David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

house at 24 Balkan Street in the Lower Falls, they were told. Freeland immediately dispatched five armored cars filled with soldiers and police officers. A search of the house turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. Outside, a crowd gathered. Someone started throwing stones. Stones turned into petrol bombs. A riot started. By ten p.m. the British had had enough. An army helicopter armed with a loudspeaker circled the Lower Falls, demanding that all residents stay inside their homes or face arrest. As the streets cleared, the army launched a massive house-to-house search. Disobedience was met with firm and immediate punishment. The next morning, a triumphant Freeland took two Protestant government officials and a pack of journalists on a tour of the neighborhood in the back of an open flatbed truck, surveying the deserted streets like—as one soldier later put it—“the British Raj on a tiger hunt.”
    The British Army went to Northern Ireland with the best of intentions. The local police force was overwhelmed, and they were there simply to help—to serve as a peacekeeper between Northern Ireland’s two warring populations. This was not some distant and foreign land: they were dealing with their own country, their own language, and their own culture. They had resources and weapons and soldiers and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain. When Freeland toured the empty streets of the Lower Falls that morning, he believed that he and his men would be back home in England by the end of the summer. But that’s not what happened. Instead, what should have been a difficult few months turned into thirty years of bloodshed and mayhem.
    In Northern Ireland, the British made a simple mistake. They fell into the trap of believing that because they had resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain, it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them. General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” And Leites and Wolf were wrong.
    “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seán MacStiofáin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years. “Well, you had that to start with in [Northern Ireland], all right.”

3.
    The simplest way to understand the British mistake in Northern Ireland is to picture a classroom. It’s a kindergarten class, a room with brightly colored walls covered in children’s drawings. Let’s call the teacher Stella.
    The classroom was videotaped as part of a project at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and there is more than enough footage to provide a good sense of the kind of teacher Stella is and the kind of classroom she has. Even after a few minutes, it is abundantly clear that things aren’t going well.
    Stella is sitting in a chair at the front of the room. She’s reading out loud from a book that she is holding up to one side: “…seven slices of tomatoes,” “eight juicy olives,” “nine chunks of cheese.…” A girl is standing in front of her, reading along, and all around her, the class is in chaos, a mini-version of Belfast in the summer of 1970. A little girl is doing cartwheels across the room. A little boy is making faces. Much of the class seems to be paying no attention at all. Some of the students have actually turned themselves entirely around, so that they have their backs to Stella.
    If you were to walk in on Stella’s class, what would you think? I’m guessing your first reaction would be that she has a group of unruly children. Maybe she teaches in a school in a poor neighborhood and her students come from troubled families. Maybe her students come to school without any real respect for authority or learning. Leites and Wolf would say that she really needs to use some discipline. Children like that need a firm hand. They need rules. If there is no order in the classroom, how can any learning take place?
    The truth is, though, that Stella’s school isn’t in some terrible neighborhood. Her students aren’t particularly or unusually unruly. When the class begins, they are perfectly well behaved and attentive, eager and ready to learn. They don’t seem like