A poignant scene in Jean Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates, as the film moves towards its climatic showdown, is when Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a savvy, well-educated political officer in the Soviet army, full of despondency and a mixture of guilt and sorrow, bared his soul to his friend-turned-rival, Vasili Zaitsev (Jude Law), the shepherd-turned-soldier.

Vasili is a remarkably gifted marksman whom Danilov, through his propaganda campaign made him a hero of the Russian people, providing hope for the demoralised defenders of Stalingrad against the Nazi invaders.

Unfortunately they became rivals when both fell for the beautiful and intelligent linguist-soldier, Tanya (Rachel Wiescz). Resigned to his fate as a loser, Danilov's disillusionment encapsulates eloquently the shallowness of socialism's equality that he had fought for all his life.

"Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal where there would be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there is always something to envy the smile, the friendship, something you don't have and want to appropriate in this world.

"Even in the Soviet army there will always be rich and poor - rich in gifts, poor in gifts, rich in love, poor in love ".

Eager converts

Scientific materialism ignored that every human being is a unique individual, capable of love and hate, generosity and greed, kindness and cruelty, that every man and woman is endowed with different measures of talent, ambition and temperament. It refused to recognize man's need and capacity for spiritual illumination, dismissing religion as a crutch for the lame.

The dogged pursuit of classless egalitarianism reduces man's complexity to a mere creature with only basic material needs, not withstanding the vast Marxist literature generated by western academia that cover various aspects of human life, from economics to health care, to art and aesthetics.

Fidel Castro's recent visit to Malaysia is instructive in that the camp mentality of the Cold War era is still surprisingly very much alive, judging from the letters of faithful believers to this website, complete with their standard lexicon of socialist propaganda of old and paeans to the Cuban strongman and his old comrade, Che Guevara.

That more than 10 years after the end of the Cold War, with the triumphant victory of liberal democracy as ideology and capitalism as an economic system, socialism still has its faithful adherents attests to the enduring appeal of social justice, the core of its ideology, as a cause to fight for.

But today we are more willing to argue that this is after all a natural impulse in man's conscience, not exactly the sole preserve of socialism. Traditionally, socialism found ready and eager converts among young people and students in both the West and the Third World, reeling under a new form of home-grown imperialism or still trying to break out of old ones.

The romantic appeal of Che's heroic exploits, devotion to ideological struggle, selfless sacrifice and eventual martyrdom captured the imagination of the young and turned him into an icon.

Socialist Utopia

It is easier to be wise now that the Cold War has run its course (but no, its not the end of history yet). While we could remain cynical of the promises of neo-liberalism, given the untrammelled rapacity of global capitalism, we now know of the millions of innocent lives that have perished in Stalin's gulags and Pol Pot's killing fields, the massacre of Tiananmen, and the jubilation of Eastern Europeans when the Iron Curtain finally crashed down.

We could also see their grossly inefficient industries that led to severe environmental degradation, and most ironic of all, labour conditions that were appalling in societies that purportedly fought for the supremacy of the proletariat.

Today we can see that maverick Castro is an ageing dictator who has ruled Cuba with an authoritarian grip, for 40 years and that many Cubans are willing to take tremendous risks in fleeing their socialist Utopia in makeshift rafts.

And behind Che's romantic image as a martyr, he was a ruthless army commander when it came to prisoners and defectors. The nuclear missile deal which almost resulted in a nuclear war in 1962 was engineered at the Cuban end by Che.

If there ever was to be a 'socialism with a human face', it was rapidly crushed by Soviet tanks as they rolled into Prague in the spring of 1968.

Radiant future

When I was growing up as a teenager and a medical student in Australia, the Cold War was at its height. Anyone who chooses to defend social justice will be automatically labelled a leftist.

In the April 2001 issue of le Monde Diplomatique, Jean Bricmont wrote an article on Chomsky, on how he was a scourge of the French left, as indeed the left everywhere else, entitled 'La mauvaise rputation de Noam Chomsky' (The bad reputation of Noam Chomsky).

Bricmont wrote, 'In the anti-imperialist movements there dominated the mentality of prise de parti, one has to choose one's camp, either for the West or for the revolutions of the Third World.

