Time Will Run Back

Chapter 7

SO!” said Bolshekov. He looked Peter up and down. “You know absolutely no history, absolutely none?”

Peter nodded.

“Well, that can only be made up by giving you a list of books to read. But I will sketch in the general outlines, so that you can get your bearings. Our histories, like our calendar, are divided roughly into two parts: B.M. and A.M.—Before Marx and After Marx. This, for example,”—pointing to a day calendar on the wall—“is the Year of Our Marx 282, which means 282 years after His birth. Certainly you learned at least that in the Communist schools before you were eight!”

Peter nodded again.

“But this is the older division. Our recent writers divide history into three great periods: Ancient History, the Dark Ages, and Modern History. Ancient History is all that period, of which practically nothing is now known, that came before what was amusingly called in the Dark Ages the Industrial Revolution. Of course it wasn’t a revolution at all; it was a counterrevolution. The Dark Ages begin with the birth of capitalism. There is still some difference among historians as to the exact year in which the Dark Ages began. Some of them place it at 95 B.M., which was the year in which a bourgeois named Adam Smith was born; others place it at 42 B.M., which was the year in which a book appeared by this Adam Smith. This book gave birth to, and presented an elaborate system of apologetics for, the capitalist ideology.”

“What was the name of the book?”

“That is no longer known; but I will come to all that in a moment. The Dark Ages represents the whole period from the birth of capitalism until its final overthrow in the series of cold and shooting wars between about 150 A.M. and the final triumph of communism in 184 A.M.”

“So modern history, Your Highness—history since the complete and final triumph of communism—is now just a couple of years less than a century old?”

“Correct. Now I won’t go into the details of the long and complicated series of wars that led to the final overthrow of capitalism. Soviet Russia, of course, led the forces of communism. The forces of capitalism mainly centered around what we now know as the Disunited States, which kept losing allies, both without and within. But you will get all of that from your history books, of which I will give you a list before you leave.”

He made a note on a small pad in front of him.

“Yet I must impress upon you,” he continued, “the one central reason for communism’s success. We began with apparently every possible disadvantage. The enemy started with better arms, more technical advancement, more production, more resources. And yet we beat them in the end because we had the one tremendous weapon that they lacked. We had Faith! Faith in our own Cause! Faith that never for a moment wavered or faltered! We knew that we were right! Right in everything! We knew that they were wrong! Wrong in everything!”

Bolshekov was shouting. He stopped for a moment as if to let this sink in.

“The enemy never had any real faith in capitalism,” he went on. “They started out with little, and began rapidly to lose what they had. Those who had once embraced the gospel of communism were willing to die for it; but nobody was willing to die for capitalism. That would have been considered a sort of joke. Finally, the best thing our enemies could think of saying for capitalism was that it wasn’t communism! Even they didn’t seem to think that capitalism had any positive virtues of its own. And so they simply denounced communism. But their idea of meeting the challenge of communism was to imitate it. They gave lip service to capitalism and to something that they called private enterprise or free enterprise—nobody any longer knows what these old phrases meant—but every ‘reform’ they put into effect as an ‘answer’ to communism was another step in the direction of adopting communism. For every reform they adopted left the individual with less power and the State with more. Step by step the control of individuals over resources and goods was taken away; step by step that control was taken over by the State. It was at first not ‘ownership’ but merely the power of decision that was turned over to the State. But the fools who were trying to ‘reform’ capitalism did not see that the power of decision, the power of disposal, was the essence of ‘ownership.’ So they took away from private individuals, step by step, the power to set their own prices, or to decide what to produce or how much of it, or to hire or discharge labor at will, or to set the terms of employment. Gradually their governments themselves fixed all these things, but piecemeal, instead of in one grand logical swoop. It was amusing to see them slavishly imitate the Communist Five-Year Plans by their own ‘Four-Year Plans. These were, of course, like ours, all State plans. Incredible as it now seems, these people actually seemed to believe that calling them Four-Year Plans instead of Five-Year Plans would prevent everybody from recognizing the imitation. In fact, some of them were too stupid even to know at first that they were imitating.”

