The Sunny Side of the Street (1995)

Coronation Street, 1995

TV Review from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the visual litter of second-rate soap operas, sitcoms and gameshows one programme has stood out like a beacon for over thirty years now. If the unthinkable ever happened and it was removed from our TV screens, a storm of protest would be guaranteed. It is well written, superbly acted and tremendously likeable. It is, of course, Coronation Street.

Coronation Street is what the pundits like to call a ‘national institution' and watching it it is easy to see how they came to that conclusion. At an emotional level, not only does it hold a special place in the heart of many viewers (unusual itself for a TV programme these days) it reflects a wider set of social values which viewers can easily identify with. It is a cosy, homely type of programme that you can curl up in front of on a winter's night. As has been tirelessly pointed out. the only real problem with it is that it does not reflect a cosy, homely world. Indeed, Coronation Street, its detractors claim, does not reflect reality at all. It portrays a world that does not exist anywhere any more. It is a terraced Victorian street with cobbles, a corner shop and an old-fashioned English pub. the sort of self-contained community that is dying out everywhere. Furthermore, Coronation Street largely neglects the type of problems associated with this decline.

At the time of writing, there is not a single unemployed person on Coronation Street. There is nobody with a drug problem. Nobody, apparently, even on anti-depressants or tranquilisers. Only one person. Emily Bishop, with a past history of mental illness. No one is active in a pressure group or political party of any sort, and there do not appear to be any trade unionists. Most bizarrely, for an inner-city Manchester street, there is not one Asian family and interestingly — as has been spotted by many a comedian with an axe to grind — the corner shop is run by a white couple called Reg and Maureen. Throughout its entire history, in fact, Coronation Street's corner shop has carried the flag for white Middle England. And of course, there is no one in Coronation Street who is — you know — in any way ‘funny’, sexually. Raquel's recent dalliance with Curly Watts is as close as it gets.

This all sounds like a terrible indictment, and in some ways it is. Coronation Street is a hopelessly unrepresentative television programme. Even if we momentarily disregard the sociological breakdowns and the discrepancies they reveal, comparatively few characters in the Street are in any way likely. Most are quite bizarre, though often entertainingly so. Has anyone ever met anybody in real life remotely like Reg Hallsworth? Or Mavis and Derek? Or Raquel? The question is superfluous — of course nobody has. and certainly not in the one little street. They are extreme characterisations of the comic variety, exaggerated almost — though not quite — out of recognition altogether. In truth, they have far more in common with comedian Harry Enfield than with anything or anyone to be found in miserable old Albert Square. Enfield’s “Mr ‘You don’t want to do it like that"’ seems to draw heavily on Percy Sugden.

Paradoxically for the greatest British soap opera, its characters are often more in the tradition of the British sitcom — more Captain Mainwairing or Gordon Brittas than Arthur Fowler, more Hattie Jacques and Joan Sims than Mandy Jordache. They are not, to hazard a guess, meant to be real people at all. It is hard to think of other characters in any other British soap opera who fall into this category.

Not them again.

Extreme characterisations often provide for good comedy, and this is one of the secrets of the Street's success. Compare it to BBC I‘s EastEnders and this becomes apparent very quickly indeed. While EastEnders goes in for a highly distorted version of ‘social realism’, the Street doesn't bother its head — its philosophy is that it is drama and laughs that people want more than murder, mayhem and misery. And that is precisely why it is held in such affection by millions of workers. Without too great a leap of the imagination, it gives them a sense of what life might be like if it wasn’t so bloody boring most of the time. lts appeal may be less obviously based on escapism than racy Dallas or glitzy Dynasty, but escapism it is nevertheless.

Despite their occasional traumas, the characters in Coronation Street are genuinely interesting specimens who are, encouragingly, rather nice with it. They are, as they say up North, decent folk. Has Alma a malicious bone in her body? Have Sally and Kevin, or Rita? It would not appear so. Best of all, they seem to inhabit a real community in every sense of the term. Not a sprawling housing estate plagued by packs of dogs and discarded syringes, nor the amorphous sprawl of suburbia but a place where people genuinely care about one another and then nip in to the local boozer to finish off the day with a pint and a gossip. It is a bit of a fantasy, true, but a lovely one.

