VIOLENCE & ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR IS FOR CRIMINALS, PEACE IS FOR THE COMMUNITY

I don’t know about you, but I am unhappy with the level of anti-social behaviour and violence within our community. I am angry with troublesome youths ruining everyday life – a small minority who make the members of OUR community suffer, most simply because they are bored ignorant bullies. I feel sorry for the police, most of whom are decent hard working men and women who want to serve their community to make it a better place. However the police can only do so much. The real power, believe it or not, is WITH US in the community who can make the difference. Real Community Justice aims to help you tackle the problems of unworthy members of OUR community by alerting you of their presence and uniting together via our common cause – to make the community a better place. We need to stop feeling helpless and start acting together. Many people do not have time, we work, we have children, we have commitments... or many understandably are frightened to take action. If we work together we have safety in numbers. Real Community Justice is a bi-weekly newspaper that will be delivered FREE straight to your door. The only cost is your co-operation, not just with the newspaper but with each other and the rest of the community. Real Community Justice will also send you free bi-weekly emails to save paper and costs if you opt to do so. I hear you asking, how does Real Community Justice work? Well basically: you provide us with valid information about the youthful rebels and we will print it in our paper/email. NAMES, PHOTOS, STORIES, DATES, you tell us we will help. The aim is NOT to hurt the offender physically, but to hopefully show them the light mentally. We are no ‘do-goody goodies’; we just see the need to act rationally to gain a positive result. Working together is necessary, your community needs you! Help by visiting www.realcommunityjustice.com - further information will be available inside.

Why Do We Take Football So Seriously?

By Rex Davids
I love football. It’s a great form of entertainment. The banter, the support, the undying loyalty, the sell outs, the glory hunters.... the list is endless. But what I don’t understand is, why do many people (yes men AND women) take it so seriously?


I am a keen Liverpool supporter; I live on the Wirral which is approximately 20 minutes away from Anfield. I get called a ‘Woolly Back’ or a ‘Plastic Scouser’ by born and bred Liverpudlians whenever I tell them what team I support. It is only a football team at the end of the day; yet people feel the need to keep it within their community, within a close nit group of people, as if it would be an honour to be a true fan – accepted. I laugh and wonder whether they realise that the Liverpool team that they are watching consists of Spaniards, Dutch, Israelis et cetera? When speaking to this type of supporter a catch 22 situation arises. I could say I support Tranmere Rovers Football club but they would hate this because it’s not Liverpool football club, it’s not their team, and we cannot bond on the subject of LFC. Also - like Evertonians, Tranmere supporters tend to be bitter due to LFC’s notorious successful history. I emphasis the word ‘their’ because this is a term used by many football supporters when talking about the team that they support. It is not actually ‘their’ team at all – far from it. Usually teams these days belong to money grabbers who are trying to cash in on the strong marketing prospects of English Football, especially the Premier League. The standard fan is just a source of money, it doesn’t matter if Liverpool Football Club wins a trophy, as long as the figures are correct at the end of the season and the books are kept green. It can be argued that football is the new golf with regards to the corporate members attending the game. Many people who don’t care about football go to the game to talk politics and form business relationships - which should happen on the golf course. Why do you think that immediately after the second half of a game at Wembley many of the seats you see are still empty? This is because the ‘corporates’, as the true supporter calls them, are still sipping away at their champagne boasting about the new typeset on their gold plated business card. In the 2007 European Cup final, between Liverpool and AC Milan, a large majority of the tickets for the stadium were sold as corporate tickets. The everyday layman fan could not get a ticket to such a glorious event. Corporates go to the games because they CAN! They have the money and prestige to be able to get tickets to any football game that they want – a sport which is taken so seriously by many men and women across the globe, having this privilege is a status symbol in itself.


Why do fans fret that the owners of the club are not going to be putting enough money into the club to compete for trophies? After all, it has nothing really to do with the fan because it’s not their club. If Liverpool loose 5-0 to Manchester United in a European Cup final it actually doesn’t hold any bearing on the average fan’s real life – gamblers excluded. (It actually made me shudder to write that). Yes your fantasy football team may go from being first in your mini league to bottom, and bragging rights are denied. Again though does this really matter? No.


