The Thinking Reed

Sometimes, to cover themselves, they claim that things are ‘better’ in El Salvador or in Chile than in the Soviet Union. That is, frankly, a lie: socialist oppositionists, Christian democrats and liberals are murdered in their dozens every day in Latin America.178 To justify these murders by reference to the Stalin terror is sacrilege, but it is a fully logical procedure. The Stalinists always considered that repressions in their own country could be justified by repressions elsewhere. Here again the New Right is imitating the Stalinist type of thinking, without considering that no political murders can be justified.

Anti-Stalinism will not, in itself, make someone either a humanist or a democrat. ‘The anti-hangman’, wrote Pomerants, ‘bears within himself a charge of fury that will tomorrow produce a new hangman… In the realm of the soul, anti will not do at all.’179 Rebels themselves feel the need for some positive idea. It is natural for human beings to strive towards ideals, and when an ideal collapses the world begins to seem insipid and meaningless. ‘It is difficult’, writes the British philosopher-economist Schumacher,

to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion — political or otherwise — which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time.180

There have been people like Bukovsky who have tried to get by without any ideology at all, but the experience of Bukovsky himself, who eventually turned into an ideologist, showed that this does not work. Spasmodic attempts are begun to find or construct such an idea, but naturally, it is constructed from the ideological and philosophical material that is to hand. ‘Primitive people, without intellectual needs,’ writes Bukovsky,

are inclined to interpret the Soviet newspapers simply a rebours, as though seen in a mirror, so to speak. If somebody is denounced, that means he must be a good man, and if he is praised, he must be bad… All of which is partly true, but such over-simplification deprives the reader of much of the news, leaving only the bald fact. What remains important are nuances, scales, degrees — in short, information.181

Although Bukovsky is trying to better his world-view, he takes the official propaganda as his starting point. If you reverse this, you see ‘the bald fact’, and later you can improve on this with ‘nuances, scales, degrees’. He ‘knows’ how to read the newspapers, and is sure that he can extract correct information from them. Here he shows himself to be a slave to propaganda, for he agrees to form his view of the world on the basis of the picture presented to him. He does not think about the world but, instead, rethinks propaganda. In this respect the ordinary Soviet person, who believes some things he reads in the paper but not others, is much more of a critic than is a dissident of the Bukovsky type, who believes everything, but in his own way. In starting to form his ‘new’ ideology in this way, the dissident resembles those thinkers of whom Marx wrote that in their revolt against the dominant theory, they ‘contest it from its own standpoint’.182

The logic of the history of ideology — and, more precisely, the inertia of thought — means that although dogmas fall, dogmatism remains. The dogmatic type of thinking proves highly tenacious of life, and new dogmas arise to replace the discredited ones. Thus criticism of ideology is accompanied by the creation of dogmas, the creation not of new ideas but of an anti-ideology which lives by that same logic of unilinearity as the official doctrine. In place of the ‘absolute’ values consecrated by the state we get anti-values, and as an ideal of human conduct, instead of the Semitic commissar of 1918, the anti-Semitic Black-Hundred-ist of 1908.