It would be easy enough to sneer at all this, but Coronation Street deserves better. It cannot even be dismissed as a mere capitalist utopia, for although there are clearly elements of this, it is a strange utopia where the inhabitants live in poky, claustrophobic little terraced houses without any greenery in sight. Instead Coronation Street is best seen as an antidote to the myriad other TV programmes that portray the working class as vicious morons without an ounce of feeling or compassion in their entire bodies. If the producers of EastEnders got their grimy little hands on it, Nicky Platt would soon be selling crack cocaine on the corner of Rosumund Street and giving heroin to little Sarah-Louise while Betty Turpin would be running a brothel above the Rover's Return. Would that be more realistic? Hardly. It would simply be to swop one excess for another.

Though it has its faults, Coronation Street has more going for it than most soap operas. Crucially, it has never really endorsed the ethics of the market driven economy, and its least likeable characters. Mike Baldwin and Steve MacDonald are both petty capitalists, interestingly enough. And when realism — in a genuine rather than the over dramatised form of otvher soaps — rears its head, it is often for Vera Duckworth or Curly Watts to bemoan their existence as a 'wage slave' after a long day in the supermarket. Most of the characters, though idiosyncratic enough, appear reasonably intelligent — only screaming, bawling Tracy Barlow seems to have caught the EastEnders disease so far, and this too is encouraging.

Coronation Street will surely continue to do what it does best: provide an engaging pastiche of working class life with humour and vigour. It can generally leave the issues campaigning and 'social realism' to Brookside, the petty arguments and grind to EastEnders and the gratuitous violence and bad sets to Prisoner Cell Block H. It has little to learn from any of them while it continues to depict a working class with humour, a certain degree of confidence and more than one brain cell to collectively rub together. For this alone, its deficiencies can be forgiven. That is its greatest achievement over thirty years and more, and in a world dominated by a cynical, bitter and twisted media, it is not to be sniffed at.

Dave Perrin

What about the law of value? (1995)

Book Reviews from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Marx’s Theory of Crisis’. By Simon Clarke. Macmillan 1994, £14.99.

‘What About The Workers? Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia’. By Simon Clarke. Macmillan 1994, £12.95.

Clarke argues that Marx gave a number of different explanations for the economic crises of capitalism. First, disproportionality between different branches of production so that one industry over-accumulates relative to the others and then faces a crisis of profitability which spreads to other industries. Second, underconsumption as workers cannot buy back what has been produced and a general crisis of profitability ensues as a result. Third, a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a consequence of new technology and its greater cost relative to human labour power. Clarke’s view is that at one time or another Marx accepted and then rejected all three theories, and this ambiguity and inconsistency has been inherited by many of those in the Marxist tradition.

He argues that the three theories may describe contingent events in crises, but crises can actually occur for all manner of reasons. What all economic crises have in common is profitability – or rather, the lack of it. Crises are necessary and inevitable: they are a way of “purging” the economy of unprofitable businesses and raising the general rate of profit (largely at the expense of the working class, in terms of more work and less job security). This is perfectly normal for capitalism and does not mean that something has “gone wrong” with the economy. Indeed, capitalism will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis until the working class consciously organise for socialism.

Clarke is quite clear that the alleged failure of Marxism following the collapse of the Russian Empire is a myth, and that what has really failed is Leninism. This accurate insight is made all the more puzzling with the recent publication of another of his books.

As the subtitle of Clarke’s second book indicates, he labours under the illusion that Russia was something other than capitalist before the fall. His contention rests on the claim that Marx’s law of value did not apply in Russia before but does now. That the workers’ lot in Russia, as Clarke convincingly demonstrates, has gone from bad to worse in recent years does not show that bad is preferable to worse. In fact the collapse of the Russian Empire is a striking confirmation of the law of value, and it brings out a peculiar feature of his book on crises in that it ignores Marx’s theory of value. This time it is Clarke who is inconsistent.

