More Satanic Verses (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hell is Camden Town as the sunsets. Drunks stagger towards gutters which are home; the children of the hypodermic needle inject some bought and deadly fake happiness; the old ones who chatter to themselves speak of “bastards” who tried to push them off the bus and bomb shelters where the roof leaked; the girls on the game pursue what only something as monstrous as capitalism could boast of as the “oldest profession”, selling submission for the price of fast-food; a man with a metal stick limps nowhere in particular and curses blacks, as if they all made him lame; a Dickensian figure whose arse is literally hanging out of his trousers sings “There’ll Always Be An England” and holds out his dirt-caked hand for pennies that will not come; kids lie in doorways in sleeping bags which should be used for jolly camping trips, but are now the substitute for home for thousands in a country which has more empty houses than homeless people; and the police shoot past in cars with Nazi-like sirens, now to collect their kebab and then to intervene in a fight between two wage slaves who enjoyed their evening’s release from misery so much that they tried to kick each other’s brains out over a penalty decision in a football match.

Graffiti on the wall says “Wogs Out”, “Cath Loves Jason”, (who is probably the Jason who will always be separated by a thick glass TV screen) and “Don’t Pay The Poll Tax” (as if the Council Tax is somehow' a merciful release from oppression). Now here is it scrawled “Dante Woz Here”, but it feels like there could not have been a much better inspiration for his vision of Hell than the streets which we have become used to. Perhaps that is the one thing worse then eternal damnation: not knowing that you’re in hell.

Camden Town is not unique. It just happens that this writer is there frequently, witnessing the destitution of the people of this late-twentieth-century abyss and the impossibility to pass by without the inner sense of wanting to vomit, as if the malignant sore was within rather than all around. Visiting Easterhouse in Glasgow or Handsworth in Birmingham or Toxteth in Liverpool or St Pauls in Bristol or the South Bronx of New York the same gaping pits of urban hell scream out, echoing in their impotent rage the high boasts of the market which will provide life for anyone at a price—and will strip you layer-by-layer of living dignity if you are short of the price.

The hell which was Auschwitz or Dachau is the most pregnant image of brutality available to our modern senses. Nothing compares with the total awfulness of systematic, industrial genocide. Visiting Dachau, the overwhelming memory is not the gas chambers or the starkly sadistic regulations on the wall or the infertile land all around the camp where plant life simply will not grow; it is the hill overlooking Dachau camp where houses stand and stood as workers were being tortured and exterminated. Somebody was looking on. Perhaps they walked the dog or told the children not to run too close to the wire. Maybe they too just vomited within, refusing to lift a finger because it was someone else confined to hell for now .

But the most moving scenes from the camps—for this writer at least—were the photographs of liberation. We do not know what those who survived were thinking. But we know what they were entitled historically to think: Why, oh why, did you not come sooner?

Be clear, this is not about saving other people—although wishing to unlock the doors of hell is no act to be ashamed of. But the platitudes of moralising salvation can be left to others who make a business from it, sitting in their golden Vatican palace and archbishops' mansions weeping crocodile tears for the poor “who will always be with us” as Christ was so eager to remind us.

Why abolish hell on earth? Because it is near me and its stink can't be avoided. Because its flames are unpredictable and catch passers-by who imagined they were safe. Because most people reading this are only an insecure job and a few pounds in the bank away from the gutter. Because Dickens, when his family lost its money, was confined to the hell of Camden Town and after a century of energetic reforming the ragged wretches of its streets would still be recognised by him. Perhaps because it is impossible to be a complete human while others are being dehumanised before us. To live on the hill overlooking the death camp of our own times—which we don’t call death camps because only the future recognises the indifference to such miseries which are so conveniently and euphemistically hidden from the moment of the present tense—is to be a collaborator in something so awful that one must either ignore it or destroy it, putting in its place something which seems decent.

Steve Coleman