Hooligans, Thugs and Gangsters

 

Our world, especially the United States, is now becoming a Gangster Enterprise where brutality and soma-induced compliance maintain the ruling order. Sadly, the weapons of resistance against authoritarianism are not readily apparent. Housing rights and in some cases a right to life are threatened at all levels. We experience deep-seated inequality and a worldwide Ponzi-scheme, not least in Ireland. This is a country where the banksters and their political apparatchiks are in charge. Welcome Paschal to the knowledge base of the World Bank.

The global population, apart from a small coterie of the rich, are reduced to corporate and other forms of slavery and servitude. Dissidence and criticism is categorised as disruption or even criminalised. It is a situation unprecedented since medieval times, but then the lord of the manor often took care of his vassals. Not any longer.

In this respect, the definition and etymology of three terms hooligan, thug and gangster has become central to any understanding of this New Dark Age.

In general, the term hooligan is closely related to rioting, disorderly conduct, bullying and vandalism. Today, either actual violence or the threat it is omnipresent. Often, regrettably this emanates from those in authority in corporate organisations, schools or other institutions.

Hooliganism is fundamentally about brutality, and it is telling that brutalist architecture began to arrive in Italy under Mussolini. This is where veneration of the strongman – or Big Fella in Ireland’s case – really began.

Today, true strength is associated with brutality and the strongman, one of Umberto Eco’s canonical definitions of fascism, has reemerged. Prole workers are being bullied in a period of an unregulated free markets, not unlike that which obtained at the turn of the twentieth century in America in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1905).

The word hooligan is in fact Irish or perhaps Scottish in origin. Thus, the Victorian novel Hooligan Nights (1899) is based on the character of Patrick Holohan a.k.a. Hooligan. The Scots, as anyone who has spoken in the Glasgow Union would attest, have also a form of attribution for that term in that General Wade during the Jacobite rebellion in 1794 referred to the Scots as hooligans.

The word first appeared in print in London police reports in 1894 referring to the name of a gang of youths in the Lambeth area — the Hooligan Boys.

The Daily Graphic thus records  in 1898: ‘The avalanche of brutality which, under the name of ‘Hooliganism’ … has cast such a dire slur on the social records of South London.’

Extortion is intrinsic to gangsterism including its corporate version. As a barrister I am aware of how blackmail cases have a particular flavour of awfulness, involving emotional and financial manipulation, fear of disclosure, along with physical and psychic violence.

H.G. Wells wrote in his 1909 semi-autobiographical novel Tono-Bungay:

Three energetic young men of the hooligan type, in neck-wraps and caps, were packing wooden cases with papered-up bottles, amidst much straw and confusion.

And then we arrive via the Blueshirts, Blackshirts et al at the football hooliganism from the 1970s and 1980s, which was referred to as ‘The British Disease,’ but was also evident in Italy, Russia and elsewhere.

A hooligan is, above all, someone who has no consequential respect for other people, their privacy, or their values. They nonchalantly damage the lives of others. The word thug is often used in this context or in the legal profession, a not dissimilar expression is boot boys with brains. Our learned friends.

But it is far from exclusively British in origin or orientation, although the late Martin Amis suggested that the yobs are taking over, and certainly that is the theme of his uneven Lisbon Asbo (2012).

Thug and Gangster

The word thug is derived from the term for the cult Indian sect thuggee, and is often associated with excessive nativism or colonialism. It should be stressed that the thugees caricatured in Gunga Din (1939), or in the Indiana Jones movies, were in fact actively engaged in deception and motivated by religious fundamentalism. So, one of their mantras is: ‘God is all in all, for good and evil.’

Well, that could be a slogan for the activities of the fundamentalist Evangelical robber barons of our age. Our new thugees?

Gangs or gangsterism is also a-turn-of-the-century phenomenon. Thus, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) portrays The Bowery Boys immortalised by Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher. They were nativistic Americans and viciously anti-Irish. Today of course we have vicious Irish nativists, wishing to exclude others. Ignorance disinformation and stupidity, as Karl Krauss historically indicated, is now apparent in every direction.

The terms gangster is centrally associated with the Costa Nostra or the mafia, and it is revealing that this develops after the decline of feudalism and the rule of primogeniture. In Marxist terms the freeing up of the alienation of land created the possibility of exploitation.

