Rubashov stood up; Ivanov also rose; again he ranged half a head above Rubashov.
He pressed an electric bell next to his desk.
While they waited for the warder to come and fetch Rubashov, Ivanov said:
“You wrote in your last article, a few months ago, that this next decade will decide the fate of the world in our era.
Don’t you want to be here for that?”
He smiled down at Rubashov.
In the corridor steps were approaching; the door was opened.
Two warders came in and saluted.
Without a word, Rubashov stepped between them; they started the march back to his cell.
The noises in the corridors had now died out; from some cells came a subdued snoring, which sounded like moaning.
All over the building the yellow, stale electric light was burning.
The Second Hearing
When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality.
With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death.
For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.
DIETRICH VON NIEHEIM, BISHOP OF VERDEN:
De schismate libri III, A.D.
1411
1
Extract from the diary of N. S.
Rubashov,
on the fifth day of imprisonment “...
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood.
He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
“But who will be proved right?
It will only be known later.
Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution
“It is said that No.
1 has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside.
So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics.
We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century.
In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity.
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history, at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country, the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it.
We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason—that was our greatness, the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism.
That is why we will in the end be absolved by history, but not they. ...
“Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit.
As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic.
We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it.
We are sailing without ballast, therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.
“A short time ago, our leading agriculturist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash.
No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs.
In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate of potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.
If No. I was in the right, history will absolve him, and the execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle.
If he was wrong ...
“It is that alone that matters who is objectively in the right.
The cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another problem: whether B. was subjectively in good faith when he recommended nitrogen.
If he was not, according to their ethics he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that nitrogen would have been better after all.
If he was in good faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be ruined by it. ...
“That is, of course, complete nonsense.