ciao, chi mi dà una mano a leggerlo &commentarlo insieme qui dentro?
l'articolo è pay ma l'ho trovato ricopiato su un forum
poi ce ne dovrebbe essere un altro che dà addosso a di canio.
lo trovo e lo metto dopo
http://www.readytogo.net/smb/showthread.php?p=14796692Paolo is not racist, he just didn’t grasp meaning of that gesture’
Gabriele Marcotti
Last updated April 03 2013 1:01AM
Many faces of controversy: Di Canio’s first press conference as the new head coach of struggling Sunderland proved to be increasingly fractious as questions about football soon gave way to an examination of his political inclinations
Four years ago last month, Barack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination at the time, gave a famous speech in Philadelphia.
He addressed the fact that the long-time pastor of his church, Jeremiah Wright, had made a number of controversial statements, accusing the United States Government of “killing innocent people” and inviting God to “damn America”.
Obama distanced himself from these statements, in unequivocal terms. But then he added: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in the world. But a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street and who, on more than one occasion, has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me.”
That speech — A More Perfect Union — came to mind yesterday as Paolo Di Canio faced a barrage of questions all in the same vein: Will you denounce fascism?
I’ve known Paolo for nearly 20 years. I co-wrote his autobiography, which was first published in 1999. Many of the inflammatory quotes circulating today about his fascination for Benito Mussolini are in that book, in black and white. So too is his condemnation of much of what Mussolini did. He calls his actions “vile” and “calculated”. He says Mussolini “went against his principles”.
Yet there is no blanket condemnation of fascism as an ideal. Just as there wasn’t yesterday. I think I may know why. And I think Obama could relate.
When I first started working with Paolo on his book, I was 25 and he was 30 and it was with some apprehension. I knew about his past, I had heard his political views on the football gossip mill and I knew about my own family’s past. My father’s side of the family were staunch anti-fascists. I grew up with stories of one great-grandfather who used to terrorise local fascist sympathisers and carried a cane sword: a walking stick with a hidden blade inside. My other great-grandfather, a day labourer, communist and partisan, was beaten and imprisoned by fascists. He lived to be 98 years old. I spent plenty of time with him as a kid and I remember his glass eye: a legacy of one of the beatings at the hands of fascists.
But there were other stories too. A great-great-uncle, who was some kind of bureaucrat in Milan’s city council, was a member of the Fascist Party in the 1920s. Three men came to his house in the middle of the night, took him into the woods, stripped him naked and hanged him. Another relative was in uniform on his way back from the front towards the end of the war. A group of partisans made him remove his uniform and coat in the middle of winter. He made it home, although, by the time he did, he was so badly frostbitten that he lost all his fingers and toes.
This was in my past, albeit largely mediated by stories passed through generations. In writing his book, I found what was in his. He grew up in Rome, in the kind of warehouse neighbourhood where families are stacked, rather than housed. It was what Italians recall as Gli anni di piombo — The Lead Years — an age when armed terrorists such as the Red Brigades on the far Left and their neo-fascist counterparts on the far Right wreaked havoc with murders, bombs and kidnappings.
One age group removed, students — both secondary school and university — were equally polarised: demonstrating, protesting and fighting, both with each other and with the police. A run-in with the wrong people at the wrong time naturally made you more sympathetic to the other extreme.
Mussolini may have been a dictator, but he was also one who enjoyed the support of a sizeable part of the population. And when he was overthrown in 1943, it is not as if all these people disappeared, left the country or changed their mind. The Fascist Party was banned after the war, but the same folks reformed as a political group with a different name.
They continued to run for office, unsuccessfully at first, but, by the 1990s, they became members of the ruling coalition. Their MPs sit in the European Parliament. The former president of the Italian senate was the leader of this party. Along the way, they renounced the excesses of Mussolini’s regime, beginning with the repression and the alliance with Adolf Hitler, which led to the infamous race laws of 1938.
Among these people, there were nostalgics for what Mussolini had brought. It wasn’t just the old trope about “the trains running on time”. It was pride: civic and national. It was the creation of trade unions and ambitious public-works projects that helped millions advance out of poverty. It was a strong-fisted fight against the Mafia and organised crime in the south of the country. And, to a young man, surrounded by bulletins of terrorism and black eyes and broken limbs on the streets, I could see how that was appealing.