Under the old system, the law of value (basically, the social compulsion to accumulate capital out of monetary profits) operated but was modified by state action. In Marxist terminology, the state redistributed surplus value from the profitable sector of the economy to non-profitable ends (the military in particular). But by the 1980s the “purging” effect on unprofitable businesses induced by the law of value, and delayed by state action, meant that most of the economy had become inefficient in terms of profitability and was, literally, in a state of crisis. This, together with popular opposition, is the main reason for the collapse of Russian state capitalism.

Lew Higgins

The World in your hand (1995)

CD-Rom Review from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Encarta '95 CD-ROM - The Complete Interactive Multimedia Encyclopedia (Microsoft £85.)

Technology — don't you just love it? Whatever, this is the baby that’s currently putting thousands of encyclopedia salesmen out of a job. A compact disc packed with 26,000 articles, it may not look as glorious as those bound volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it’s a damn sight easier to use — providing. that is, that you have access to a CD-ROM facility on a PC. It also has the advantage of colour pictures, video film and stereo sound. It will talk and sing to you if provoked.

Without doubt, it is a quite excellent reference guide with some stunning features, and even gives you the facility to print out text and pictures. The sections on social science, history and philosophy are voluminous, although the quality of the information varies according to the contributors. Even so. it is nice to see a reference under the term “socialism" to the fact that this word was initially used as a synonym for communism, a society of social or common ownership of wealth. This may be considered surprising as the entry was partly written by the late Norman Thomas, former leader of the reformist US Socialist Party.

The entries on Marx. Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg et al are generally well written and informative and there is relatively little to complain about. As befits a US publication, the references to Daniel De Leon and Eugene Debs are also good, although the statement that De Leon was an “authoritarian socialist" will annoy some.

Much of the usual mumbo-jumbo is regurgitated in the economics section, though not more so than in other encyclopedias. In fact there is a reasonable outline of most bourgeois economic theories, and there is also a small section on Marxian economics, which is a definite advance.

Microsoft originally designed this product mainly for the US market, and this often shows, with truly huge sections on American history, politics and geography, but for 1996 a version specifically for use in Britain is promised. If such a tiny, insignificant groups as the American Labor Party can rate an entry in the US version, we can hopefully assume that a distinctive organisation like the Socialist Party of Great Britain should be assured a place on merit for the version over here.

Dave Perrin

It's a bloody lottery! (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The advent of the National Lottery has unleashed a real feast of unreason. The Sun (14 November) took up a lot of its valuable space printing a large red disc, five inches in diameter. The accompanying text boasted that the Sun “now brings you another amazing way to help you scoop the huge jackpot - LOTTERY SPOTTERY. The giant red dot on this page has been charged with lucky psychic energy . . . all you have to do is touch the lucky spot when you want to pick you numbers. Just close your eyes and the numbers will come to you. You can also use the power of Lottery Spottery by cutting out the dot and rubbing it on your lottery ticket to turn it into a winner”.

What’s that again? Psychic energy? The Sun explains. “Top British psychic Nella Jones channelled her energy into the Sun’s lucky red spot, which we have reproduced here . . . even if you’re playing the lottery with the Sun’s Wizard of Odds Sunplans, a little bit of extra luck will do your chances no harm at all.”

And how does this so-castled “psychic energy”, which we are told was implanted in some unexplained way into a red disc in the Sun's office in London, transfer itself into the millions of Sun newspapers printed and sent to the farthest comers of the kingdom? We are not told. But then, if you have enough reasoning power to ask such questions, you wouldn’t be reading this rubbish in the Sun, would you?

Bloomsbury' Press, which brought out Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love (the book that even convinced royalists found sick-making) made its own grab for profits by publishing Dream Ticket, sub-titled How to Win the National Lottery! This book, said Bloomsbury, allows you to “decode the secret predictions of your sleeping mind” (Guardian, 16 November). If you dream of eating lettuce, bet on 34 and 29, if [you dream] of cutting your nails, then it’s 13,31 and 24.

