Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  But it didn’t go off, and it was unclear what had happened—a loss of nerve?—when a supporter appeared, running hard, straight down the middle of the High Road, chased by two policeman, and one caught his heel and the supporter fell and rolled and covered his head, and, just as we passed him, I saw his chin popped backwards by a policeman’s boot and then knocked forward as he was kicked by another policeman from behind.

  There was another incident further back, but I couldn’t see it—the lines of supporters on either side of the street seemed to stretch for a half a mile—and the roar went up again, and everyone turned, ready, but then nothing happened.

  Any moment now, Robert was repeating, any moment. He was watchful, waiting for that instant when the thousand United supporters straggling along the High Road would change and know to act in a different way, in unison, as a crowd—as a violent crowd. I could see that Robert was actually judging each moment, weighing it, and that the time was not right yet, and that the time was still not right, but that it would be right shortly.

  Any moment now, Robert said again.

  Something was going to happen, but it was evident that whatever happened would have to involve the police. Had Robert anticipated the police? There were too many—not so many that they were not outnumbered by the supporters—but enough that, having placed themselves down the middle of this road, having positioned their dogs and horses and vans between the two groups of supporters, the police would have to be attacked first. They were in the way—deliberately. It seemed to me that it was one thing to fight those who wanted to fight. It was a different thing to fight those who wanted to arrest you. This was not done. You don’t attack the police—unless, it follows, you are able to beat them up so effectively that it is then impossible to get arrested. But this, too, was not done: you don’t beat up the police. Scattered along this long street, I now realized, were around two thousand people working themselves into a state so heightened that it would allow them to attack the police. They were daring themselves, provoking themselves, asking, as Robert was asking, if this moment was the one that would set them all off.

  This road, this ordinary north London thoroughfare, the most direct route into the city, the A10, the very one that led straight back to my home in Cambridge, had taken on a powerful meaning. It separated the supporters of Tottenham from those of Manchester. It separated both from the police. But it also separated them from the experience they were all trying to have. And they knew it. To remain on the pavement was lawful. To step off it was to enter lawlessness. The divide was almost a physical thing. I looked back, taking in the length of this line, this border, and it was as if I could see the lads pressing up against it, testing it, stretching it, wanting to break through it but being unable to do so—just. Someone stepped aggressively into the street, but the others whom he was hoping would follow remained on the pavement, and he hesitated, and, having hesitated, lost his nerve, withdrew and disappeared. Someone from the other side did the same—venturing out but finding himself alone—and retreated. This street—such a simple thing—was the line that needed to be crossed for this crowd to become a violent one.

  THESE ARE THE things that are said about crowds.

  A crowd is mindless.

  A crowd is primitive; it is barbaric; it is childish.

  A crowd is fickle, capricious, unpredictable. A crowd is a dirty people without a name (Clarendon). A crowd is a beast without a name (Gabriel Tarde). A crowd is a wild animal (Alexander Hamilton, Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele). A crowd is like a flock of sheep (Plato), like a pack of wolves (Plato), like a horse—tame when in the harness, dangerous when set free. A crowd is like a fire burning out of control, destroying everything in its way, including finally itself (Thomas Carlyle). A crowd is in a fever, in delirium, in a state of hypnosis (Gustave LeBon). A crowd reveals our Darwinian selves, primal hordes suddenly liberated by the sway of the pack. A crowd reveals our Freudian selves, regressing to a state of elemental, primitive urgency. A crowd killed Socrates; a crowd killed Jesus. A crowd kills—in the Bastille, at the Commune, in front of the Winter Palace, in the streets of Vienna, down a dirt road in Mississippi or Soweto.

