Communism, the false God that died!

Kaypo Anak Sarawak is a Columnist  of  Hermit Hornbill at The Borneo Post Online , His article is  published  in The Borneo Post every Sunday. (Used by permission of the Author )

IN the past week, Berlin in Germany was the scene of joyous celebration commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall came to symbolise for the world the East West divide, and its collapse marked the end of communism in Eastern Europe, and a conclusion to the Cold War between the Soviet-led Warsaw pact Alliance and the Nato countries in Western Europe.

The Wall was not removed by any political leader, or any military force. It was removed by East and West Germans, brick by brick, with hands or chisels, at the tail end of spontaneous uprising against communist regimes all over Eastern Europe, in East Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungry, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and the former Yugoslavia.

Communist East Germany was a vassal state of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev could have sent in the tanks to quash the people’s uprising, as the Soviet did to Czechoslovakia in 1967. However, Gorbachev decided against repressing the popular uprising, the Wall came down, and the communist regime folded, paving the way for reunification for East and West Germany.

Looking back 20 years later, the fall of the Berlin Wall was nothing less than a revolution in world history, one that is comparable to the storming of the Bastille in Paris back in 1789. It changed world history, and created a new world order, leaving the USA as the sole superpower in a new uni-polar world.

The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 by the East German government to prevent the migration of East Germans to West Germany. Border guards would shoot on sight East Germans who tried to escape to West Berlin and freedom. The Wall came to symbolise for East Germans all that was bad about communism, such as material deprivation, political repression, thought control, and loss of personal liberty.

Young Sarawakians would have neither memory nor knowledge of communism. In Sarawak too, we used to suffer from an armed communist insurgency, which had its seed in the birth of the Sarawak Communist Party in the late 1950s.

Their aim was to free Sarawakians from British colonial rule, and to realise the kind of ideal society preached by Karl Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse Dung.

More than a few of my friends in Kuching disappeared into the jungle to fight for their cause, and prior and after Merdeka in 1963, there were weekly radio reports of casualties on both sides, among the communists and the security forces.

If you want to find out more about that turbulent period of Sarawak history, do buy and read the book Rise and Fall of Communism in Sarawak 1940 to 1990 by Vernon L Porritt.

The Sarawak communists lost their war, and many of them have been ‘rehabilitated’ now. The next old man or old lady you meet on the streets of Kuching may very well be a former Communist ‘terrorist’. Many of them have become successful capitalist Towkay to day! Excuse me for not naming names, as we all want to bury our painful past.

But communism was the vogue after World War II, and South East Asia was engulfed in revolutionary flames everywhere, including in Malaysia. Western powers like the UK and USA were weary of the Domino Effect, the expectation that the communist surge originating from China and the Soviet Union would quickly swallow up the entire Indochina, down to the Malayan Peninsula, and eventually to Indonesia.

This fear for the ‘Domino Effect’ had something to do with the hasty formation of Malaysia in 1963, as the British colonial government in Whitehall wanted to leave behind an anti-communist Malaysia to fend off the Red Menace.

All communist books were banned in Malaysia in those early days of course. It was not until I went to a university in North America that I began to read Karl Marx and Lenin as part of our course work.

I had to study in great detail Karl Marx’ major works, including The Communist Manifesto 1848, and part of his magnum opus Das Capital. So I became quite familiar with the communist ideology, though I was never persuaded to their worldview.

Communism was born out of the misery of industrialising European society in the 19th century. According to Marx’s analysis, the people who actually produced wealth are not the capitalists, but the workers.

But people with capital will always control what he called ‘the means of production’, the land, the factory, and the machinery needed for industries. In order to ensure they reap maximum profits, the capitalist class will always control the ‘superstructure of state, the political, economic, and social institutions’, so that they can control the working class.

Communism is the movement that organises and unites that working class, to overthrow the capitalist class, so as to wrestle back the power to appropriate the means of production — through armed revolution if necessary. As Marx used to say, “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

With their guns, communist revolutionaries took power in half the globe in the first half of the 20th century, in Russia and Eastern Europe, in China, Vietnam, Central Latin Americas, and Africa.

The trouble with communism is that there is no blue print for the ideal economic management. Their experiment with centrally planned economy, while banning private property ownership and private enterprise was a total failure everywhere. Even food was scarce.

Then again, the communist regimes often proved to be even more dictatorial than the capitalistic government that they replaced. They rule with an iron fist in the name of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Dissidents were persecuted, imprisoned, or simply killed en masse. In comparison, the capitalist countries that preached and practised democracy were like paradise in the eyes of those people living under communist rule.

The perfect society that Marx dreamed about turned out to be the most massive nightmare on earth!

Today, there are very few communist countries left.

North Korea is still under very dictatorial rule, while the people suffer from political repression and hunger. Cuba is doing well, and could catapult into prosperity only if the US would lift their economic sanction. Vietnam is liberalising, and her economy is growing by leaps and bounds. China is a huge capitalist miracle, and remains communist in name only.

In retrospect, Marx was not entirely wrong, and his critique of capitalism remains valid on many fronts. But the practice of communism in politics has proven to be a complete failure, resulting in millions of ruined lives.

There is one reason why I never supported communism all these years.

I believe in peaceful way of resolving our political differences. From day one, communism has always advocated the legitimacy of the use of violent means towards achieving their political goal. It is amazing how many millions of reasonable people could subscribe to violent and bloody means of revolution to bring about change.

Perhaps to them, communism represented a kind of secular God. In the end, communism turned out to be a god that died, when the Berlin Wall collapsed at the hands of the ordinary people in 1989!

You would think that world peace would have prevailed after 1989 following the death of communist orthodoxy.

Unfortunately, the world has since remained a dangerous place to live in, with religious, ethnic, and territorial conflicts filling rivers with blood in many corners of the world. Now, we read and watch on TV the barbaric images of suicide bombers killing numerous innocent civilians — including women and children — in the name of God.

We hear holy-looking old men of God in turban and long white beard proclaiming death and repression on the other human beings. We hear them preaching hate instead of love, death instead of life.

Communism may have died a natural death, but the beast in the heart of the human species has not!

Make love, not war please!

(The writer can be reached at Bapakmiki@yahoo.com)