The Windowless Wall
REEDY swine!'
`Greedy swine yourself.'
`Tu quoque is the sign of a fool, so you must be a fool as well as a swine.'
I suppose the verbal sword-play of the schoolroom still includes this classic riposte; and I agree that to quoque is rather a feeble dialectical gambit (though Heaven knows how they would get on without it in the House of Commons). But there is one context in which it hardly ever seems to be used, and I can never quite understand why.
For several decades the Communists have been proclaiming that all non-Communist political systems are doomed; and although not everybody has accepted this forecast, very few people—and those mostly extremists of one sort or another— have suggested that things are at least as likely to work out the other way round.
Only three things can be said, with the precision required of a lexicographer, about Communism. The first is that it is a political doctrine. The second is that it was evolved by persons who were in exile at the time and who had never exercised administrative responsibility. The third is that it has never worked.
When I say. that it has never worked, I mean exactly what I say. As a method of running a community in the twentieth century, Communism has not achieved even the local successes which have been granted to the Mormons and the Doukhobors. We talk about 'Communist Russia' and 'Communist China'; the Russians and the Chinese do not. When I first visited the USSR a quarter of a century ago I was mildly surprised to find that Russia did not regard herself as a Communist State. 'We are a Socialist State,' they said. 'We are on the road to Communism.' They are on it still; and they have just discovered that the man who guided them down it for twenty- nine of the last years was an unreliable exhibitionist who did not know the way., * * If you subscribe, as most people—including most Russians —do, to the theory that man is a noble piece of work, it really is extraordinarily difficult to think of a worse way of ruling him than their way. I do not (of course) mean a less effective way; I mean a more basically unsound way, having regard to what man really is. It is easy to say 'Dictatorship suits the Russians' or 'They've never really known anything else.' In fact no men, in any country, in any age, have counted the loss of their liberties a blessing, or even a burden which they were prepared to sustain for an indefinite period. The promotion of mistrust between leaders at all levels has never been a source of strength to any State. To insist that all the citizens should hold the same political creed is a bad and ridiculous thing to do, and it is not made any less ridiculous if, at irregular intervals and for arbitrary reasons, you make alterations in the creed.
A well-knit modern community is not one in which the head of the State from time to time finds it expedient to have several of his principal subordinates shot or thrown into prison. To falsify the history of your own country and of the civilisation to which you belong is foolish, unbecoming and dishonest; and to feel obliged to refalsify it every so often, like a confidence trickster altering his patter in mid-swindle, is plain silly, impairing your chances of deluding the citizens.
The reflex action whereby each successive regime degrades the heroes and denies the doctrines of the one before it may consolidate the political positions of its members, but it can hardly be said to lay a sure foundation for those traditions from which all nations draw a part of their strength. To erect a sort of deer-fence round one-sixth of the world's land surface and not to allow any of the people inside to go out or any of the people outside to come in may be a prudent measure during the formative stages of a new political system; but if the deer-fence becomes a permanent feature of the world's landscape, and indeed a sort of symbol of the system, there must be something wrong somewhere.
* * *
Most people seem to take the survival of Communism as a world force for granted. They see it as though it were a windowless wall of the room we all live in, as something that at best will always be there and at worst will relentlessly close in on the room and squash us flat. They may be right about this, and certainly it would be idiotic to underrate the dynamic strength of a political movement which in so short a time has enslaved (or, if you prefer double-talk, liberated) so large a part of mankind.
But the achievements of Communism cannot alter or even obscure the fact that both its theory and its practice are based on the conscious suppression, distortion or denial of ultimate truths (such as that liberty is a good thing, lies are bad things, and human rights belong to all human beings, not just to those whom the State happens to approve of at the moment); and anyone's estimate of its future must largely depend on how long he believes that large numbers of his fellow men will continue to rally to a doctrine which, because of its inherent contempt for truth, stands revealed at frequent intervals as nonsensical and base.
* * *
Is Communism a wall of the room in which mankind lives? Or is it a monkey-puzzle which has grown up, on what used to be the lawn, during the last half-century and which, after darkening the windows of another generation or two, will fall to the axe or to decay? Although there is almost no limit to the extent to which men's, and especially children's, minds can be abused in a modern totalitarian State, I nevertheless believe that the human animal has, in the long run, the same fundamental need for truth that it has for salt. So I, per- sonally, would plump for the monkey-puzzle. though 1 doubt if 1 shall be there to count the rings on its stump. STRIX
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