THE ANTIFA WHO CRIED “WOLF!”

by Colin Liddell

The lupine grace of footballer and now manager Paulo Di Canio is entirely appropriate to the present unlikely situation in the UK, where he was recently appointed manager of Sunderland AFC, a major soccer team in a large Northern town. The wolfish mien of the 44-year-old manager is appropriate because Di Canio is playing the part of the wolf in the age old story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” you know the one that finally turns up at the end of the story when the cries, screams, and – perhaps in some versions – death agonies of the silly little boy go unnoticed.

For years now Britain’s totalitarian-inspired anti-fascists have been running around crying “wolf!” or in their case “fascist!” at the drop of a hat, in the process wearing out everybody’s nerves and ears. It is only fitting, therefore, that when a real fascist turns up, and they go into their usual hysteric mode that no one pays attention. Once you've seem these knee-jerk idiots fall into epileptic, frothing-at-the-mouth spasms over trivialities, like, say, Geert Wilders visiting the UK, a credibility gaps starts to open up.

If anyone in a high profile position can seriously be called a fascist in this day and age, few have better qualifications than Di Canio. In 2005, he twice gave straight-arm Fascist salutes to the fans of Lazio, the club in Rome that he played for. When accused of racism, he proudly claimed, “I am a Fascist, not a racist.” In addition to this he has “Dux,” the Latin for Il Duce, the title by which Mussolini was widely known, tattooed on his right biceps. In his autobiography he also said that he was fascinated by Mussolini, whom he described as “a very principled individual.” On a lighter note, it is also reported that he likes the trains to run on time.

But despite all this being dutifully put out in the public domain by leftist journalists, it has been greeted with muted murmurs of “Hmm, interesting, wonder if he'll play a sweeper at the back” rather than blood-curdling cries of “No Pasarán!” that the relics of the outmoded totalitarian left would have wished for.

One person who has obeyed the zombie summons of the antifa was the cretinous carpetbagger David Miliband, big brother to the Labour Party leader, offspring of a man who, as a Trotskyist, believed in class genocide and who also despised the very country that allowed him to escape from the Nazis.

Miliband, who was serving as a director of Sunderland, and picking up a fat salary in the process, bravely gave up this sinecure in protest at Di Canio's appointment and also to please his new friends in New York where he is taking up a much fatter sinecure as the head of an NGO.

But surprisingly few others have heeded the antifa’s rusty siren call. After years of having it switched on full blast, human ears must have learnt to tune it out. Perhaps the occasional scruffy dog can still be made to growl and snarl, but not Sunderland’s Chief Executive Margart Byrne.

"Anyone who has met Paolo and spoken with him personally, as we did in depth before making this appointment, will know that he is an honest man, a man of principle and a driven, determined and passionate individual,” she said in a statement defending the appointment, before taking a crack at Miliband. “It is disappointing that some people are trying to turn the appointment of a head coach into a political circus."

Despite paying lip service to the idea that Fascism may in fact have been a bit nasty, Byrne and the other bosses at Sunderland clearly take the position that politics is politics and football is football, and believe quite rightly that a man who can do the job and clearly has nothing against meretricious people of any race – important because English football is now so multiracial – should be allowed to get on with it.

The very thing that the antifa made such a fuss about for so long when it wasn’t there has now turned up, but instead of Di Canio’s fascism acting as an ineradicable stigma, like the tattoos of concentration camp inmates, or a truncheon to constantly beat him with, as the antifa would wish, it has become instead a yawn in the face of their hysteria, a signal of their growing impotence, and a sneer at their tyrannical tendencies.

The boy who always cries wolf is still crying wolf, but those who happen to gaze at this scene merely see a graceful grey beast slinking by and a hysterical brat who seems to be screaming in silence.