The Italian aristocrat Tomasi di Lampedusa’s extraordinary novel The Leopard (1960) was written under a settled hopeless expectation of death. It was filmed brilliantly by Visconti and is a crucial portrait of Italy in revolution, just as feudal entitlements are stripped away. The abolition of feudalism was replaced by sharecropping and small holdings, which ushered in the opportunistic mafia and robber barons.

Today wealth is channelled to a small minority, and everyone else is left scrambling for a living in worldwide corporate serf-Capitalism or, in some respects, serf-Communism. Take your pick. The gangsters corporate and their role models worldwide engage in blackmail, deceit, and manipulation.

How do you expect the wretched of this Earth to behave? What with the lure of consumerism and an endless media barrage of lifestyle choices, hedonism, and easy money.

The gangster drug problem in Dublin, for example, essentially stems from an abject failure in urban planning, moving people from solid working class communities into squalid estates as well as the tower blocks of Ballymun, which spawned drug-infested infernos. Naturally, these buildings were modelled on the brutalism of Le Corbusier.

Roberto Saviano exhibited his expertise in the Italian drug trade in his book Gomorrah (2006), which demonstrates the economic rational and organisation of the drug cartels. His subsequent book Zero, Zero, Zero (2016) makes the following crucial points:

First, the gangster drug cartels of South America and Italy among other places created a model of business organisation and funding that corporate organisations have emulated. What difference in moral terms is there between vulture funds, Goldman Sachs, and drug barons? None at all. The business of America is business. Or of Ireland or, more pertinently, of China.

Secondly, this model has become, through both its ruthlessness and an omertà code of compliance, the model for corporate business organisation. The transnational vulture funds and purchasers of Canadian, Chinese and American origin presently destroying Ireland are, in moral terms, equivalent to drug cartels.

There is, no moral distinction between Steve Bannon, the late Peter Sutherland, Xi Jinpeng and Pablo Escobar. Corporate law firms’ bankers share the same dynamic as the drugs trade.

Visit to Palermo

I recently visited Sicily and while in Palermo stayed in a beautiful old hotel with a golden bath frequented by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for under fifty pounds. I chose the restaurant because it was recommended by Peter Robb in Midnight in Sicily (1996). It was just around the corner.

Before leaving the concierge said to me: ‘Oh no, Sir, we will order you a taxi, the alleyway is bad.’ You could walk around it, but that would take an extra forty-five minutes, while a cab will take fifteen minutes, and it’s a beautiful drive.’

And so it was. When I arrived in the restaurant, serving the fantastic Sicilian dishes recommended by Peter Robb Pesto Al Sarna, I noticed the adjacent table had lots of guns on the table, and from the alleyway the hotelier referred to gun shots were audible.

Agrigento is of course very close to Corleone a town with many limousines with blocked windows and a dislike of visitors. The next day on the drive there I was greeted by half-finished buildings. Unfinished, because of backhanders to the mafia. Reminiscent of the false promise of housing from Mr Martin.

Thus, we are rendering housing, both for the rentier and mortgaged class, impossible in Ireland. We are destroying the next generation from living happy and fulfilled lives, as we embark on the road to an ever-compliant mediaeval feudalism.

Beautiful spaces and buildings create balanced, adjusted people, as Alain De Boton rightly argues in his book about buildings and urban spaces The Architecture of Happiness (2006). And yet the tribalistic veneration of gangsters from Ned Kelly to Don Corleone to the Irish variations in Martin Cahil and Gerry Hutch persists.

Gerry Hutch has been around as long as I have. I won’t get into morals or ethics, but Hutch has been kind to the community in Dublin Central in indirect ways, as Bertie Ahern put it. Whether we like it or not, he is respected by downtrodden working class Dubliners, in a way that the legal class is not. I doubt Rossa Phelan, another person who secured a not guilty verdict in a recent murder trial, will be going up for an election any time soon.

The solution to all this is the reassertion of community, fraternity, equality and of course respect, but this must be earned rather than inherited. Their wise talk is about trust and respect which leads to kindness and inner warmth. Openness to chat.

Feature Image: James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces, 1938