That is his background. That was my reading of him when we wrote the book, which was actually one of the few times we discussed politics. That was probably his starting point.
But over the years, people change; they become more nuanced. Their experiences change them, for better or worse. In that very same book we wrote together, he speaks at great at length about immigration, about how immigrants are a resource, about how governments have a duty to integrate and assimilate migrants. He spoke with glowing admiration about his view of Britain, a place where people can take pride in being British while also being Muslim, Jewish or of foreign extraction.
Might his views have been different had he not left Italy for Britain in 1996? I don’t know. But these surely weren’t the views of a racist or a neo-Nazi.
In fact, over the years, three qualities struck me most about Paolo. Two of them, I sort of expected. He’s outspoken and his dial is usually set somewhere between 10 and 11. He’s one of the most intense people I’ve met. Being in his presence can be exhausting. And it’s not just a case of him talking your ear off. Speak to him privately and he listens with an eagerness and attention that few men — let alone managers, who are used to giving orders — offer their interlocutors. He does not do half-measures.
After the September 11 attacks he rang me up and asked me if I could help him get a giant American flag. He was going to raise it over his house in Chigwell to express his solidarity with the victims.
The other is that he’s a workaholic. Innumerable managers have complimented his work ethic. To get his coaching badges, he graduated top of his class at the Coverciano Football Academy. I suspected this wasn’t coincidental and not just because of the usual trope whereby professional footballers need to work hard and be committed. Paolo nearly had his leg amputated at the age of 17. He has suffered from anxiety in the past and required therapy. Putting on my pop psychologist hat, I concluded that work and structure are a means of daily therapy, a coping mechanism for what came before.
The characteristic I did not expect was curiosity. Most footballers’ curiosity does not extend far beyond cars, golf and sex. But Paolo is a voracious reader and, with hindsight, I should have known: the reason we got on to Mussolini in the book in the first place was his large collection of historical biographies.
I remember once going to his house with a book I was reading at the time: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, a quantum physicist who does research into string theory. It was the quantum physics version of the accessible scientific book for the common man (think Stephen Hawking, only with physics) and yet Paolo talked my ear off about it, bombarding me with questions.
Since then, it has been obvious. He has been involved in restaurants, wine, fine clothes boutiques and, more recently, Far Eastern philosophy. He does it with the zeal of those who do not have a formal higher education, but are determined to read up and learn for themselves.
How did I reconcile all this with perhaps his most talked about and infamous gesture, the raised-arm salute in the Rome derby in 2005? I’ve wondered about it, I’ve heard his explanation. And, while he may disagree, I chalk it up to the moment. It may look exactly like the Heil Hitler salute, but in the Lazio world, that’s not what it means.
It is the comrade-to-comrade greeting used in fascist times. Yes, undoubtedly a fair slice of Lazio ultras would place themselves on the far Right and would call themselves fascist. But it is also the way that many of the Lazio faithful greet and cheer on their players.
Paolo was not just a Lazio player, he was a Lazio fan. One who took a huge pay cut at the end of his career to return to his boyhood club; one who travelled the length of Italy as a teenager to watch them play; one who, had he not been blessed with the talent to play football, would have been sitting in among them.
I am not a mind-reader, but when he says his gesture did not have a political meaning, I believe him. Or, rather, I believe it did not to him. It did to much of the rest of the world, which is why he was wrong to do it. To an impressionable kid tempted by racism and the far Right, seeing his club captain make such a salute could have been the tipping point. Just as so much of what our sporting heroes do can influence our young.
Whatever the case, that is the past. He cannot escape it and, like Obama, he cannot renounce it in its entirety; just condemn the individual aspects. He has not said or done anything remotely political for the past eight years. He’s not a politician, he’s a sportsman and, in that sphere, those needing reassurances over whether he’s a Nazi or a racist need only speak to the hundreds of footballers who have played with him and against him over the years.
Would it be easier for him to simply condemn everything in his past? Of course it would. But Paolo doesn’t do easy. And neither does Obama