And John Major gave the nation a lead by betting on numbers “combining his birthday with the addresses in Downing Street that he has occupied”. A large advertisement in the Observer (1 January) offered readers the chance to buy “the Lottery-Beater”, telling the buyer how to win the National Lottery. So here is a genuine philanthropist: he knows how to win the National Lottery (otherwise he couldn’t offer to sell readers the information), but he isn’t going to win it himself, he will let others do it.

Fortunately for him, many people won’t be able to work that out.

The Sun (31 December) had big headlines: “The Question That Is Gripping Britain - Why Haven’t These Balls Dropped Yet?” The article began: “These are the amazing 19 numbers that still haven’t been picked after six draws of the National Lottery'.” They “include No. 7 - said to be the luckiest lottery number of all. So if you are looking for a banker to play in all your lines, 7 may be the one for you”.

Almost certainly, the journalist writing this tosh must know that numbers drawn previously have no effect whatever on numbers drawn later. If you toss a coin fifty times, and get heads each time, the chances that you will get heads or tails at the fifty-first time are exactly even. But the editor (on behalf of the proprietor, Rupert Murdoch) wants this obscurantism, so the journalist supplies it.

Alwyn Edgar

On our wavelength (1995)

Party News from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Caller: There's been many privatised industries where the company’s made profit and the executives are richer than before and they've still cut back on workers.

Presenter: It must be said that the purpose of the state was to secure jobs while still trying to maintain profit.

Caller: I think that that's why common ownership does work . . . 

Presenter: Well, that’s interesting, because the other day I received some information from the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which is a [pause] shall we say. little-known organisation as far as 1 know, which I think is Marxist but, if I’m right, which is usually the case, they aren’t Leninist . . . 

Caller: Well -

Presenter: . . . shut up! [pause] they aren’t Leninist and they point out one thing, which must cross most people's minds, is that the State still works on a wage or salary basis and therefore they are [pause] still used in the same manner as a private enterprise, still having to make profit to survive, and therefore the State is not in common ownership.

(James H. Reeve’s phone-in programme on Hallam FM, Sheffield, 18 December 1994)

Where should socialists go now? (1995)

Editorial from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

There will be no basic change in the structure of society unless people join together and bring it about. The change from production based on profit to production solely for use will not happen on its own.

For most of this century workers looking for change have joined, supported or voted for. the Labour Party, entertaining the vague hope that it will be the vehicle for introducing a new kind of social order. Experience has taught most of them that they are wrong in expecting Labour to oppose the profit system. Those who vote Labour in the next general election will not be doing so in the expectation of bringing about socialism, but of giving the Tories a bloody nose.

At its coming special conference the Labour Party will throw out Clause Four, despite the cries of its left-wing, and with that hollow aim gone they can wipe even from the back of their minds any claim to stand for something other than the profit system.

Some went into the Communist Party. Many were genuine workers who wanted to see this rotten capitalist society destroyed. But Leninism and the belief in so-called socialist countries (which were in fact, state- capitalist) wasted their efforts. Now the Communist Party is dead.

There are the numerous Trotskyist sects, but what do they really stand for? They all tell workers to vote Labour at election time. They all stand for reforms of capitalism, never advocating the socialist demand of the abolition of the wages system. And they all have leaders and followers, with parties like the SWP appearing more like a cult than a movement, with internal opposition to the leadership banned and crazy policies handed down to the followers as party dogma.

There is one party in Britain which stands for socialism. Don’t judge us by our claims, but on the record of what we have said and done throughout our history. Never once have we swerved from the simple objective of organising politically and democratically to end capitalism and establish socialism.

Over the past year we have been heartened by a number of contacts in Britain and overseas, which, though all too few, have come from socialists who can see that we are the only party worthy of their principled support. Our intention for 1995 is to build on that and make clear to our fellow workers, be they young or old, black or white, blue-collar or white-collar, women or men. that there is one party for socialists to throw their energies into: the Socialist Party.

