Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (10 page)

The odd part is that after the Bolsheviks took over, it became fashionable in the West to act as if they were the true republicans. Lincoln Stefans, "America's Philosopher," visited the Soviet Union and returned to say, "I have been over into the future, and it works." American labor union leaders visited terrible places in the Gulag and came home praising the Soviet's "rehabilitation programs." And everywhere, Western intellectuals proclaimed "there is no enemy to the left."

Republics were in danger only from the right; this despite the news from the Soviet Union.

Make no mistake: as Robert Conquest shows in
Harvest of Sorrow
, the truth about the artificial famine in the Ukraine was widely available in the west. The
Manchester Guardian
and
Daily Telegraph
,
Le Figaro
,
Neue Zuricher Zeitung
, and the
Christian Science Monitor
and
New York Herald Tribune
gave broad coverage. Most of this was ignored by Western intellectuals. Some didn't believe it. Others said you can't make omelets without breaking eggs, as if that trite phrase excused turning the breadbasket of Europe into a death camp of starving people.

George Bernard Shaw said, "I did not see a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of foam rubber inside?" Of course, Shaw went where he was told, accompanied by official guides, unlike Malcolm Muggeridge, who went to the Ukraine in secret, and found the people starving.

Then there were Beatrice and Sydney Webb, champions of English Socialism, who said, "The cost of collectivization was driving out the universally hated kulaks and the recalcitrant Don Cossacks by tens or even hundreds of thousands of families," and conclude that dekulakization was planned from the start to summarily eject from their homes "something like a million families. Strong must have been the faith and resolute the will of the men who, in the interest of what seemed to them the public good, could make so momentous a decision."

Robert Conquest observes that these words might equally be applied to Hitler and the Final Solution.

Steven Vincent Benet was one of our better poets, and a man who believed in freedom and the Republic, but even he did not see that between Red Fascism and Black Fascism there was only this difference: the Red variety was much more efficient and racked up a much higher score of victims.

Benet's "Litany" was dedicated to the victims of Black Fascism, but it can serve for all, including, of our charity, Trotsky and Antonov, who were themselves murdered by the regime they created.

 
For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time . . .
For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten
By the skillful boys, the boys with the rubber fists,
—Held down and beaten, the table cutting their loins,
Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking
Like a headless hens on the floor of the slaughter-house
While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.
For those who still "Red Front!" or "God Save the Crown!"
And for those who are not courageous
But were beaten nevertheless.
For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
Quietly in the hall,
Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.
For those who carry the scars, who walk lame—for those
Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard
And the earth smoothed back before morning and the lime scattered.
For those slain at once. For those living through months and years
Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day
To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,
Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,
And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.
 

For those escaping
Incredibly into exile and wandering there.
For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities
And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,
The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,
The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,
The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter's face,
The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie
Nor in any of that earth. Their children are strangers.
 

For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten
And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan
But were denounced, but grew angry, but told a joke,
But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,
But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,
"Died of pneumonia." "Died trying to escape!"
For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheat-stacks,
For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes,
And their flesh remembers their fields.
 

For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled or gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.
For those betrayed by the neighbors they shook hands with
And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair
With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless
As they tell the street and the house and the man's name.
And for those sitting at table in the house
With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,
Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars
And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly
And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face, Smoothing her dress.
"We are all good citizens here. We believe in the Perfect State."
 

And that was the last time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house
And the family was liquidated later.
It was the last time.
We heard the shots in the night
But nobody knew next day what the trouble was
And a man must go to his work. So I didn't see him
For three days, then, and me near out of my mind
And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns
And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.
For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,
For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,
The children spat-on at school.
For the wrecked laboratory,
The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well,
The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square
And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.
For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet's heat,
For the rope that chokes, the manacles that bind,
The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes
And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.
 

For the man crucified on the crossed machine-guns
Without name, without resurrection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons
—
John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody—oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table.
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
This ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die,
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light fails and the terrible blood streams down.
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.

In Volume One of this series, we learned how Chap Foey Rider, Anglo-Chinese chairman of Rider Factoring, discovered the Galactic Postal Union through observation of the simple fact that the farther a letter had to travel, the faster it arrived.

As a result, the Postal Union has sent an ambassador, and Chap Foey Rider must think fast.

