Land, Work and Brotherhood

Shaka Hislop has hit out at his former team-mate Paolo di Canio after the Italian was fined for showing a fascist salute while playing for Lazio. …BBC NewsBlack British football player Hislop said their friendship was over after Di Canio made the gesture in a game at Livorno and has not apologised. Hislop said: "Paolo never impressed me as that kind of person when he was here at West Ham. "When it is someone you thought was a friend it has a longer-lasting effect. I am very disappointed by it." Di Canio was suspended for one match and fined for aiming the salute at supporters, which he insists has "nothing to do with political ideologies." "I will always salute that way because it gives me a sense of belonging to my people," he said recently. But Hislop is disgusted by Di Canio's explanation for his straight-armed salute. He said: "He got on well with my wife and my kids and to see him making headlines for his actions disappoints me greatly because of what those gestures mean and the wider effect of it." Paolo was certainly someone I considered a friend who I liked a lot, so I am very disappointed. " Hislop need not have worried and could have maintained his friendship, Di Canio has claimed that he is "a fascist, not a racist. "The salute is aimed at my people" he claimed. "With the straight arm I don't want to incite violence and certainly not racial hatred." The distinction made be lost on some, but Di Canio speaks to a tradition of Italian fascism that was never essentially about racism, but rather Roman civilisation and European culture. The essence is of course Indo-European, but that is in the spiritual area, not the anatomical. Our culture is a dynamic thing and although we must be conscious of our glorious history, our culture is not some fossil to be put on exhibition. Race is spiritual and not anatomical, as Francis Parker Yockey told us in Imperium, it is not independent of the land. Land in its wider meaning, man's interaction with it, a process we call work. As a young man I inhabited the terraces of a local football team, its what working class youth did in 1969. While middle calls navel-gazers recovered from the so-called summer of love, we followed more virile pursuits. I occasionally look back now with not a little embarrassment at the antics we performed and I am not at all proud of many. But we had an honesty that for all their mock sincerity the Hippies lacked. We represented (in the main) honest toil, they self-indulgence. And I stood on the terraces with West Indian boys with the same accent as mine, bound as brothers by our common bond to labour and leisure at its end. We were the living embodiment of a living culture on European soil, not some daft faux romanticism. We did hold antipathy towards Indian and Pakistanis because they were not part of our cultural milieu, not only did they not at that time wish to integrate, many held us in contempt. That I now regret, however I do now recognise as Francis Parker Yockey said, the further away that newcomers come from the greater the disruption. The point is that it is not so much geographically as culturally.As long as European Nationalism focuses on some bourgeois idea of cozy little Europe, the project will go nowhere.The descendents of the S.S.Wind Rush passengers have been in this country for several generations now, few have any connection left to the West Indies, let alone Africa. If Europe were to be organised along the economic lines set out by Oswald Mosley, what I believe to be the natural order in economic and political affairs, then statisticians would certainly see the population of Europe following a normal distribution (in statistical terms) around a mean that would be the indigenous European. This follows as an automatic consequence, no magic, no fortress Europe, just the natural order. However at either end of the curve will be people who are not connected to indigenous forbears but are culturally European."Race is not independent of the soil."-Francis Parker Yockey