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?”

Peter admitted that he had. Bolshekov threw up his hands in a gesture of resignation and despair.

“Well, this proves that my feeling about it has always been right. I’ve always contended that on this point of music our ancestral communist leaders weakened in their resolution, that they failed to be thorough, and we are suffering from that mistake to this day.

“Here is what happened. They ordered all the music of the Dark Ages burned; and it was burned. But there was one thing they didn’t count on—people’s memories.”

“Memories of the bonfires?”

“No! Memories of the music! The musicians remembered the music! They remembered nearly all of it! Do you know that there were orchestra conductors who remembered whole symphonies, even when these were written for scores of instruments? It was found that among them the living musicians carried in their memories the whole of bourgeois composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Haydn! And of course the pianists remembered all the piano music; and so on.”

“I am not surprised to learn that,” said Peter; “but what could have been done about it?”

“They could have wiped out the melodies by wiping out everyone who remembered the melodies! They could at least have forbidden anyone to play or sing or hum them, on penalty of death, and gradually the memory would have died out.... But on this one point our communist ancestors were lax and weak. They compromised. They allowed people to rewrite the old scores, and even the tunes of the old songs, provided the words were left out or proletarian words substituted. They provided merely that none of these things could ever be played except by chosen members of the Steel Frame in the hearing only of other members of the Steel Frame.”

“Oh, that’s why His Supremacy allowed me to learn Mozart! And that’s why I couldn’t get at the scores in the library without a special card and key!”

“His Supremacy can never do anything wrong.” Bolshekov made the sign of the S on his breast, and then looked significantly into space.

“Well, to continue. The biggest split in the Politburo itself came on the question of science. Bourgeois biology was nonsense. Bourgeois astronomy was unnecessary, except for navigation. But bourgeois medicine had cured even communists.... And bourgeois physics and chemistry and mathematics had helped to direct artillery fire and were necessary for the industry and engineering that are necessary for wars.... Moreover, all the important discoveries of so-called bourgeois science or mathematics had in any case been made by Russians—”

“I’ve often wondered,” said Peter, “who discovered the differential calculus.”

“I’ve forgotten myself,” said Bolshekov, “whether it was Tchaikovsky or Lenin.... In any case, there was lengthy debate about the whole matter, and our ancestors finally decided on a selective purge of the sciences. They burned all the old books, but not until they had copied what they wanted out of them and rewritten them from a Marxist point of view.”

“Supposing somebody did not turn in all his books for the bonfires when they were demanded?”

“Our ancestors simply prescribed the death penalty for anyone in whose possession any of these books was found. If they were found in any house, every member of the family in that house—and everybody in the house on either side of it—was sentenced to death. This naturally made everyone alert to see that all the books were destroyed.”

“People were encouraged to spy on each other and to betray each other?”

“How else could a really thorough job have been done?”

Peter was silent. His thoughts went back to the peasant family in the May Day parade. “But what happened,” he resumed, “when people had memorized poetry as they had music—or parts in plays—or stories or novels or old sayings?”

“Ah,” answered Bolshekov, “here we come to the most brilliant stroke of our communist ancestors—the invention of Marxanto!”

“Didn’t people always speak Marxanto?”5

“Not until after the former capitalist world had been wholly conquered! Our ancestors saw precisely the problem you have just raised. They saw that people might remember these stories and verses and pass them down from generation to generation word of mouth. And then they thought of a device that solved not one, but nearly all of their problems at a single stroke!”

Bolshekov paused dramatically.

“They invented a new language—Marxanto, and forced everybody to learn it!