  And who do we find in a crowd? Trouble-makers, riff-raff, vagrants and criminals (Taine). The morbidly nervous, excitable and the half-deranged (LeBon). The scum that boils up to the surface of the cauldron of a city (Gibbon). Both honorary barbarians (Hitler) and the vulgar working class who want nothing more than bread and circuses (Hitler). We find people driven by the impulses of the spinal cord and not the brain (LeBon). We find people who have abandoned intelligence, discrimination, judgement, and, unable to think for themselves, are vulnerable to agitators, outside influences, infiltrators, communists, fascists, racists, nationalists, phalangists and spies. We find people with a thirst for obedience (LeBon), an appetite to serve (Freud). A crowd needs to be ruled. A crowd needs its patriarch—its despotic father, chief, tyrant, emperor, commander. It wants its Hider, its Mussolini. A crowd is like a patient to a doctor, the hypnotized to the hypnotist. A crowd is a rabble—to be manipulated, controlled, roused.

  A crowd is not us.

  Whose metaphors are these? They come from Freud, Burke, the historians of the French revolution, our nineteenth-century heritage, our newspapers. Who is telling us what a crowd is like? It is not the crowd—the crowd does not tell us its histories; it is the observers of the crowd, listening to each other as much ‘as to the shouting outside their windows: Edmund Burke, removed in London, weighing the gravity of a revolution that he sees only through other people’s eyes. Hippolyte Taine, preparing lectures in Oxford, where he reads in the English papers of the violence of the Commune and fears for his family and his property in Paris. Gustave LeBon, the ‘father of crowd theory’, eleventh-hour sociologist, effortless plagiarist, lifting passages from Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde and (inevitably) Hippolyte Taine (it is possible that the only crowd seen by the father of crowd theory was in Paris on a shopping day). Freud, two years after the great crowd massacres of the Great War, the streets outside his window already alive with the sounds of restless nationalism and anti-Semitism, advancing his own theories about the crowd and its leaders, based (inevitably) on the work of the ‘justly famous’ Gustave LeBon.

  The history of the behaviour of crowds is a history of fear: of being a victim, of losing property, of a terror (and of the Terror) so powerful that it needs a name—to be accounted for, distorted into intelligibility, made safe. The history of the behaviour of crowds is one of explanations. It has given us the politics of violence and its sociology. It has provided us with the models of revolution and the ego-ideal. It has shown us cause and effect, the details of oppression, the brutalities, the injustices, the prisons and the torture, the price of bread, the loss of land, the inequities of exploitative taxation, the mechanical contrivances and contraptions of a dehumanizing modernity. Crowd theory makes sense of the crowd and its violence, as if, as in a scientific experiment, the right conditions could and always will produce the same results. Crowd theory tells us why—relentlessly, breathlessly, noisily, as if by shouting the reasons loudly enough the terror can be explained away. But crowd theory rarely tells us what: what happens when it goes off; what the terror is like; what it feels like to participate in it, to be its creator. I have a recent photograph depicting a crowd incident in the I have a recent photograph depicting a crowd incident in the seaside city of Split in Yugoslavia. I will describe it.

  The crowd, all men, fills the frame. It consists of Croatian nationalists who have surrounded a tank that has been sent in among army troops to restore order. The photographer, uncredited, is positioned above the crowd—perhaps perched atop a vehicle travelling alongside or else crouched on the balcony of a nearby flat. Some of the protesters are pressed up against the tank, so closely that, panicking, they are having to pull themselves out of its way. They are the only ones moving. The others are still. Their stillness is sudden and compelling. In another context, they could
be described as onlookers or members of an audience: their faces have the same expressions—expectant, slack-mouthed, not just judgement but the act of judging suspended or deferred—that we are used to seeing in any sporting crowd, waiting for something to happen. Or not. They, too, are waiting for something to happen. Or not.

  Five men have just climbed on to the tank. There is a sixth man, out of view, about to leap on board—we see only his arms extended as he reaches out for support—and another, a seventh, still on the street, who is afraid of being left behind and is prepared to climb on from the front. The others are more circumspect and have avoided the gun turret, knowing that, to disarm the tank, they would have to do it from the rear, as though coming up behind a snake and grabbing it below the head. The men are neat and clean-shaven, except for one who has a moustache. He was the first to reach the top of the tank, although he is now being pulled back by his jacket—the seam joining the sleeves is starting to come undone—by a man who is eager to get to what he has in his hands. It is the head of the tank commander. The man with the moustache has reached down into the tank and pulled out the commander by his head: his hands cover the commander’s face—his thumbs are pressed deep into his eyes—and he is yanking him out by his chin. It is possible to complete the metaphor: having taken the snake from behind the head, the man, wanting to disarm it properly, has now reached into its mouth to pull out each one of its fangs.

