Street scenes
DEMO HUGH REAY
;le of the few spontaneous moments in the Attie of South Audley Street came when the sung marxists suddenly challenged the on- oakers to join them in their charges on the slice. 'What are you here for, if you—don't ant violence?' True to a day in which no one dislodged from his position, the challenge me to nothing. But it was throughout a oderately threatening situation—as with vary- g degrees of distance it has been for the ublic generally. Against a built-up background enormous numbers and disagreeable eapons, it was not clear what anyone's reac- ons were going to be. People under such reats tend to react aggressively. I saw one oman punching a man for standing on her t—not in the circumstances an unreasonable pectation. So it was quite natural to find one- f viewing the demonstrators with some con- lnpt; at the same time one questioned the ellectual propriety of doing so. What was it due?
All crowds are stupid; and most of them 11'. Aesthetically, they can be redeemed by a at passion, or by oratory. Of passion there s none beyond the requirements of philo- phical duty. When police helmets were being sed through the air the cheers of the crowd re cruel, but not ravenous. Oratory was fined to a diminutive Sotsman in a eck cap denouncing the exploitation of
the German worker in the First World War.
The tactic of the marxists was less the strategically useful one of provocation than the romantic one of projecting themselves by de- scription into an ideal but unlike situation. They ran a commentary on the heroism of their behaviour: 'Well get through the enemy lines now . . .' etc and on the aggression of their antagonists `. . . remember whose violence we are protesting against.' In the local context. however self-stimulating, this approach was psychologically obtuse. Such direct assaults in- tegrate police morale; they never did that in Prague. So even on their own terms the marxists were incompetent. There was nothing of the guerrilla in their tactics: they were instead the victims of their own need for direct confron- tation. To their foreign colleagues--the in- tolerable pressure of whose manly example must surely be the chief reason for the demon- stration of 27 October—the event could only emphasise the dissimilarities in international context.
There was one slight exception. They forced at one moment a charging police rank to
break from behind in response to the cry. 'Make way for the wounded.' Since glorifica- tion of their own dead is a tradition respected by both bourgeois and marxist, the demonstra- tors were free to driN e their own improvised ambulances, in a flurry of moral self-impor- tance, up and down wherever they liked. But it was a weapon which one suspected they lacked the wit rather than the bad taste to exploit any further.
So who was frustrated by the way the demonstration went? Not the police. That curious tension that exists in the mind of the bourgeois in his relationship to the police was overbalanced into a complete identification. For once, policemen were there to be chatted to in every hotel doorway. The marxists? Pos- sibly, although their rigid romanticism —the certainty of which is so infuriating to non- marxists, perhaps indeed because it is so successfully self-protective—seemed sure to preserve them from a sensitivity to either criticism or defeat. As for society, it had tested the strength of its subversives and found itself gratifyingly superior to them.
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