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KamaAina

(78,249 posts)
Sun Apr 1, 2012, 11:57 PM Apr 2012

Chinaglia is dead. I had no idea about his past with Nazio.

er, I mean "Lazio" di Roma, Numero Uno with fascists worldwide.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2001/09/mussolinis_team.html

Although the S.S. stands for societá sportiva, Lazio merits the abbreviation's worst connotations. Of all the clubs in Europe, each with its own goon squad of skinhead supporters, Lazio fans are easily the most racist, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, and despicable of the bunch. The management of Lazio intended the Shalom Cup to be both an act of reparations and public relations. But even in the club's moment of contrition, Lazio's fans couldn't suppress their hate. Four days before the tournament, the team's anti-Semitic fan clubs (called ultras) announced they would boycott the pro-Semitic cup. When a relatively mediocre Ivory Coast club beat mighty Lazio to hoist the Shalom trophy, a pathetic crowd of 10,000 fans bothered to show up.

Lazio has always had unsavory connections and a spot on the brownshirts' end of the political spectrum. Mussolini adored the team, frequently appearing in the stands. Il Duce even built Lazio's current stadium, replacing the old Stadio del Partito Nazionale Fascista. In part, Mussolini was drawn to Silvio Piola, the team's unstoppable striker. But the fascists had a deeper attraction to the club. Founded in 1900 by Italian army officers, the club shrouded itself in a martial ethos. The team's logo, a strident-looking eagle, looks as if it could have been ripped off of one of Mussolini's caps. And with its north Rome fan base, Lazio attracted the conservative shopkeepers and bumpkins who constituted fascism's rank and file.

As the memory of Mussolini has grown distant, Lazio's affection for fascism has increased. Rightist parties like the old Alleanza Nazionale treated the team's stadium as their recruiting grounds. In the '80s, the ultras' politics acquired a racist, xenophobic bent as Italy attracted immigrants and Italian soccer attracted Brazilian and African players. New venomous slogans and banners began appearing in the Curva Nord, the ultra section of Lazio's stadium. Before one game last year, police seized 60 different racist and anti-Semitic banners but missed several large ones, including a 50-meter-long banner that taunted fans from a cross-town rival by declaring that they had a "Black Squad, Jewish Home End." At another match against Roma, the opponents were greeted with a sign that told them, "Auschwitz is your town, the ovens your houses." The ultras have been known to appropriate the Nazi font when spelling the "S.S." in S.S. Lazio. And when watching Lazio's matches on the Fox Sports World cable network, you can still catch glimpses of Mussolini's visage adoringly displayed by the crowd....

Remarkably, Lazio reflects its fans' sentiments. Unlike Roma or almost every other team in the Series A, Lazio's roster is devoid of black players. When it once imported one, Dutchman Aron Winter, he quickly left after the team's fans hounded him with chants of "nigger Jew." Rather suspiciously, nearly all of Lazio's current foreign imports hail from countries with fascist pasts—Chile, Argentina, and Serbia. The team's defender, Sinisa Mihajlovic, unabashedly trumpets his devotion to Slobodan Milosevic and his friendship with the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan, whose band of thugs raped and pillaged their way across Bosnia. When Arkan was killed, Mihajlovic placed a wistful memorial notice in a Belgrade daily.[/]

And the Cosmos' No. 9 was president of this?!

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