  A brave act? Or a crowd act?

  The newspaper reports that one soldier died in Split that day. We can imagine that the fatality was the tank commander. As I write, there are accounts of terrible killings in Yugoslavia—dismemberments, a disembowelment. We are accustomed to the journalist’s scrutinies of the excesses of human conduct; they provide us with the material of our entertainments, the stuff of our newspapers, our television news, our films. We have no illusions about the potential depravities of our nature, except that rarely, despite our modern sophistication, do we admit that these depravities are genuinely our own: yours, mine. We know how the mob behaves, once in a frenzy. But, even today, the mob is not us. It is easy to dismiss an incident of crowd violence in Yugoslavia; it is an unstable state; it is not ours. It is even easier to dismiss an incident in South Africa or India, countries that, removed in both geography and culture, are manifestly not us: it makes sense—does it not?—that there, among the ‘underdeveloped’, the ‘underprivileged’ the ‘uncivilized’, the ‘primitive’ (our nineteenth-century metaphors re-emerge) there would be mob violence. But it is as easy to dismiss the violence outside the doors of our homes. Here, now, in England, in London, down a side-street, not far from the centre, there is a crowd assembling: but that crowd, we will insist, is not us. Here, now, in the provinces, a bank holiday weekend, just before closing time, there is another crowd assembling which the police cannot control: but that crowd, too, is not us.

  On 31 March 1990, a march on Downing Street to protest against the Poll Tax turned into a riot that injured 132 people, crippled twenty police horses, damaged forty shops and destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of property. Forty thousand people joined the march. How many were among the rioters? The rioters filled Trafalgar Square and controlled the centre of the capital for more than three hours. How many rioters were there? Three thousand? Five? Ten? England, my newspaper told me the next day, is a civilized country. How could this have happened? Was it not because ringleaders, of dubious politics, infiltrated and influenced the crowd? Was it not instigated by the riff-raff of our society, the marginal elements, the anarchists, the small-time revolutionaries, the anti-parliamentarian militants? The language of the prosecution, when the arrested were brought before a magistrate, could have been Burke’s—or Taine’s or LeBon’s. The crowd, it seems, is still not us.

  Two years before, on 19 March 1988, a silver Volkswagen Passat was driven into a funeral procession on its way from St Agnes’s Church to the Milltown Cemetery in Belfast—the dead man, thirty-year-old Kevin Brady, had been killed three days before by a deranged Unionist assassin. The driver and his companion, two army corporals not in uniform, were surrounded and trapped by the mourners, pulled out of their vehicle, beaten, stripped of their clothing and thrown over a wall, bundled into a taxi, shot and abandoned on a piece of waste land.

  A brave act? Or a crowd act?

  There were two thousand mourners. Some were members of the IRA; many, we can assume, were sympathizers. Most, however, were also responsible members of a community: taxi-drivers; shopkeepers; people with jobs, with families; owners of property. The killings themselves took place amid detached houses, family cars in driveways, a park—the suburbs. How were the members of this procession perceived? They were all terrorists, according to Tom King, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, capable of unknown ‘depths of evil’. They were a ‘depraved and perverted people’, according to the spokesman from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They were starved animals in a Roman arena (the Sunday Telegraph), animals in a frenzy of hatred (the Independent), a tribe capable of eating you alive (the Sunday Times). ‘There seem to be no depths,’ Margaret Thatcher said, ‘to which these people will not sink.’ They were thugs, terrorists, primitive bully-boys, IRA rabble, ‘baying for blood’. And, within a week, the search was on for the leaders (there are always leaders)—the IRA ‘godfathers’ who had turned this crowd into ‘a mob of seventeenth-century assassins prepared to impale their enemy on spikes.’

