SLADE: Oh. Yes, I dare say it was.... Well, Kamon, about a hundred years ago those two Asian states, still paying lip service to the--debatable doctrine of communism (satisfactory, Mr. Spearman?)--attacked each other in a long war, making use of recently discovered atomic weapons as well as man-made pestilence and other devices. It was not actually a doctrinal war, but simply a power struggle between two tyrannies. It was hideous, incredibly destructive, and the only saving thing about it was that it prevented them from visiting the same disaster on the rest of the world. Neither side won, of course; a few decades later a new dictator--a little one-eyed zealot from Mongolia--inherited the desolation and built on the ruins a new monolithic state, which still exists. AREK: But what actually was this theory--this communism? SLADE: Oh, the theory. Originally an appeal to the dispossessed. In the nineteenth century and earlier there were masses of poor, widespread suffering and injustice, too much economic and political power in the hands of a few, who abused their power with stupidity and cruelty. Marx and other theorists imagined, or said they imagined, that the situation could be remedied by reversal--give power to the dispossessed (the proletariat, as they called them) and injustice would right itself. Why they imagined that the proletariat was any more fitted to rule than its oppressors--why they supposed it would not abuse power quite as viciously--they never bothered to explain. Naturally the realists among them weren't concerned with any Utopian outcome: they simply saw the doctrine as a means to personal power for themselves and used it accordingly. The first important one of these was a furious little man named Lenin. He may have believed his own theories for a while--there seems to have been some short-lived experimentation with the contradictions of actual communism when he first won power in Russia--but absolute power corrupts absolutely, as somebody said. The foundations of an old-new despotism were well established before he died--and was unofficially deified and kept in a glass case for the consolation of the atheist faithful. Matter of fact, Arek, a good many things in Earth history would make a cat laugh.... The actual cure for the ugly situation that existed turned out to be a gradual economic leveling combined with the (very slow and difficult) growth of representative government--so that there would be no swollen fortunes, no severe poverty, and no heavy concentrations of unchecked political power. But that was most undramatic procedure: it needed the work of centuries. No bloody revolution could ever achieve such an end, nor could any other evil means ever bring it any nearer.