Some Cash Points (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scattered throughout the land, with the inconspicuous ubiquity of the beggars who are now everywhere, is a new form of life-support machine. They are to be found on every major street, sometimes several of them in a row. Staggering towards them, gasping for the machines, are endless streams of wretches who queue before the machine, like Muslims before Mecca. Cards in hands they stand - we stand, for you and I are there frequently - and appeal to the money machine, like robots in search of oil to keep them toiling.

In the face of the cash machine all claims to individuality collapse. “I AM A NUMBER” you remind yourself, as you tap in the four digits given to you by the bank to register your new identity. It is no use tapping in a stanza from Shelley, a line or two from Morrissey, an extract from your diary . . . The machine does not want to know who you are or how you feel, but simply how much money you want and how much money you arc allowed to have. It issues cold instructions: PRESS AMOUNT REQUIRED - WAIT - TAKE THE CARD - TAKE THE MONEY PROMPTLY . . . Missing you already!

That is the pleasant scenario. The cash machines have no obligation to deliver the dosh. Let us say

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

that a mother with two kids approaches The Machine, inserts her card and requests £30 so that she can buy enough to feed her children for the week. She has exceeded her overdraft. The Machine misses nothing. Request denied. There is no right to appeal on grounds of need: WITHDRAW YOUR CARD AND GO AWAY. Next in the queue stands a businessman who has made his fortune out of renting out slum properties to the poor. He is about to clinch a deal and proposes to withdraw £100 to pay for a decent business lunch. (Wine doesn’t come cheap in the decent restaurants, you know.) He inserts his card and The Machine, still angry at the audacity of the greedy mother and her excessive demands, pours out the twenty-quid notes, reassured that the world makes sense once more.

If you have no money you go without. In some countries you watch your babies slowly starve to death. In this country you face the indignities, discomforts and insecurities of scraping by with needs greater than you have money. There is no greater symbol of alienation than money. It tramples on our freedoms and desires, crushing hope in the impoverished and lavishing endless powers upon the extremely rich. The cash machine is symptom, not cause of this state of affairs. It is an inanimate player in a cruel game. The man who was seen some weeks ago in Camden Town kicking the wall containing the cash machine of the Royal Bank of Scotland made no impact upon the system which made him poor. (Even as a gesture of mere anti-Scots nationalism it would have been impotent.) Had he smashed open the machine and strangled it with its own thinly-wired innards The Tyranny of Money would have been dented no more than by the knocking-off of a policeman’s hat during an anti-war demonstration. The machine has built-in resilience.

Some months ago in a Budgen supermarket a woman presented her goods at the till, was given her bill and then presented her Visa card to the cashier. The card was inserted into the machine and, within seconds, popped out with the word VOID appearing in the appropriate slot. Her card was not accepted the cashier asked for cash. The woman had none. She looked around her, perhaps hoping that one of us in the neighbouring queue would pull out their wallet and act the Samaritan rather than shuffle the coins in our pockets and feel sorry for her. She burst into tears and left without the shopping. An unpurchased cabbage stood as a monument to her poverty. Did she go home and curse Budgen or the Tories or the blacks or the Jews . . . or maybe join the suicide statistics . . .  or maybe, like me and like you, accommodate herself to the sickly rituals of spending within her means? We can be sure that the credit-card machine lost no sleep over the drama. It is just a machine, and the cashiers, the managers, the accountants and producers of goods merely appendages to the machine.

In the Little Chef restaurant on the M1 the waiters plug themselves into the cash till before taking our money. It is apparently a security measure to ensure that the appendage pays sufficient homage to the machine. It is hard to think of a more symbolic image of the alienating bondage of money fetishism than a grown man plugging himself into a money machine.

Steve Coleman

Hot War in the Caucasus (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

If anything, the end of the Cold War has given even the least enlightened of us a geography lesson. Most of us are now all too familiar with names like Basra and Bosnia, Zagreb and Sarajevo and Mogadishu and Macedonia, and we can locate them on a map without too much difficulty. Grozny and Chechnya are the latest example of hitherto unheard of names that have suddenly rocketed themselves into the world news. But why the tiny Caucasus republic of Chechnya?