  Let us indulge in an exercise of imaginative projection. You are in a procession to mourn a friend, perhaps a relative, murdered by the same act of violence that has just killed three people and injured sixty others. Before you join the procession, you are body-searched for weapons. The march begins. Thirty minutes later, a car appears speeding dangerously, driving against the direction of the procession. There is no other traffic. Its lights are on; its horn blaring. As it approaches, its speed seems to increase and it actually drives up on to the pavement alongside you, heading straight for a group of children. They leap out of the way; the car stops, reverses and blocks the path of the hearse itself. Someone shouts: ‘It’s the peelers, the peelers.’ Someone else shouts, ‘We’ve got the Rod. They’re Brits, they’re Brits’—and the shout is taken up by the others around you, as the car, still in front of the hearse, is now boxed in—one in front, two behind—by the other vehicles in the procession. You are frightened. Everyone is frightened as two thousand people—naturally?—close round the car. People are banging on its side; someone is on the roof, when the driver emerges, climbing out of the window, trying to get away, flourishing a hand-gun—a hand-gun?

  Every crowd knows the laws it transgresses, and every member of that crowd would have known that they were about to deprive two men of their lives. Are you confident that you would have stopped short of killing them?

  The crowd is not us. It never is. Again two years before; this time, April and May 1986: Saturday after Saturday, I was outside News International’s printing plant in Wapping when hundreds of people were injured during crowd rioting. I thought I had witnessed a process by which previously rational adults—policemen, print-workers with mortgages and pension funds and families—suddenly behaved in a highly irrational way. But I was wrong. The violence, I always read the next day, had been the work of outsiders, anarchists and agitators. One year before, May 1985: (the chronology is so arbitrary, but so patterned): the deaths at Heysel stadium; they were not the doings of anyone from Liverpool. Reliable authorities—a mayor, a former referee, a director of the football club—inform us that the National Front was responsible: and not the members from Liverpool but from London. One year before, this time 1984. The violence surrounding the miners’ strike: infiltrators, Militant Tendency, the lunatic socialist fringe. And even football violence itself: it is not the ordinary supporter, but a minority of trouble-makers, bad apples, villains and criminals—descriptions I kept repeating when on the last day of the season, four hours after running up the High Road to Tottenham with the lads from Manch
ester, I watched the trouble at King’s Cross, trouble involving supporters from many clubs—London ones returning to the city, provincial ones on their way home. There were crowd fights—crude charges, medieval in their primitiveness—in every direction I looked. The traffic was stopped for an hour, and still the fighting went on. Down the side-streets, there was further violence. There was a fight on York Way; another one up the Pentonville Road; yet another broke out on the steps of the Underground station. I heard sirens in the distance and realized that there was more trouble at the nearby Euston Station. I flagged down a taxi and drove back and forth along the Euston Road. There were now police, fire engines, ambulances, helicopters—and still the fighting continued. It was difficult to estimate the number of people involved, because the violence was spread out over such a large area, but it ran into the thousands.

  But these thousands were not us.

  It is worth re-examining the photograph from Yugoslavia.

  I am intrigued by what I continue to find. I note that the men are well-dressed—two are wearing fashionable leather jackets; one, a suit and tie—and that it is likely that they have jobs, perhaps well-paid jobs in an office or a shop. I note that they are mature adults—with handsome, attractive faces; one has a stylish haircut. I note the high calculation of their act—coming up behind the hatch and pulling out an armed man. It is bold, but thought out, the risks weighed. Studying this scene on the tank, in medias res, I can infer the order of events that led to it: that the crowd, having surrounded the tank, found itself unable to commit the next act—an unequivocally criminal one, antisocial, lawless—and then one man, the man with the moustache, scaled the tank. He was not a leader, or at least not a leader in the sense that we believe crowds to be governed by leaders. He was not there to cajole, persuade, exhort, enjoin, hypnotize or rouse, and it is unlikely that the crowd would have responded to him if he had tried. Although he will be seen by the authorities as responsible—he is there, after all, in view—he has no influence over the crowd. He is merely the first to cross an important boundary of behaviour, a tacit boundary that, recognized by everyone there, separates one kind of conduct from another. He is prepared to commit this ‘threshold’ act—an act which, created by the crowd, would have been impossible without the crowd, even though the crowd itself is not prepared to follow: yet.