The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has been celebrated as a milestone in the advance of human freedom.
But not everyone was happy when the Berlin Wall fell.
Sunday Times editor Mondli Makanya recalls: "It was with horror that I and my friends watched those scenes of Germans dancing on top of the wall and merrily chipping away at it."
It is a great irony that oppressed people in South Africa were so blinded by the ANC's alliance with the Soviet Bloc that they could not see the reality of communist oppression.
In truth, the Soviet Union was more brutal than apartheid South Africa. About 20 million people were murdered or starved to death in the USSR, and millions more died from the export of communism overseas.
Nelson Mandela read the autobiography of Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, and when they met he told Sharansky that his experience in Soviet prisons was worse than that on Robben Island.
The dilemma for anti-apartheid liberals like Helen Suzman and Alan Paton was that they had to steer a course that did not see apartheid replaced by the communist tyranny of the ANC's primary sponsor.
This also became FW De Klerk's dilemma when he decided to negotiate seriously with the ANC, which is why the fall of the Berlin Wall that so upset ANC supporters was critical in the eventual fall of apartheid.
Certain commentators now claim, however, that there was a lost inner virtue in communism, and that the current world recession has equally discredited capitalism.
The truth is that the universal faults of human nature will manifest themselves in any system, but will be most pernicious where power is centralised rather than dispersed.
Crass materialism in communist regimes was much in evidence, with a political elite who led the high life amidst gross consumer shortages.
The amnesia around the evils of historical communism is so bad that mass murderers are often quoted with complete respectability.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe recently cited Lenin as the role model for the principle of "democratic centralism" in the ANC.
This is the same Lenin who characterised Communist governance as "power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, that is restrained by absolutely no rules, that rests directly on coercion."
When Mathews Phosa opposed nationalising the mines the Young Communist League chastised him by quoting Mao Tse-tung: "In the great leap forward ... some will join the enemy camp".
There are far too many people who still perceive virtue in Castro's Cuba and praise Hugo Chavez for his socialist moves in Venezuela.
I wonder how South Africans would react to Chavez's recent appeal for people to save water by having a 3-minute "communist shower".
"Some people sing in the bath for half an hour,'' he told his cabinet. ``What kind of communism is that? Three minutes is more than enough!''
Communism not only fails to generate wealth, it always and everywhere stifles freedom.
For all its faults, capitalism facilitates wealth creation, and provides a necessary but not sufficient base for democracy.
The rest is up to people themselves since freedom also includes the freedom to be foolish, immoral and make mistakes.
Jack Bloom MPL, is a DA member of the Gauteng legislature. This article first appeared in The Citizen.
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