The Thinking Reed

What is this dogmatic style of thinking? Its main feature, in my view, is an endeavour to understand the world by starting from some readymade general formula which ‘explains everything’ and cannot be doubted. It is impossible to refute such a formula by rational arguments, because any rational information that contradicts the dogma is re-thought from the standpoint of that dogma and thereby rendered harmless to it. Debates with a dogmatist are fruitless: in his own eyes, at least, he always emerges from them victorious. The formula must be simple and extremely general. For example: ‘all Jews are dishonest’, or ‘all Bolsheviks are scoundrels’. You may adduce as many counterarguments as you like — talk about Jews who were renowned for their honesty, or about Bolsheviks who never committed any scoundrelism. In reply you hear that of course, the Jews mentioned were just hypocrites who carefully concealed their dishonesty and the Bolsheviks of whom you spoke simply committed their scoundrelly acts in such a way that nobody noticed. No rational arguments can take effect in such a debate.183

Here, for example, we have Bukovsky, who is convinced that ‘Stalin, with all his brutality, was an organic consequence of Leninist ideas and of the very idea of socialism itself.’184 If that formula is beyond question, then all the ideas of ‘Eurocommunism’, the ‘Prague spring’ and so on, are so much idle chatter and dangerous demagogy.185 Hence the ‘self-evident’ conclusion, which is specially formulated in Bukovsky’s book Pis' ma russkogo puteshestvennika,186 that the Western socialists, and even Social Democrats, are no better than the Communists: they are all tarred with the same brush! Here we have a generalization of the ‘You’re-all-swine’ type, and here lies the root of the evil. This is, if you like, the methodological foundation of foundations of dogmatism, its ‘cage’: all ideological phenomena that are alien to you are thrown into one heap and without further analysis, without proof, are wiped out. It is the same logic that enabled Stalin and his assistants to set up the ‘amalgam’ trials. If you do not agree with the Party line, you are not a Communist. If you are not a Communist, that means that you are a supporter of capitalism. A supporter of capitalism — that means an enemy of the people, and… to the execution wall with him! We see the same logic in the case of the Russian New Right, only now ‘all the other way round’. Every Communist without exception bears, for them, responsibility for the crimes of Stalin: between Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Togliatti, on the one hand, and Stalin, Beria and Yezhov on the other, there is no difference. ‘Socialism with a human face’ is based, as they see it, on the same principles as the Gulag, and Western socialists are preparing ‘an easy transition to Communist rule’.187 All Lefts are Communists, all Communists are hangmen, and… to the wall with them! He has yet to reach that final generalization which was made in the immortal novel by Ilf and Petrov, Diamonds To Sit On: ‘All Jews are lefties’, although some people are even now ready to draw that conclusion, too. To be sure, nobody has gone to that wall yet; nor, God grant, will they. But Maksimov is already threatening to put the Social Democrats on trial. One is made a little uneasy when one reads in Bukovsky’s book how he and his friends, when young, dreamed of being issued with ‘brand-new machine-guns’.188 To tell the truth, I should not want to see a machine-gun in Bukovsky’s hands.