Yeltsin and his generals would have us that Chechnya is breaking laws laid down in the Russian Federation constitution by declaring itself a sovereign republic. Therefore, they must be returned to the fold at any cost.

One wonders at the importance tiny Chechnya holds for Yeltsin, considering its size. The old Soviet Union covered a total area of 8,647,172 square miles. Chechnya covers an area of 7,350 square miles (smaller in fact than Wales - 8,018 square miles). Surely Chechnya can't be that important - or can it?

To Yeltsin, the free-marketeer, Chechnya means vital roubles to a crippled Russian economy. Chechnya is basically essential to Russia's economic interests - all the more important since Georgia and Azerbaijan, both rich in natural resources, seceded successfully from the Soviet Union.

Oil Pipeline

The tiny republic of Chechnya, land locked on three sides by Russia, includes fertile farmland that straddles the wheat fields of southern Russia. The republic is also an important rail/road trade route to other trans-Caucasus republics. But most importantly, Chechnya controls the oil pipeline that connects the Black and Caspian Seas. Chechnya also claims several oilfields and a refinery and is further invaluable for the supply of chemicals, building materials and engineering.

So, like all wars in the modern world, the Chechen conflict has profit motive at its root, in particular who controls the Chechnya's mineral wealth and strategic pipeline.

The Chechen separatists feel they have every reason to claim independence. The area was initially forcibly incorporated into Russia by Tsarist expansionists some 150 years ago, since which time they have suffered the status of t the second class citizen, their Islamic faith making them subhuman to racist Russians and having to endure travel restrictions all too reminiscent of South Africa.

Stalin hated them so much that he had the entire population deported to central Asia in 1944 on trumped-up charges of Nazi collaboration -  a venture that wiped out 60 percent of the Chechen population.

Yeltsin has since blamed Chechens for every social evil facing Russia, from drug-trafficking and black-marketeering to the current trend for hijackings.

Chechnya sparked the current conflict in September 1991. When General Dzhokha Dudayev assumed power and declared Chechnya an independent republic. This was flatly denounced by Russia on November 1 1991.

Russian hostility to Chechnya's claims to sovereignty led some Chechen extremists to carry out hijackings to force their message home. This provided Moscow with the pretext to finance and supply weapons to the anti-Dudayev forces led by the pro-Yeltsin Umar Authurkhanov, in an attempt to nip Chechen nationalism in the bud.

Confidence in support from Moscow inspired anti-Dudayev forces to launch an attack on Grozny on November 25 last year, with the help of Russian mercenaries - an assault that was quickly repelled. What only became clear later was that the FSK (the successor to the KGB) had in fact recruited the mercenaries to fight Dudayev. The present crisis is, therefore, grounded in the covert backing Russian security forces gave to internal Chechen opposition forces. For it was the humiliation of that defeat that prompted the Russian massing of troops on the Chechen border at the beginning of December.

Opposition to the war

Polls since carried out in Russia have found that 75 percent of respondents oppose the war. The Russian media has also condemned the invasion of Chechnya, including the normally pro-Yeltsin Izvestia newspaper. On December 23, MPs in the Duma voted overwhelmingly for a halt to the war and even the army has been reported as feeling compunction pangs.

The only support Yeltsin has had for his Chechen operation has come from the parliamentary faction "Russia's Choice", the right-wing lunatic Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other nondescript opportunists. To the majority of Russians, Yeltsin, "the champion of democracy", is in reality a Stalin in miniature.

Many Russians are bewildered at Yeltsin's overnight change of character. For this is the same Yeltsin who came to world attention lambasting Gorbachev's attempt to stifle Lithuanian independence, begging army officers to disobey orders and calling on the UN to intervene.

Yeltsin, in three years, has learned quick that the rules of capitalism means that a country can only prosper if it is aggressive in defence of its economic interests. That's why the governments in the West have been so reluctant in coming forward with their criticism - because they have been doing the same thing as Yeltsin for 200 years.

