Associazione Sportiva Roma. - Hated and Proud: Ultras Contra Modernity

ARKTOS
London 2018

Copyright 2018 by Arktos Media Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN

978-1-912079-23-0 (Softcover)

978-1-912079-24-7 (Hardback)

978-1-912079-25-4 (Ebook)

Editing

Martin Locker

Cover and Layout

Tor Westman

T his is a book that is still perhaps too close to my heart to be published, and it is certainly one that carries a unique burden. The Ultras, both those who are mentioned in this book and those who are not, do not take kindly to being represented or defined by those who do not inhabit their world. I did so once, and did everything I could to learn from them, and to respect their form of life. But even with that, the limitations of research and, in truth, my own Roman transformation made it impossible to include the vast multitude of unique and politically contrary viewpoints in Curva Sud Roma . All will admit that the Far Right was the dominant political force in the Curva , but it was never the only one. I could have just as easily focused on the radical Left, anarchists, socialists, or the various modernist-aesthetic groups that have carved out their own derelict space in the Curva . In other words, there is not one Curva Sud Roma but many. I merely chose the Curva that could be lived and studied on my own terms.

Furthermore, the Ultras absolutely despise anyone who seeks to profit from their actions, and while I do not expect a substantial profit from this book, I must assume that Arktos Media does. For my part, it fills me with dread that publishing this book would taint my time as a part of Curva Sud Roma . I only do so now because enough time has passed to make the information it contains rather useless to the State in its war of capture against free spaces like Curva Sud Roma , and because I feel that it can contribute on many other front lines to the Ultras war against the homogenization and standardization that the liberal and neo-liberal State imposes upon its deracinated subjects.

I would like to thank Arktos Media for giving me the chance to share this story with the few radical souls who are able to embrace its message. The journey to publication was long, painful, confounding, and disappointing, but ultimately triumphant; and I sincerely and respectfully thank Daniel Friberg, Martin Locker, Tor Westman, and last but not least John Morgan for helping to bring this to fruition. None of us can create the noble life we envision alone; every triumph and defeat is collective and I am happy to share mine with you.

To have earned a Ph.D. and then, in the eyes of most (who have never read Schopenhauer as Educator), to have thrown it away running around with a bunch of crazy extremists, is something about which I am at once regretful and prideful. I regret that the members of my Ph.D. committee didnt get the chance to welcome me into their fraternity after working so hard to help me become a scholar. Michael Blim, Jane Schneider, and Gerald Creed deserve all of the credit for my credentials and none of the blame for what I have done with them. That being said, I am proud that I as continue to negotiate the terrain that both conjoins and separates the American radical Left and extreme Right, I have encountered so many amazing people; none more so than Hugh Maguire, whos intelligence, comradery, and friendship justifies whatever price I end up paying for rejecting my inheritance.

To Lorenzo Contucci, Federico Esposito, my Ultra brothers and sisters who I continue to hold as deeply as possible in my heart, and to the other keepers of the faith, I only ask your forgiveness for mythologizing or perhaps immortalizing my Curva Sud . I do so just as I lived amongst you: not to represent, but to experience and understand. As such, the Curva will forever be yours, but this story is mine: it couldnt have been written by anyone else. I admit to changing names of both individuals and groups when merited, and to committing the common anthropological sin of making the implicit perhaps a little bit too explicit, and to being astonished every day by the potential richness of the Ultras critique of the contemporary world. In my defense, I will only ever say that; and that it was the Ultras themselves who taught me to love Nietzsche.

To the present generation of Ultras, I ask you to work together to protect the Curva from the influence of il calcio moderno ; to continue to oppose the foreign regime that seeks absolutely nothing but the most vulgar of financial profits from both AS Roma and a thoroughly emasculated Curva Sud Roma ; and above all, to protect and adore the city, people, and history of Rome.

This book is dedicated to my wife, without whom Rome would have been just a dream, to my son, in whose body flows the instincts and inspirations of the greatest heroes ever to fight for the Eternal City, and to Curva Sud Roma : nessun mai tamer pi di me .

Chapter One

T his is a book about war; the war that has been raging in the West since the first of us gave control, power, and sovereignty over life to someone else in order to live more comfortably and securely. Better yet, it is the war that has been raging since one of us learned about this inequitable exchange while watching his children suffer its consequences, and yet hadnt the courage to do anything about it. With brutal clarity and simplicity, Nietzsche called this war Roma contra Judea : the battle of a warring and violently noble form of life against the ideas cum forces that disarmed and recreated it as fodder for a marketplace of pious merchants and good citizens. This book is a study of a small group of men and women in Rome, Italy, that are engaged in re-establishing something noble about life. These men and women have stopped being pious, good, or anything else that their enemies demand of them. Sure, like all of us who speak about destroying what keeps us docile, they have an ambiguous relationship with their enemy: they despise their mother, as it were, but still snuggle up close to her and fall asleep every night.

And yet they fight: with words, counter-ideas and concepts, with fists, bats, and sheer will. This is a book about how they have turned life into a fight against what so very many of us begrudgingly or fearfully accept. It is a book about Ultras; the extreme. Ultras are fanatical soccer fans, at least, that is how the media knows them. But what makes them extreme is neither the soccer nor the fandom, and that is what this book seeks to explain. As such, one may be disappointed that it is less forthcoming about certain fan-based Ultra behaviors, and certainly that it is grounded in radical political theory. Likewise, the distance between the years of study and the books subsequent publication might seem a limitation, especially as so much has changed in the meantimemost notably the 2011 purchase of AS Roma by an American investment banker, and subsequent attempts to rid AS Roma fandom of the Ultras. But life is always in the meantime, in the middle, and if things have changed with Rome, the Ultras, soccer, political violence, and even the cuisine described herein, it is only thanks to the forces brought into the world by all that this book explains.

This book began its life as a thesis written in order to obtain a Ph.D. in Anthropology, but even in that form it was far from what the American Academy has come to demand of its best and brightest students. Instead of an objective study that could innocently claim to be compliant with contemporary moral standards and political subjectivities, it was a defiant defense of men and women who have been deemed indefensible by those very standards and subjectivities; and it was a document of my own becoming-Ultra. Going native is a relatively accepted process within Cultural Anthropology: firstly, because it takes a certain amount of empathy to live amongst a different people, dig into their dirt, and ultimately champion whatever it is that one might find therein; and secondly, because who in their right mind would spend thirty-something years being molded, organized, conditioned, nay created in academia, only to find something beautiful, exhilarating, majestically critical, and even festive in such horrible things as Fascism, Futurism, ethnocentrism, and violence?