Twenty Two men run around the pitch and try and put a ball in the back of the net using their feet, head and chest. Why is this so exciting? Why is there a feeling of ecstasy when Liverpool take the score to 3-3 after being 3-0 down to AC Milan in the 2005 European Cup Final? Why is there an even greater feeling when Steven Gerrard lifts the cup way above his head? There is one simple answer – escapism. Watching the game, being at the match chanting or having a laugh with your mates in the pub, you forget about the real world. You forget about your mortgage, your debts, your pregnant wife who you don’t really love, the STD that you picked up last Saturday night, the fact that you think the lad next to you smells like he hasn’t washed for a week, but you will hug him anyway when Torres blasts one into the back of the net. Escapism is one of the main reasons why football became so big in the first place. Long ago when people kicked an inflated pig bladder around, running between villages and fighting along the way, they were in fact escaping from their reality. It became a problem as people were getting seriously hurt or even dying when participating in this early type of football. The winning village would hold the bragging rights; they had the strongest, bravest and most courageous men. This usually meant more women, and more ‘rumpy pumpy’. The rich folk of society couldn’t have this; they didn’t want their workers getting injured. Hence rules were introduced and a safer style of play was invented. Crowds of men were encouraged to watch and participate in games by employers, it kept them away from trouble and participating in other more violent types of sport – bare knuckle boxing, dog fights et cetera.

Football allows us to express our human nature. The need to compete, the need to survive, the need to show who the best really is, and who dominates the territory (the league). It is hard for us to do this in the real world where the poor are kept poorer and the rich get richer. The rich still control us. Football is one of the best things known to man for these reasons and these reasons are why we take it so seriously.

YANKS OUT............... YNWA...............

Is Winny Churchill all he was cracked up to be?

By Rex Davids

Winston Churchill achieved many great things in his life. He had a huge bow with many strings, when he shot his golden arrow; it usually hit the target and turned to platinum. It is not a secret that Churchill was a successful war time prime minister, but he was also a writer, historian, artist, Nobel Prize winner and officer in the British Army. Churchill was also made an honorary citizen of the United States of America, an honour only given to one other person. Many people gasp in awe at the achievements gained by one man in a life time, Average Joe would settle for half of Churchill’s success. This positive picture painted of Churchill is shared by the majority of people from different cultures and backgrounds, it is also probably the reason that he was voted Britain’s Greatest Citizen of all time in a poll taken in 2005. But is Churchill all that he was ‘cracked’ up to be? What if I was to suggest that Churchill was a military failure, a disloyal politician, an abusive drunk and a warmonger?

During the First World War a young Winny Churchill proposed an attack on the ‘Sick man of Europe’. Churchill believed an attack on the already weak Ottoman Empire would prove fruitful to the war effort in the East and boost overall troop morale, as there was a stalemate occurring in the West. Russia put a lot of pressure on the British government to provide support on this particular front and Prime Minister Atlee asked Churchill to implement the ‘Dardanelles Campaign’. Churchill believed that the operation should take place completely by sea – after all Britain had the strongest navy in the world. The British navy could not possibly be defeated by such a weakened enemy? The Ottoman’s where a dying breed, definitely no match for a strong superior navy that protected the biggest Empire the world had even seen? These questions, or even perceived facts, were completely wrong. The Turkish army, under the command of Liman Von Sanders - a German, had mined the sea around the Mediterranean forts that the British navy were to attack. Churchill did not have a Plan B, and when the minesweepers failed he was forced to retreat. British casualties were few but Australian and New Zealand’s were high. To this day both nations celebrate Anzac day on the 25th April to commemorate the men that lost their lives. This tragedy would not have occurred if Churchill had planned properly, not underestimated the enemy and communicated better with allied officers.

After the failure of the Gallipoli Campaign, Churchill needed to get back into the political lime light; he did this in the inter war years by swopping back and forth between political parties, showing less loyalty than Otto Von Bismarck! Between 1937- 1939, Churchill condemned Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Churchill argued that Britain should attack Germany as soon as possible and defeat the Nazi’s before they could achieve their objectives of a unified powerful German controlled Europe. What army would Britain use to attack Germany? Britain, like most other European countries, was in severe debt and had a very small army, navy and air force, following the First World War. The German army was perceived to be a lot bigger than Britain’s; Germany also used a different method of attack against their enemies that made use of a small number of troops to maximum effect – Blitzkrieg warfare. Churchill knew these facts, but used political propaganda to anger the British public into thinking Chamberlain had pursued the wrong policy and hence war had broken out. In reality Chamberlain knew war was imminent, he was ‘buying time’ to rebuild the British army and prepare them for the war when it actually did break out. If Churchill had managed to go to war, as he had wanted, it would have been a disaster bigger than Gallipoli. Many of us would have grown up shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ while Nazi saluting a portrait of Adolf Hitler. Some of you would be in Eastern Europe, fighting the Communist Enemy and denouncing anyone who is ‘racially inferior.’ Some of you would literally be in hell – a concentration camp.

It is surprising Churchill lived to the age of ninety. He was an alcoholic who was increasingly in bad health towards the end of his life. Once a woman denounced Churchill for being drunk, he responded with “madam, you are ugly, at least in the morning I will be sober, and you will still be ugly.” Does this sound like Britain’s greatest citizen? I beg to differ.