'Such an attitude is alien to Chomsky, rationalist in the classical sense of the term. It was not that he placed himself above the melee, very few intellectuals were as engaged as him, but his engagement was founded on the principles of truth and justice his opposition to the (Vietnam) war was not on the premise that the Vietnamese revolution offered a radiant future to the peoples of Indochina, but that American aggression would be catastrophic, because, rather than motivated by the defence of democracy, it aimed to prevent any form of independent development in Indochina and the Third World.'

Passing phase

Harking back to a slightly earlier era, the article reminded me of George Orwell, Albert Camus and Octavio Paz whose writings I am more familiar with. These men had the intellectual courage to speak out against the darker side of communism while remaining critical of the capitalist system, against the prevailing sentiment of leftist intellectuals of their time.

Camus and Paz were much maligned for their position, whereas Orwell, whose 1984 was thought to be an indictment of Stalinism did not suffer a similar fate. Camus became disillusioned that many people he had been close to were fervent in their desire for social justice but less inclined to defend freedom.

Jean Paul Satre and the people around him held the position that Stalinist violence, though not to be condoned, should be regarded as a passing phase in society moving in the direction of social justice.

In other words, since the Soviet Union was marching towards social justice, it would be wrong to dwell on the fate of particular individuals who were being mistreated, even killed, along the way.

His bitter political quarrel with Satre eventually led to a break between the two men. His inconsistent politics made things worse. By opposing Algerian independence, primarily because of family sentiments and that Algeria was the place of his birth and childhood, he was further isolated by the French left.

Self-immolation

Growing up in Malaysia in the 70s, my own internal contradictions vis-a-vis socialism came rather early. I had to do a history assignment on Lenin when I was in Form 3. In a school that was supposed to produce only science students, it was difficult to get good references, but I learned enough of the great early figures of socialism and Marx's ideas.

I was surprised that those ideas sounded perfectly reasonable, but it was hard to reconcile them with what was happening in our country at time and the one to two decades before independence - the loss of life in the fight against communist terrorists, the atrocities of the Bintang Tiga during the vacuum that followed the Japanese surrender .

There was also the general revulsion that the Malays had for the communists because of their supposed godlessness.

But seeing the horrors of the Vietnam war, the photo of a Buddhist monk's self-immolation in a Saigon street and the picture of a naked child fleeing in terror from American bombing of her village, I was happy that finally the communists won and that they could now rebuild their war-torn nation.

Pity our neighbours. First, the war of liberation against the French, and then the war between the north and the south.

But not long after, as a medical student in Australia, the wave of Vietnamese boat-people revealed the misery of life under communism. On the news we saw those grim, gaunt faces, with their ragged clothes and dishevelled hair, staring at the TV cameras as their creaky vessels were escorted into harbour.

Our friends' errors

Three of those boat-people later became my classmates at medical school. The ebullient Phan joined us in Year 3. Her sister joined the dental faculty and her father, a former lawyer in Vietnam, became a sweeper at a university campus across town.

She was nearly finishing her studies when the war ended. Tran and his other friend, whom I can no longer recall his name, joined us in Year 5. They had both been working as doctors for some years in Vietnam.

The real losers of this camp mentality, by turning a blind eye to the wrongdoings of our ideological colleagues, were the very people that each side claimed to have defended.

The untold misery and enormous loss of life under communism are well known, as were the atrocities and gross abuses of human rights committed by client regimes with the backing of the United States in central and South America in their suppression of leftist anti-imperialist movements.

Are there any lessons that we could learn from all this? Old style socialism is all but dead today. Letters eulogising its virtues, displaying the old camp mentality such as we have recently seen, provided some harmless entertainment in these otherwise grim times.

On a more serious note, in the political battle to capture the hearts and minds of Malaysians today, there is every reason to take the side of those championing democratic freedoms, social justice and, especially is this nation of ours, genuine racial harmony.

That is our moral obligation. But let us not be blinded by too strong a sentiment of camp solidarity that we are prepared to overlook the errors of our friends. There is no substitute for looking at the truth objectively.