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
“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
Similar Books
