WHITE POWER FORUM BLOG Skinhead Nazi Discussions

The irony of the campaign to boycott the Euro 2012 football championships in Ukraine is so huge it is difficult to compute. Here is a lobby which presents itself as anti-racist, keen only to protect English footballers and fans from being racially abused in Ukraine, yet which simultaneously depicts that Eastern European nation as a weird hotbed of backward attitudes. Here’s a movement which publicly frowns upon expressions of racism, yet which treats Ukraine in a manner similar to when Victorian colonialists rolled up in an African backwater and stared in bewilderment at its strange-tongued natives. The boycott campaign confirms that modern anti-racism is, in the irony to end all ironies, more about expressing one’s superiority over uneducated peoples than it is about securing proper equality.

Under the banner of “anti-racism”, some startlingly sweeping statements are being made about Ukraine by those who think football fans should steer clear of the Euro 2012 taking place there next month. Apparently, racism is an “endemic social problem” in Ukraine, a country “notorious for its extremist yobs”, says the Sun. If you believe the Sun, decent Brits could soon find themselves refighting the Second World War in stadiums in Ukraine – apparently “neo-Nazi paramilitaries” are “drill[ing] thugs in unarmed combat, knife-fighting and use of rifles and pistols” in order to “wreak havoc” during Euro 2012. The Sun’s report was accompanied by a photo of four rather sad-looking Ukrainian men in a forest, wearing pseudo-militaristic uniforms. Four blokes do not a Fourth Reich make.

When the family of black England player Theo Walcott said they wouldn’t be attending Euro 2012, because they feared racist attack, the media went into anti-Ukraine overdrive. Like every other country in the world, Ukraine no doubt has some nasty racists – but British hacks have continually depicted the entire nation as a cesspit of xenophobic attitudes. “Nazi mob lies in wait for England fans”, says another newspaper hysterically, telling us, once again, that racism is “endemic” in Ukraine. The Foreign Office has issued the kind of statement it normally only puts out for non-European countries, telling travellers of “Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent” that they should take “extra care”. Former Arsenal player Sol Campbell took this fear of strange Ukraine to its logical conclusion when he warned English fans not to go to Euro 2012 because “you could end up coming back in a coffin”. He says Ukraine should never have been awarded Euro 2012 in the first place, because if you’re a racist country then “you do not deserve these prestigious tournaments”.

In short, tournaments should only be held in civilised countries, here in England perhaps, rather than in those former Soviet entities where people are dumb and prejudiced and one Nazi salute away from recreating fascism. The media tells us that some Ukrainian football fans look upon black players as “savages”, and I’m sure that’s true. But in online discussion boards across Blighty, Ukrainians are frequently referred to by us as “savages”, who live in a “very backward country”. What we’re really witnessing in the hysteria about Ukrainian attitudes is the expression of a prejudice against strange Easterners disguised as an enlightened anti-racist sentiment. If it is stupid for small numbers of Ukrainian football followers to sneer at blacks and Asians, it is also stupid for the British media to sneer at the whole of Ukraine. Indeed, trying to demonstrate one’s anti-racist credentials through being fairly xenophobic about allegedly racist Easterners – that is the dumbest stance of all.