Among the Thugs: a very short review

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1977, a young American writer named Bill Buford found himself in graduate school at King's College, Cambridge, studying English.

Within barely 18 months, Buford and a fellow student had successfully re-launched the university's 100-year-old student literary magazine, Granta. Only a few years later it was already thriving, and Buford's writing and editing career was taking off. He would later become an editor at the New Yorker and find enormous success.

In 1977, however, Buford was still young, in his late 20's, and for whatever reason he became interested in the world beyond the library. As he tells the story, he had a startling and confusing encounter while taking the train home to Cambridge from Wales:

The train was a football special, and it had been taken over by supporters. [...]

I changed trains four times; three were taken over by supportes. One was torn apart: the seats had been ripped out, and the bar, which had been closed beforehand, was broken up, its metal shutter door split into pieces and drink handed out to anyone who walked past. I did not know what was more surprising, the destructiveness, which was gratuitious and relentless, or that, with so many police, no one seemed able to stop it: it just went on.

Buford realizes that he has much to learn, but more relevantly and surprisingly, he realizes that he has much that he actually wants to learn.

I thought I'd go on my own. I didn't know that it wasn't done, that lads went with lads or that lads went with dads, but there was so much I didn't know -- which was the point. I wanted to find out what I didn't know; I wanted to meet one of "them" and didn't know any other way to go about it.

He tries, and tries again. He attends match after match, choosing teams and locations almost at random. He goes up to fan after fan, supporter after supporter, and tries to get them to talk about what is happening. Time after time they refuse him and shun him. Yet he is stubborn, and doesn't give up.

while I couldn't say that I had developed a rapport with any one of "them" yet, I did find that I was developing a taste for the game. I had figured out how to stand on the terraces and watch the play on the pitch -- an achievement of sorts. In fact I was also starting to enjoy the conditions of the terraces themselves. This, I admit, surprised me. This, it would seem, was neither natural nor logical. It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.

More than a little, as we are soon to find out: much, much more than a little self-destroying.

The paperback edition of Among the Thugs has a black-and-white picture of young Bill Buford on the cover, presumably from his days with the lads. His head is shaved and his heavy-lidded eyes stare you down; a lit cigarette rests in the corner of his mouth.

It's an amazing picture; it's hard to look away from it.

It's certainly not the picture you'd expect to see of a graduate student at Cambridge University.

After Buford sets the stage, the rest of Among the Thugs has a definite structure, as Buford jumps around between three different sorts of segments:

1. He gives some historical background, covering well-known events such as: Burnden Park, 1946; Ibrox Park, 1971; Heysel Stadium, 1985; Hillsborough Stadium 1989; and others, some of them 100+ years ago.
   
   In these segments, in addition to the historical background, he appears to be trying to connect the dots, sometimes more successfully than others.
   
   
2. He tells stories of events that he, personally, witnessed, including: Juventus v Manchester United, 1984, in Turin; several Manchester United matches in London in the mid 1980's, at Tottenham, at Chelsea, at West Ham; and finally a detailed report of the 1990 England v Holland World Cup match in Cagliari, Sardinia.
   
   Buford notes that he went to dozens of football matches while researching and writing the book, but he chooses to tell just a handful of stories.
   
   However, he tells them extremely well. By "well", I mean that he relates what happened vividly and chooses events that explain the things that he is trying to explain. He goes into extensive detail; there is a thorough narrative. But more importantly, he is honest. By "honest," I mean that Buford includes his own thoughts and his personal feelings, and also I mean that he doesn't shy away from admitting his own culpability in what happened.
   
   
3. Interspersed amidst these various sections, Buford also includes some more abstract observations about mobs, about crowd mentality, about identity politics, about desensitization of violence. In these segments he includes his own thoughts as well as surveying those writers who have tried to discuss these topics in the past.

The vivid descriptions of Buford's own first hand experiences "among the thugs" are far and away the most powerful parts of the book. I don't want to reproduce them here, however; if you want to know more you should go read the book yourself.

In the end, these parts of the book are the "what", not the "why".

The observations that Buford makes as a result of these experiences, while they cannot fully explain the why, are certainly the most important parts of Among the Thugs, and are the reason that it's still worth reading, forty years later. English football hooligans have certain essential elements that are somehow universal in humans. Lynch mobs occur everywhere; xenophobia seems almost omnipresent in human behavior.

Buford is interested in what people get out of it. For one thing, he finds, there is a sense of belonging, of joining a club, of finding a community:

"For most lads," Mark was saying, "this is all they've got." He nodded, as we were walking out of the door, towards a cluster of supporters whose common feature was, I must admit, a look of incredible and possibly even unique stupidity.

"During the week," Mark continued, "they're nobody, aren't they? But then, when they come to the match, that all changes. They feel like Mr. Big."

[...]

"It was us against them, and we had no idea what was going to happen. There were so many different feelings. Fear, anger, excitement. I've never felt anything like it. We all felt it and everyone of us now knows that we have been through something important -- something solid. After an experience like that, we're not going to split up. We'll never split up. We'll be mates for life.

"I will never forget these blokes. I will never forget Sammy. For as long as I live, I will be grateful that I could say I knew him."

[...]

Mark was still explaining. "You see, what it does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater -- for us. The violence is for the lads."

At one point, Buford meets up with some of the leaders of the National Front, trying to understand their connection with the football hooligans:

I am sure that Ian Anderson was right when he said that the football stadium was his ideal recruiting ground, but he would also have known that it provided a special kind of member, one already experienced, if not trained, in how to become part of a crowd, sometimes a violent one, even if it was not politically directed. And he would also have known that the crowd is a revolutionary party's most powerful weapon. On paper, it would have seemed so straightforward, and so many of the National Front's activities -- its discos, its marches, its propaganda -- were designed to create the crowd among its members and then make it political. But it isn't straightforward, and in the end the young, well-dressed executives of the National Front were not very good at their task -- they were there to lead, but few were following. But, although incompetent, they were not ignorant. The understood something about the workings of the crowd; they respected it. They knew that its potential -- its rare, raw, uncontrollable power -- was in all of us, even if it was so persistently elusive.

One of the things that Buford is most fascinated by is the topic of how a group of individuals stop acting as individuals, and become instead a mob. And, having done so, how they somehow seem to stop thinking, and just start doing, and then soon they are doing the unthinkable.

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one -- the present in its absoluteness.

Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above muyself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion and overwhelming detail. I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state of adrenaline euphoria. And for the first time I am able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug.

Buford's conclusion is, finally, that we have met the enemy and he is us.

It is not the case that the violence is either a deviation or a continuation, but that it is both deviation and continuation. It is not: either ... or ... . But: both ... and ... and ... and ... .

I believe in the modern behavioral models of our conduct, and much of this book has set out to prove their validity: that the crowd is in all of us. It isn't an instinct or a need -- being in a crowd isn't necessary to our being complete human beings -- but, for most of us, the crowd holds out certain essential attractions. It is, like an appetite, something in which dark satisfactions can be found.

Among the Thugs is truly bleak. But it is simultaneously truly important, for Buford has looked deeply into the darkness and come away with the knowledge that it is important, and ever-present. To know this is to know that you have to always be aware of the possibility, and be ever alert.