Today's Gazeta Wyborcza ran an intriguing story about a phenomenon which has been developing over the years - the set-up pitched battle between several hundred fans of rival football clubs. In Polish, an ustawka. This one - which occurred outside Poddębice, some 25 miles (40km) to the west of Łódź, was said by police to have involved around 300 hooligans and left one 24 year-old man dead.
This is what happens when war gets marginalised. Today's warfare is moving away from the mechanized, industrialised battles of WW2; no longer do tanks and air superiority fighters dominate the battlefields, but guerrillas, terrorists, suicide bombers, cyberwarfare geeks - war has become asymmetrical. When a $1.5m armoured personnel carrier can be destroyed with $30-worth of cunningly-hidden explosive, it makes you wonder why any nation would still want to build $1.5m armoured personnel carriers. This is a reaction to total war - in its 20th century iteration - combined battle forces, nerve gas, carpet bombing, concentration camps, nuclear weapons, civilian megadeaths. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction has ensured that in the past 65 years, no major power has gone to war agains any other one.
And yet... and yet. Male mammals still have that urge to fight one another. And humans are still beings built on top of a standard mammalian chassis. Too much of the male hormone coursing through the system leads to risk-taking and aggression, and en masse, it will lead to conflict. Walk around a city centre after a football match, and the air reeks of the stuff. Brains switched off, the hooligans strut around together, baying for the blood of rival fans, pumping the air with their fists, tunelessly singing songs full of the foulest oaths.
Since man could first fashion a flint into a weapon of war, testosterone has been the driving force of conquest and brutality.
What should those at the top of Society's pyramid do? Make the most of it. Harness that surplus testosterone and make it work for you. The Lord of the Manor will get his villeins and serfs to bare arms in his name, to fight against the Duke-next-Door. Then, add some extra spice - religion, nationhood, race, class or some other ideology - and you can really tweak it for what it's worth. And then - introduce industry and technology. From 18th C. muzzle-loaded muskets that could fire one round every 20 seconds in the hands of a well-drilled musketeer to the 20th C. heavy machine gun that can spew out 1,200 bullets a minute. Flamethrowers and napalm, main battle tanks and tactical nuclear weapons. Wars have become logarithmically more deadly with passing centuries, civilians becoming the dominant victims.
Campaign for Real War
An ustawka is pure, testosterone-driven male aggression for all its worth, without the downside of mothers having to get their children to safety, historic city centres getting trashed, millions of unwilling conscripts mown down by bullets and shells. Purely voluntary, agreed by both parties. The ustawka has a great future as a social safety valve. No longer do we have (as our European forebears did) a major or minor war once a generation. Yet young men still pine for action. Football hooliganism is an answer. And in the big scheme of things, a low-cost answer for society.
Perhaps our legislators should just let them be. One proviso - that the costs of any deaths or injuries incurred in voluntary fight action should not be lumbered on the taxpayer. Let all football hooligans sign forms waiving their rights to publicly-funded health care - the football club should have a fund for treating its soldiers who are harmed in action.
Men will always have the urge to fight one another. Some will be intelligent enough to understand that it's utterly futile. But for the many - the chance to take part in an ustawka, to prove one's valour in hand-to-hand combat, to fight in a band of brothers, to sing songs with one's comrades about glorious routs of the cowardly enemy - will have an attraction that's hard to resist. Get it out of the system.
This time last year:
Call out the snowploughs
This time two years ago:
Fieldfare in midwinter
This time three years ago:
Kraków beckons
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6 comments:
Michael,
This is a controversial subject but I do agree. It's hard to explain - and probably even harder to justify - but anyone who has stood in a large crowd of me, fighting or singing for one cause, in defiance or hatred for another, will tell you: it's a fantastic rush of adrenaline, addictive and satisfying.
I remember two quotes. Pepys said, "every man thinks less of himself for not having been a soldier." Phil Ashby, who served in Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone (and who writes about his experiences here: http://www.amazon.com/Against-All-Odds-Escape-Sierra/dp/0312989210) remembered riots in Northern Ireland where the police and soldiers were enjoying it as much, if not more, as the rioters were.
Ustawki are in that respect a logical outcome of this testosterone driven urge. War continued by other means. Furthermore, ustawki are generally fairly arranged: in an isolated location, equal numbers, medical staff on stand-by, rules about not striking those on the ground.
Attacks on the unconsenting and weak are clearly wrong but on the spectrum of violence, ustawki surely lie closer to boxing - a dangerous but fully legal sport - than they do to public disorder as it's known in the UK.
Paddy
If it really works for these lads to have their ustawki events, then perhaps it is worth paying their medical expenses...or funeral costs. At least the rest of us have a fair chance of surviving unscathed, alive.
Lot of that kind of stuff has historic precedent - medieval battles often had a ritualized form where knights proved whatever they needed to prove and lived to prove it all over again another day. Aztec and other Central American armies fought in a agreed-upon between the adversaries ustawki. Not very effective against the Spaniards, who just didn't understand the rules...Coup taking on the plains of N. America.
But it wasn't always like that. Look at the Neolithic (and period pre-) in Europe, Old Europe as it is known. No fortifications, no obvious weapons (unless they used farm implements and hunting gear to destroy each other), no mass graves or sites of massacres. For thousands of years, all the way from the Balkans to present-day Southern Poland
And then, out of the East as usual, along came the hierarchical pastoral chaps on their shaggy little ponies...
Michał - it almost sounds like you're suggesting a government backed sort of Fight Club . It would make sense on one hand, but on the other hand someone would just be too freaked out by the idea and would start complaining and the idea would just not take off.
Anyone who has seen the 'Hamsterdam' story in season 3 of The Wire might identify with what I mean.
I say send the ustawka guys to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban rather than letting them pollute Polish society - see how tough they are then.
Bob
Good points, but I'm still in two minds about this. Intelligent men would indulge in different types of rivalry than beating one another to a pulp. But after all back in liceum we also had ustawki, just for fun...
Can I sign away from private pension fund to which I have to pay contributions under costraint and take responsibility for my pension benefit on my own? Unfortunately the answer is negative. The same as about your proposal. Both those guys with excessive level of testosterone and I, aware of limitations and drawbacks of rip-OfFE will not be allowed to waive our rights, because we are told we "don't know what we are doing". This is the "freedom and responsibility", as posited by Tories, in today's society...
@ Bob
It's precisely because war in Afghanistan is so remote (drones, IEDs, sniper rifles etc) that it puts young men off. Ustawki are hand-to-hand; this gets the testosterone going more than launching guided missiles from beyond visual range.
@ Paddy
You have problems posting. I will load your comment from my end. It's good.
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