John Bissett

The persecution of Taslima Nasrin (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religious groups have a notorious history of stifling dissent by any means possible. And if, in Britain, nonbelievers are no longer persecuted, tortured and killed it is because the superstitious myths and rituals with which religion cloaks itself are no longer taken seriously by the majority of the population. But there are countries where the heads of religion are still able to wield considerable power and influence. To belong to a different faith or to question that religion and try to have a reasoned discussion instead of blindly accepting its "rules" is to take great personal risks.

The humanist and feminist author, 32-year-old Taslima Nasrin has fallen foul of Muslim fundamentalists in her native Bangladesh because her novel Lajja published in 1993 depicts Hindus mistreated by Muslims. In an interview given to the Calcutta newspaper the Statesman she stated that the Sharia law (the Muslim religious law which makes women second-class citizens) needed reforming but this was misquoted as her saying that the Koran needed reform and fuelled fundamentalist anger still further.

Arrest warrant

Fundamentalist Muslims demonstrated in the streets threatening to kill her, and the Bangladeshi government, afraid of public disorder, succumbed to threats and issued a warrant for her arrest under article 295(a) of the Penal Code for "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings". This law was introduced by the British during the days of the British Empire and was intended to prevent inter-religious fighting which would have made Asia more difficult to govern. Ironically, it was now being used to further religious differences and fundamentalist hatred.

After the warrant was issued for her arrest on 4 June 1993, Nasrin went into hiding for a couple of months before appearing in court in Dhaka on 3 August, accompanied by her lawyer, Sara Hossain. She was granted bail. It has been claimed that the secular Bangladeshi government wanted to give her an opportunity to leave the country. This is quite possible given the widespread international support that she received, since her continued persecution by either fundamentalists or the Bangladeshi courts would have created further embarrassment for the Bangladeshi government.

PEN, the international writers' organisation, offered assistance and within a week Nasrin fled to Sweden where she was granted political asylum. Shortly after she appeared in Stockholm to receive the Kurt Tucholsky prize which is given annually to a writer in exile. In 1992 it was awarded to Salman Rushdie, also in hiding from fundamentalist death threats.

Fundamentalist insanity

In accepting the prize, Nasrin thanked the Swedish government for granting her asylum and pledged to continue her fight against "fundamentalist insanity . . . which is spreading darkness in the world". She is trapped in a conflict between liberal secularism and religious fundamentalism, with, the extreme Islamic group, Jamaat stating that "the blood lust will have to be satisfied elsewhere".

Nasrin had criticised Islamic law on previous occasions; in an interview for the New York Times she stated that: "some men would keep women in chains-veiled, illiterate and in the kitchen". She added: "There are 60 million women in my country, not more than 15 per cent of them can read and write. How can Bangladesh become a modern country and find its place in the world when it is dragged backwards by reactionary attitudes towards half its people? It is my belief that politics cannot be based on religion if our women are to be free".

In an interview for Index (September/October 1994) Nasrin was asked if she wanted to revise the Koran. She stated:

"The Quran can no longer serve as the basis of our law. A thousand years ago it may have been useful for fending off barbarism. But we live in modern times, the era of science and technology. The Quran has become superfluous. It stands in the way of progress and the way of women's emancipation."

Asked of she still considered herself a Muslim, Taslima Nasrin replied:

"No, I am an atheist. All forms of religion are anachronistic to me. I dream of a world without religion. Religion gives birth to fundamentalism as surely as the seed gives birth to the tree. We can tear the tree down, but if the seed remains it will produce another tree. While the seed remains we cannot root out fundamentalism."

Religion is the badge of the mentally-enslaved. It uses a cloak of mystification to reinforce its authority by promising a mythical afterlife as a reward for blind obedience and by making threats of eternal punishment, backed up by intimidation and persecution for those who do not submit. It has been a useful tool in the hands of the ruling classes to keep their subjects subservient.

Carl Pinel