From the unassuming Lexington Avenue offices of Rider Factoring, Ltd., Chap Foey Rider managed, in his spare time, his family's investment portfolio. In late November he called his broker with orders to sell all transportation securities: General Motors, Exxon, United Aircraft, Braniff Airlines, Norfolk & Western Railways, the proceeds going into 90-day Treasury Bills. Calling a second broker, he gave instructions to sell short a broad range of transportation stocks.

So. In for a penny, in for a pound, he reflected. He then sat back and waited, a plump, middle-aged, Anglo-Chinese merchant of nondescript features. If he was apprehensive, he gave little sign of it, beguiling the time by smoking an occasional cigarette.

At 3:14 the intercom buzzed.

"Mailroom, Mr. Rider. A large package just arrived. The return address says Sagittarius. Official Service of the Mandator?" The voice trailed off in a rising note of hysteria.

"Splendid," said Chap Foey Rider, making a note to overhaul the mailroom personnel, "I shall be there directly."

He gathered his four sons, John, Chong, Chan, and Wong, graduates respectively of Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford Engineering, and Harvard College, and proceeded sedately to the mailroom.

"This is ridiculous, as well as being impossible," sniffed the son from Harvard. "A vulgar hoax."

Chap Foey Rider did not reply.

A parcel some four feet around sat on the floor. His sons unwrapped the paper and twine. Chap Foey Rider was unsurprised to find that the transparent crating revealed a living being sprawled at ease in a comfortable-looking easy chair. The alien, humanoid save for light golden down on the unclothed portions of his body, nodded tolerantly and waited patiently for the crate to be dismantled.

He stood up and stepped forward. There was a slight, pleasant odor, as of cinnamon. Chap Foey Rider inclined his head a measured two inches. It was a moment of high emotion: the stars had come to mankind.

"I am Xanthil, Ambassador Plenipotentiary," said the alien benignly. "You, sir, are the Mr. Rider who has been in communication with the Mandator of the Galactic Confederation?"

"Yes, Excellency. On behalf of Rider Factoring, Ltd., may I welcome you to Earth, Ambassador Xanthil."

"It is most kind of you." The Ambassador coughed delicately. "Your air," he murmured apologetically. "Its level of pollutants is somewhat higher than on my native planet. No, no, do not concern yourself. This capsule is a quite efficient internal filter." He swallowed, then inhaled deeply. "Ah. Splendid."

Chan and Wong, the two younger sons, failed to keep their eyebrows from rising slightly.

"If his Excellency would care to step this way," suggested Chap Foey Rider, "he might deign to join us in a cup of tea, that is, an herbal infusion of mildly stimulating but non-hallucinatory and non-toxic nature."

"I should be delighted."

"And may I apologize for the foulness of—"

"Not a word, my dear sir. Indeed, 27,000 members of the Galactic Postal Union stand ready to serve you. Air-scrubbing equipment of worldwide capacity is readily available." His spaniel-like eyes glanced keenly at Chap Foey Rider.

"One could expect no less," replied the factor politely, absorbed in directing the Ceremony of the Teapot. "A matter of mere financial detail, one would suppose. Sugar, Excellency?"

"A sweetener? Two, please. As you say, a matter of minor but tiresome details of finance. But no doubt your world has experts in the matter of commodity exchange?"

"Oh, no doubt," said Chap Foey Rider. "No doubt at all."

The second cup of tea was interrupted by the intrusion of four Treasury Department agents. An imperturbable Chap Foey Rider heard them out, bade his farewells to Ambassador Xanthil, and accompanied them to the elevator. "You'll be hearing more from us, pal," muttered one of the Secret Servicemen under his breath. "Trying to keep a deal like this under the table, for Chrissakes, is like practically treason."

Chap Foey Rider inclined his head a quarter-inch in curt dismissal and marched back to his office.

"Let me call the lawyers, sir," said the Harvard son excitedly. "Illegal entry, unauthorized—"

"A moment, Wong," said Chap Foey Rider, raising a palm. "A moment's reflection first. Surely an obvious corollary suggests itself?"

"Huh? You mean they've got lawyers too?"

Chap Foey Rider sighed. "I advise you to leave such twaddle to the ACLU. Rider Factoring is a business concern. Ah, Miss Zielonka, step right in. A letter, please."