Newz Forum: SOCCER: Paolo DiCanio's Nazi Salute..

Remember when some goof suggested that the sport of soccer ought to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize because it brought the peoples of the world together? Forget the hooliganism that soccer generates - and tolerates. Consider now the situation of Paolo DiCanio who left the pitch awhile back and gave the Mussolini Fascist Salute to the fans of his side - and got similar salutes in return.

DiCanio was not remorseful in any way because he said afterwards, 'I will always salute as I did yesterday because it gives me a sense of belonging to my people,' and his people spent the day waving swastikas. Well isn't that swell for him and them too...

Oh, don't feel so sorry for the opposing team and its fans. They were too busy waving red Communist flags and chanting Communist slogans to take more than a superficial offense until things spilled over into the parking lot where fights broke out.

This is not DiCanio's first 'saluting incident'; he was fined for similar behavior a few months before. A spokesthing for the Italian right wing National Alliance Party said that the salute was not a violent gesture and that everyone should be able to salute the fans as he likes. Not violent? Has he read anything about what Mussolini and Hitler did to various folks in the 1930s and 40s? And lest anyone think I am going to let the other team's fans off the hook, the Communists under Josef Stalin in the 1930s and 40s were even more repressive and barbarous in killing people than were the Fascists in Italy and Germany. I hope the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has checked all this out carefully.

Curmudgeon

TRD, I beg to differ with you.

Stalin was a butcher, a mass murderer and one of the worst monsters of the past 500 years, but he did NOT have more blood on his hands than Hitler. Twenty to thirty MILLION Russians, most of them civilians, died in the process of ultimately (after about 18 months) crushing and defeating the German Army in the Battle of Stalingrad and surrounding areas, which was to the European war what our battle with the Japanese at Midway was to the Pacific war--i.e., after it was over, it was no longer a question of who would win, but only how long it would take.

And as this unfathomable number of his men, women and children fought and died at the hands of the German Army--the same one which killed up to 15,000,000 Poles, and huge numbers of people in other European countries--Stalin said what was probably the only accurate thing of his sorry-@ss life: "They are not fighting for me, and they are not fighting for communism. They are fighting for Mother Russia, and because the enemy is the devil himself."

He was right.

Anyway, can you imagine 20 to 30 million killed by the Nazis in one country alone? Everyone focuses--understandably--on the carnage in the concentration camps, but the Nazi war machine killed many times more than the 6 million Jews who died in those camps. I believe something like 10 million died in Norway, where the citizens put up a fierce resistance. As I said, estimates have 15 million Poles dying. Casualties in France, as we all know, were a bit lower.

Anyway, I know I'm from the States and thus presumed ignorant, but I went to a fine university and have a degree in European History, with my field of emphasis being Modern German History. I learned all about Stalingrad, and about how the Nazis were crushed, broken and hopelessly defeated (barring development of a nuclear bomb) long before D-Day, and how our major contribution to the European war--and this is no small thing--was to stop Stalin from gobbling the whole damn continent up. Another major point: By accelerating that war's end, we helped prevent the Germans from developing a nuclear bomb, which would have been Armageddon for sure. (Can y'all imagine if Hitler'd had the doomsday button as those Russian tanks closed in on his bunker? It would not have been the trigger on his gun that he pulled....)

Anyway, even apart from what Hitler did in Austria, Czechoslovakia and other minor countries before the war officially broke out in 1939, I cannot imagine Stalin killed as many people as Hitler did from 1939-1945. When you add up the war-related body count from all those different countries, toss in civilian murders committed just for the hell of it, and then add all the concentration camp murders, you've got an enormous number.

Stalin, who like Hitler died far too easily (but did so within a couple of weeks of my birth), killed a great many people. But you will have to go a long way to persuade me that his body count matched Hitler's.

B.H.N.

Paolo Di Canio has refused to rule out the possibility of returning to England in the summer. Di Canio has fallen out with Lazio as he feels the club did little to defend him after he was accused of making fascist gestures in the Serie A fixtures against Livorno and Juventus.

Sportinglife

How i would love Pardew to bring him back to West Ham, he was a cult hero at the Hammers. And who can forget the goal he score in the cup match against Man United...