Time Will Run Back (7 page)

He stopped to pour himself a glass of water.

“In brief, step by step the capitalistic world accepted the basic premise of communism—that the individual, left to himself, is greedy, callous, stupid and irresponsible; that ‘individualism’ and ‘liberty’ are simply euphemisms for dog-eat-dog, the law-of-the-jungle, the-devil-take-the-hindmost—in short, euphemisms for anarchy—and that only the State has responsibility, only the State has wisdom, only the State can be just, only the State can be trusted with power. They accepted this premise, but they lacked the courage or the clarity to follow it to its logical end. They lacked the courage to see that the individual, because he is responsible to nobody, must be deprived of all power, and that the State, the State representing
all
the people, must be the sole depositor of all the power, the sole maker of decisions, the sole judge of its own—”

He pulled himself up. “I hadn’t meant to get into all of this just now. But is it any surprise that the capitalist world was defeated? Is it any surprise that it kept losing supporters both from the outside and from the inside? Do you know what the American political leaders did at one time? They threw huge sums of money around the world to try to
bribe
the rest of the world not to go communist! They thought they could
buy
off faith by dollars!”

“And what happened?”

“What would you expect to happen? The other bourgeois countries found that the easiest way to get money out of the Disunited States was to hint that they might go communist if they didn’t get it. Soon they began to believe themselves that their chief reason for not going communist was as a favor to the Disunited States, and that their chief reason for arming against us was not for their own preservation but again as a favor to the Disunited States! If bourgeois America wanted them to arm, they felt, it could jolly well pay for it! And they used most of the other American funds, anyway, to finance socialist programs—in other words, to move in the direction of communism!”

He grinned, then turned suddenly serious again. “Should there be any surprise that while they could bribe only a few spies among
us
, we had swarms of voluntary spies among
them
—people who gave us information gladly, of their own will; people whom we did not have to pay; people who ‘betrayed their countries,’ to use the phrase of condemnation that the capitalist nations tried to adopt—people who betrayed their countries exultantly, from a sense of duty, because their countries were wrong, and because they were serving a higher cause, the cause of humanity!” Peter was deeply impressed by the passion and conviction of this man. “Well, I hope you’ll forgive me,” said Bolshekov, “if I keep getting carried away from my point.”

“No, no,” said Peter; “all this is precisely what I need to learn. But may I ask one question? Why did the bourgeois countries fight against communism at all?”

“They fought against communism because they were ‘against’ communism. That was the only point on which they could agree. But they didn’t know what they were
for
. Everybody was for something different. Nobody had the courage to defend a capitalism that was true to the basic premises of capitalism. Each had his own little plan for a ‘reformed’ capitalism. They could stave off communism, they thought, only by ‘correcting abuses’; but all their plans for correcting abuses were steps
toward
socialism and communism. They quarreled among themselves as to how far they wanted to go toward communism in order to ‘defeat’ communism, as to how far they should embrace communist ideas in order to destroy communist ideas. I know all this sounds incredible, but I assure you it is true.”

“But didn’t
anybody
have faith in capitalism?”

“Not in the sense in which everybody on our side had faith and has faith in communism. The strongest among our enemies were halfhearted. They merely
apologized
for capitalism. They would say that capitalism, with all its faults—and then they would compete against each other in seeing who could admit the most faults—that capitalism with all its faults was probably as good as reasonable men could expect—and so forth and so on. And so we wiped them out.”

Bolshekov made a quick movement with the flat of his hand to symbolize heads being cut off.

“But we will have to get on with our history. Having utterly defeated them, having exterminated not only their leaders but everybody who could be remotely suspected of believing in capitalism, we decided that the job would not be complete, and that we might at a later time face the same struggle all over again, unless we stamped out the whole rotten capitalist civilization, so that the very memory of it would disappear from the minds of men!”

“You mean that our ancestors stamped out
everything
? Didn’t they try to separate the good from the bad?”

“The good? Separate? What could be good in a thoroughly rotten civilization? What could be good that was built on a lie? What could be good that was based on injustice, on the exploitation of class by class? What could be good in a bourgeois ideology? And as for separating—When the plague of 261 broke out in Moscow we had to shoot everybody who had it to keep him from contaminating the rest of us. Could we separate the ‘good’ people who had it from the ‘bad’ people who had it?
They had the plague!
Whoever or whatever carried the microbes of the plague was a menace to all the rest of us! And so it was with whoever or whatever carried the microbes of capitalism!

“And so we began the work of stamping out every sign and memory of the rotten capitalist civilization. We leveled all the churches. You may not believe it, but there were people who dared to question that step. They called the churches ‘things of beauty,* ‘architectural monuments,’ ‘frozen music’ You have no idea of the nonsense they talked. Architectural monuments! Monuments to superstition! Monuments to lull and drug and enslave the people! As if anything could have beauty, except a poisonous and dangerous pseudo-beauty, that was built on a lie! Then of course we slashed and burned all the religious paintings, and shattered all the religious images and statuary. Wait till you read about the ridiculous fuss that was raised in the Italian Soviet, for example, about
that
!”

He laughed sardonically. “Well, then of course we burned all the other paintings, which were simply dripping with bourgeois ideology and capitalist apologetics. We did save a few paintings—portraits of Karl Marx, of Lenin, of Stalin, and a few paintings by a Mexican called Orozco depicting the proletariat rising against their masters. But we didn’t save much, fortunately.

“And then we got to the books!... Our ancestors thought it was more fun not to burn them all at once. Cat-and-mouse tactics, you know. Assurances of moderation, so as not to raise opposition even within our own camp at the start. The leaders of our ancestors decided to begin merely on all the capitalist economic books. No one could object to
that!
So on one fine May Day we burned the whole of capitalist economics, the whole rotten system of direct apologetics.... I don’t think we have yet begun to realize the progress the world made on that day! Naturally we had to burn most of the answers to capitalist apologetics, too, so that nobody would be able to reconstruct from them an idea of what capitalist economics was like.

