Another voice

Scots hooligans and Chinese fanatics

Auberon Waugh

I have never been seriously inconvenienced by football hooligans. In fact, I am sorry to say, I rather enjoy watching them bash each other up on television. Perhaps this is because I was made to play football at school: I resented the humiliation acutely at the time, and may have been looking for my revenge ever since. But I prefer to think it is because football hooliganism is a loud, public denial of the perfectability of human nature, and such denials are welcome in the intellectual climate of our times, where strikes, burglaries, school vandalism and even assaults on the middle class are seen as justifiable strivings for social justice.

It may be that it is this denial which our society — and especially the opinion-formers inside it — find so intolerable. It is true that I once saw some drunken Scotsmen walking abreast down the pavement in Shaftesbury Avenue — their presence was apparently to be explained by a football match — and judged it prudent to go inside a shop and pretend to be interested in buying a saxophone. But it would never have occurred to me to demand that the revellers be sprayed with indelible dye, birched, or given electrical shock treatment — three solutions which have apparently been offered in all seriousness for the phenomenon of football hooliganism.

Nor do I think that those who make these suggestions are likely to have suffered much, especially in places like Taunton,. where cries for new forms of punishment' are loudest. Last week in Taunton I was on a BBC Any Questions? programme when the matter of hooliganism came up. Among my fellow-panellists, Lord Soper demanded an end to the availability of beer while Arthur Marshall, my successor and present rival on the left-wing New Statesman, demanded that football hooligans should be hanged by the neck for a period of five years.

Needless to say, this ingenious suggestion produced gasps of admiration from the Taunton audience. How could I compete with it? With the Mikado's song in mind, I was about to suggest that they should be kicked to death by old age pensioners in football boots when I remembered that a few years ago there was a drunk Scotsman who beat up Mr Martin Seymour-Smith in the Haymarket. I don't know why the drunk Scotsman did this, or even whether it was anything to do with football. Perhaps it was simply his way of revealing a suspicion (however false) that Seymour-Smith is a fraud and a charlatan who bases his claim to literary punditry largely on the pretence of having read books he hasn't in languages he does not even understand. But this incident should serve as an important reminder that

even drunk Scotsmen are human beings, possessing immortal souls and the ability to choose their own point of view.

Can the same thing be said of the Chinese? If there are no football hooligans in China this may be because they don't play football, but I suspect there are few other forms of hooliganism, either. Certainly their ping-pong players were models of decorum during the world championships in Birmingham. All hooliganism in China is supervised by the authorities — not so much permitted as ordered — and called a Cultural Revolution or possibly a protest against the Gang of Four, led by the fiendish voluptuary Chiang Ching in obedience to the perverse teachings of Lin Piao.

Of course, it may all be a pack of lies. China may be torn by constant major civil wars we know nothing about. Every pingpong match in the smallest provincial town may produce carnage on a scale which puts the Sicilian Vespers or St. Bartholomew Massacres to shame. Nobody except the man at the very top has the faintest idea what is happening in China.

But if one takes Chinese propaganda at its face value, and listens to the more simple-minded of its eulogists, then we are bound to ask ourselves whether the Chinese are human beings at all. At one level, China is final proof of the perfectibility of human society. Listen to Magnus Magnusson, in his introduction to William Watson's Ancient China (BBC Publications 1975): 'There is no crime in China, for instance, no theft, no pickpockets. There is no poverty in China . . . there are no beggars in China. There is no disease in China, no flies — indeed the Chinese are fanatically concerned with health and can boast of the finest health services in the world . .

Reviewing this book with a shelf of others on modern China for Books and Bookmen two years ago,! asked why, if there was no disease, they needed a health service and discussed what had happened to the flies, whether the Chinese had eaten them or re-educated them into butterflies. But that was not the important point: by abdicating any right to think for themselves, the Chinese seemed to have surrendered various characteristics which are usually considered essential attributes of human identity: the ability to distinguish between good and evil, between truth and falsehood. The doctrine

of man's perfectibility as applied in China appears to have established exactly the opposite: man's degradability into something between a performing animal and an ant.

From a theological point of view, of course, we must give them the benefit of the

doubt, allowing them the same dispensation which the Christian church has traditionally allowed to foetuses and incurable lunatics: while there is the faintest possibility of human potential, they must not be destroyed, enslaved or treated as animals. It is a harsh and somewhat rigid rule — a leftover. perhaps, from earlier conditions which may not apply today — but nevertheless it is one which we have got to observe until we can think of a better one. More disturbing than the theological approach are the biological and medical ones. Dawa Noebu's excellent account of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, Red Star Over Tibet (Collins 1974) reveals how not a single incident of rape occurred during the entire operation. Somewhat ungratefullY, Tibetan women nicknamed them 'The Impotents'. Much that is strange in modern China might be explained by the suggestion that the Chinese are undersexed (although I believe this is not true in Hong Kong) hut anyone who has read Ruth Sidet's magnificently silly manual Women and Child Rearing in China (Sheldon Press 1974) is forced to the more austere conclusion that modern Chinese have actually overcome the sexual urge. Ann Leslie reached the same conclusion in the Daily Mail last week, in a brilliant article which hereby receives the Auberon Waugh Award for Investigative JournalisM 1977: 'How can 800 million people forget sex?'

Plainly, the biological phenomenon has a medical explanation. The important ctis; tinction, I think, is between the medical effects of life in an authoritarian regime' like Russia, and life in a totalitarian reginte' like China. The first requires an acqu cence in rigid or unnatural behaviour Patterns and an acquiescence in untruth, thef second requires enthusiastic acceptance. both. The first, which is based on inuMr dation, can result in drunkenness, ellt°' tional withdrawal and murderous apatn The second requires the bending of will an° reason to a new system of belief, howeve,r unstable. Perhaps I should explain (0China: A Handbook — David and Charles, p.18, Michael Lindsay on History of ChM' ese Communist Party) that the unstabl,e belief on which China is founded is Ma °.s dictum that 'Marxism-Leninism is a u111versal, wholly correct and general truth''a An 'unstable belief' is one based uP011,..1e theory or factual assumption incomPat'.' with empirical evidence. It can be matrit, tamed only by deliberate rejection of abe' evidence to the contrary, which maY rejected with signs of emotional distastovf frequently accompanied by symptoms violence and aggression. As someone who has always had a vielc..ness for Chinese women, I am sad tntetYs should have come to this. But I supPose le even more alarming that 800 million Pe°n P — a quarter of the world's populatioat should be clinically insane. This is

comes of trying to put a stop to fo° hooligans.