I would like to thank Mazeni Alwi for the recent column on the evils of communism. However, I would not dismiss communism as something that has entirely failed.

Socialism and communism, which are basically the same thing (communism is the socialism of Marx and Lenin), were not the failures, so much as the politicians who espoused them were.

The politicians did not understand the vast literature of Marx, the German Jewish philosopher whose ideas they took for the setting up of a communist state.

They misunderstood the writings of Marx on individuals and the community, assuming arrogantly that humans had to annihilate individualism, and become a mere factor of production.

They also misunderstood Marx's opposition to religion, and chose to brand all religions as false.

Their dogged obsession with the material aspects of humanity and denial of the existence of the human mind and soul ultimately ruined their governments from within.

This was the failure of the communist revolutions.

But there were great revolutionaries who strived hard to establish societies that were communist or socialist, with a human face, ultimately.

They were Muhammad and his assistants like Omar and Ali. They were the Sikh Gurus from Nanak to Gobind.

The Muslim and Sikh revolutionaries fought hard for egalitarianism, divinely ordered. But they did not ignore the human mind and soul.

They did not ignore divine orders of just warfare, not to be cruel to civilians and not to torture others. Not to ruin nature too.

Had the communists not been so blind to the revolutions of Muhammad and the Gurus, there was, if slight, a chance for them to improve themselves and their societies.

The democratic capitalists began as brutal revolutionaries, sometimes even worse than the communists and socialists.

Washington and his romanticised soldiers were very brutal, very Lenin and very Guevara when they massacred the pro-British peoples in the USA. Many pro-Britishers fled to Canada for safety.

The Washington forces also annihilated the Iroquis confederation of Native American tribes, and destroyed the environment.

The democratic French revolutionaries led by Robespierre were also known for their cruelty in chopping heads of civilians. Many conservative and liberal democrats of Latin America were despots.

But these societies changed with time and education. They could change because they had the scientific revolution on their side. And because they were not faced with pressure by any outside force but their own people.

It was a matter of time before their people caught up with them to have them honour their ideals.

The communist and socialist societies emerged on the backwaters of the world. These were societies which did not have much political intellectualism, and had hardly underwent scientific revolutions (China underwent civilisational decline but retained some scientific knowledge from its past).

They were constantly under pressure from the democratic capitalist world to conform to democratic capitalism or (for those outside West Europe and North America) autocratic capitalism.

Thus, their leaders withdrew from acquiring knowledge in the capitalist world, and branded everything there as poisonous (save McDonald's, of course).

Had the capitalist democrats been virtuous politicians who truly recognised two systems (not two camps) in the world at the end of World War II, there was hope that the autocratic communist bloc could slowly be nudged into a humane form of communism.

The communist autocrats could slowly be nudged into adopting more professional management styles, more eco-friendly policies, more decent labour standards and more humane treatment of anti-communists in their societies.

They could have become more like (at least) Lee Kuan Yew's autocracy in Singapore or Hassanal Bolkiah's autocracy in Brunei.

But the Cold War was inaugurated by the USA to divide the world firmly into two rigid camps, with the capitalist democratic camp the more ambitious one out to take over the world.

And with the autocratic communists fanatically eager to preserve their monolithic tyrannies at all costs, and to help a few popular uprisings (Cuba and Vietnam) turn Leninist to keep them company.

The communist governments contained lots of contradictions inside them from day one, and their fall was hastened by their leaders' paranoia to view all things non-communist and non-socialist as poison from the capitalist world.

The capitalist world hastened the communist and socialist world's fall by its aggressive Cold War stances, which condemned communism as an evil which could not be reformed, when it could.

On the assertion by many writers that the communist bloc was the more expansionist of the two, that is debunked by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Fewer Americans today believe that their leaders, including Jimmy Carter and John Kennedy, were anything but nice guys who genuinely feared communist expansionism.

Both the USA and the USSR (and its pal Cuba) wanted the world to be divided into two ugly camps, the autocratic communist and the democratic-plus-autocratic capitalist.

The first camp died of a heart attack suddenly, because it could not sustain its contradictions.