“Well then, of course, we started on what they called their literature! And here too our ancestral leaders were very clever. About two weeks after the burning of capitalist economics, they announced that the whole of religious literature would have to be destroyed, but that this would end the program for the present. So on May 17—another great day—they burned every extant copy of a book called the Bible, perhaps the book that had done more than any other to hold up the spread of communism and dialectical materialism. Of course all other religious literature, including prayer books and mountains of sermons that probably no one read anyhow—but our ancestors had to play safe—was burned along with the Bibles.

“A few months later our ancestors announced that the new Wonworld regime was unfortunately not yet safe, and would not be so long as bourgeois philosophy and ethical theories and logic were allowed to exist. So these were consigned to the flames.”

“Did that mean, Your Highness,
all
the then existing philosophy?”

“Certainly—all of it except Marxist philosophy, for whatever was not Marxist was of course either unnecessary or pernicious.

“Well, then our ancestors burned all the books on politics and sociology. These of course were the worst of all. They used the words ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ in the capitalist and bourgeois sense instead of in the communist and proletarian sense, and created endless confusion. By liberty they meant liberty to starve, liberty even to criticize the State—can you imagine? And by democracy they meant secret elections, in which you couldn’t even tell who or what a man had voted for. How could you ever detect disloyalty under such a system? By democracy, in fact, they even meant the power
openly
to organize a
recognized
opposition to the existing government! Well, thank Marx, our ancestors took care of
that!

“The next big bonfire was that of history and biography. All these bonfires took place at intervals of a few months, and of course the next step was never announced until the Protectors got to it. The one thing to be said in favor of ‘gradualism’ is that it lulls and divides the opposition. You tell them always that the step you are taking completes your program, that it isn’t a precedent for anything else; that they are foolish to talk of the ‘principle’ involved in a new step when every step is taken purely on its individual merits; and that they are downright hysterical to oppose what hasn’t even yet been suggested.

“Well, bourgeois history, of course, was the worst of all. It would sometimes openly contradict dialectical materialism. It would even try to twist facts so as to lead people to think, for example, that every struggle had not been a class struggle. These historians not only pretended that the world had actually grown richer under capitalism; they talked as if the poor themselves, in America, for example, had constantly become better off—whereas, in fact, they were dying off miserably like flies.”

“But how,” Peter began, “did the population grow to be—?”

Bolshekov rebuked him. “You’d better keep your questions until after I’ve finished.... Well, next our ancestors burned the essays and encyclopedias—they only needed to declare a half-holiday for that—and then they made mighty bonfires of all the poetry and drama and fiction—all of it, of course, riddled throughout with bourgeois ideology—”

“Didn’t they have
any
great poets or dramatists, like ourselves?”

“How
could
they have had, when these poets and dramatists either understood nothing, or were hired lickspittles trying to curry favor with the rich and powerful?”

“But didn’t any of their fiction attack capitalism?”

“Oh,
most
of it did—but incompetently. In any case, it had served its purpose. It had divided, confused, undermined and disintegrated the opposition to communism. But now that the opposition was totally destroyed, what further need was there for such literature? Moreover, though most of these novelists ridiculed and hammered away at some cornerstone, or one or two of the pillars supporting capitalism, they always seemed to want to preserve some other pillar, some bourgeois or capitalist value, like ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘freedom of conscience,’ or some other pernicious doctrine. They hadn’t the slightest realization of how or why the capitalist values hung together.

“Then our ancestral leaders turned-to music, and ordered all existing score sheets burned—with, of course, the exception of the
International
, and a few revolutionary compositions—”

“But what was wrong, Your Highness, with the existing music?”

“What was wrong with it? Ask me what was
right
about it! Of course there were not lacking people—and one or two of them were on the Politburo itself—who argued that bourgeois music was harmless. They thought that with the exception of an enormous number of bourgeois love songs, full of claptrap about sexual faithfulness, and songs about mother and home and liberty, and patriotic songs—and all this trash of course
nobody
defended—they thought that with these exceptions the rest might be left, on the ground that it didn’t actually
say
anything. Fortunately they were overruled, on the solid ground that bourgeois music necessarily reflected and might perpetuate all sorts of sticky bourgeois sentiments and emotions and ways of feeling—”

“But what harm,” Peter broke in, “could a pure pattern of sound—”

“What harm? Look at a music scale! The very symbol of bourgeois inequality, with some notes higher than other notes—”

“But don’t we have inequality in our own social system? Don’t we divide people into Protectors, Proletarians—”

“That is not inequality; that is merely difference in function. Let’s not bring up these matters until we get to them. In any case, there is no resemblance whatever between the bourgeois inequality and class divisions reflected in the musical scale—they even had ‘major’ keys for the employers’ songs and ‘minor’ keys for the workers’ songs—and the necessary differences of function in a communist society. Do you know that bourgeois music even had self-confessed
dissonances?
Proletarian music can contain only the purest harmony, to reflect the unadulterated and uninterrupted harmony of the communist society!”

Peter felt that on this point, at least, he ought to be the instructor and Bolshekov the pupil. He suspected that Bolshekov did not know the difference between a dominant seventh and a hole in the ground. He longed to tell him how necessary discords and their resolution were to harmony. Instead, he asked mildly: “Is Mozart a communist composer?”

“Mozart? Great Marx, no! He was the worst type of bourgeois! He composed all that rubbish on commission from archbishops and emperors and such, and even from the church! So you can imagine what kind of trash it must have been.” Bolshekov suddenly looked at him shrewdly. “How do
you
know about Mozart? Do you play Mozart?”