“Can’t you see how many problems that solved?” he went on, smiling. “The language we think in determines the very way we think. The words we use come already loaded with the meanings that decide our conclusions. Now all the ancient languages—all of them now dead and fortunately irrecoverable—were loaded almost from the beginning of time with bourgeois and capitalistic connotations, implications, emotions, sentiments, attitudes. We had already seen how much could be done to change all these by describing everything in a new vocabulary. This was the great discovery and the great triumph of our Prophet and Redeemer, Karl Marx. When he had finally maneuvered his opponents into talking in his vocabulary they were already in the linguistic trap. For everyone who used the Marxist terms—capitalism, finance capitalism, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat, the masses, the class struggle, class antagonism, capitalist imperialism, historical determinism, dialectic materialism, utopianism, capitalist exploitation—whoever used these terms accepted along with them the concepts that must inevitably lead him to the Marxist conclusions. Why not, then, complete and nail down the intellectual triumph by eradicating every word embodying a bourgeois concept and substituting for it words embodying the Marxist concepts?

“That is what our revolutionary ancestors did. They called together an assembly of their greatest Marxist dialecticians, linguists, lexicographers, semanticists and propagandists, and ordered them to create an entirely new language. They made a new dictionary, consisting not only of new words, but of new, precise Marxist definitions of each of those words. They replaced the bourgeois grammar of the old languages with a new proletarian grammar for the new language!”

“But how did they get people to learn the new language and to forget their own?”

“Ah! They were forced to issue new bilingual dictionaries in each of the scores of existing national languages. The new equivalents were given with the new definitions. Each of these dictionaries was numbered and allowed to be held for only three years. Henceforth only Marxanto was allowed to be taught in the schools. Children and adults both were given three years to learn and use the new language. Then they were forced to turn in all bilingual dictionaries, and all of these were burned. Meanwhile everything that was worth preserving was rewritten and translated into the new language. And thereafter no one could use anything but Marxanto on penalty of death!

“Now look at all that was accomplished at a single stroke! The old bourgeois languages, words, meanings and connotations were totally destroyed. People were prohibited, on penalty of death, from speaking any poetry or phrase that they remembered from the old languages—and their grandchildren wouldn’t have been able to understand them anyway. Wonworld was cemented together by a single international language! And this language itself was so constructed, and its words so defined, that nobody could henceforth arrive at any but Marxist conclusions!

“We constructed a new poetry, a new science, a new logic! It meant at last a clean slate, a fresh start, a new dawn in the history of man!”

An exalted light came into Bolshekov’s eyes.

“Well, I have talked too long. You are so ignorant, there is so much to tell you, and the excitement of having for the first time a grown man to whom all this wonderful history can be communicated, has carried me far beyond the hour I had set aside. Here: I must give you a list of books.”

He wrote down some names rapidly on a pad and handed a slip to Peter. “Here are the three best histories—though if you begin with the three volumes of Ordanov you won’t need the other two small volumes: they are merely popular condensations.

Get these from a State bookstore today. Be here again at ten tomorrow.” “Have you time now, Your Highness, to answer one question?” Peter asked, getting up.

“What is it?”

“If all the old histories of the ancient world and the Dark Ages were destroyed, in order to wipe out the very memory of these so-called civilizations, how is it that you yourself know so much about them?”

“You don’t seem to understand. What I have given you is the present official history of that dead world. It is the history that the Protectors of Wonworld have voted to teach. When they wiped out all the old books, they had to decide what history to put in its place. What I have told you is the agreed-upon history.”

“But did things actually happen that way? Was it actually so?”

“I will explain all that when we get to neo-Marxian logic. The only question to be raised about a statement is not, Is it so? but What good will it do?”

“You mean you don’t actually know whether the history you have just recited is true or not?”

“What do you mean by ‘true’? Truth, as you will see by the Marxanto dictionary, is just an instrument; it is simply whatever belief works satisfactorily. Truth is whatever is good for Communism. But that opens up the whole subject of neo-Marxian logic, and we can’t go into that today. Be here tomorrow at ten.”