30.11.1995

Cromwell Street trial sees morality go west

IT IS not only the tabloid press with its screaming headlines that has placed the murderous activities of Fred and Rosemary West in the straightforward, uncomplicated category of ‘evil’.

One reporter, Bryan Appleyard, wrote:

“Looking at Rosemary, I found it hard to believe in the simple fact of her appearance. It seemed impossible that all she had done was not branded on her exterior. Surely such depravity should leave some clear mark, or failing that, surely by studying this slightly odd respectability I could follow the chain of causality back to the deranged abattoir of 25 Cromwell Street. But I couldn’t. Nobody could” (The Independent, November 23).

Having located this ‘evil’ as residing within individual human beings, the bourgeois moralists enter into anguished debates about how it got there. Are we born evil, as some religions maintain, or born ‘good’, only to be corrupted by malign influences?

The answer is neither. The nature of individuals is largely determined by the world as they experience it - first and foremost by society itself; by their relations with other humans, themselves also moulded by society.

It is class society’s distortion and repression of our very humanity, including our sexuality, which provides the alienating backdrop to the extreme example of the Wests.

Can society itself directly promote such horrors as slow death by torture, to the sexual gratification of onlookers? The phrase, ‘hung, drawn and quartered’, gives us a clear answer. Public executions still occur in several parts of the world and could even be reintroduced in advanced countries such as Britain in a revolutionary situation. Today army recruits are systematically and routinely brutalised in order to prepare them for the inhuman task of savagely killing ‘the enemy’.

The notion of what is good and what is evil has always been determined by the interests of ruling classes, and it is only through ridding the world of class society that we can provide a genuinely human morality.

Alan Fox