluded, however, “the glorification of ‘Il Duce’ is one thing above all else: a lot of talk”. It corresponds to no important political trend. Which is one reason why it appeals to that section of football fans who are always looking for a symbol, but don’t much care about politics.
The calm reaction of the students to the NF man crystallised for me why I have changed my mind on all this. We are a world of seven billion people many of whom are, at any one time, making speeches, posting videos, talking nonsense, tweeting, bleating and yabbering. A process of realising that you can’t qualify free speech, which started for me with the Rushdie case when I heard “liberals” argue that the author was to blame for exciting reaction to his novel, is reaching its inevitable conclusion. The young men and women in the lecture theatre understood something, almost generationally, that it has taken years for me to learn.
It is that a pretty stringent harm test must be applied before someone’s speech or expression alone sees them prosecuted or blacklisted. If you are going to argue that Di Canio should not have a senior job in the only industry he’s any good at, the damage threshold has to be reasonably high.
In his case it would only be crossed if he had acted again in such a way as to incite or provoke violence, hatred or racism among football fans as he did eight years ago in 2005. His mere past existence or current opinions cannot be sufficient cause for barring him.
As we went out that night on to the Mile End Road, not far from where the communists fought the fascists in 1936, I was struck by what the quiet toleration of his speech had done to the National Front man. It had rendered him completely harmless. He might just as well have stayed in Croydon.
