Death doesn’t lie, but people do. Soon after news broke of race killings in Urumqi, Xinjiang, on Sunday, July 5, Nathaniel Tan said:
I hope the world pays more attention to this. I really hope the Chinese government stops this heavy handed violenceagainst Muslim minorities (emphasis added).
Turks, kin to the Uyghur Chinese and 4,000km away, did pay attention. Nathaniel Tan’s message is repeated in the exact same fashion in Turkey in nearly daily demonstrations against China. The message is clearly this: the Uyghur is the repressed group, therefore, innocent and no Han was killed by them. Following from that moral inversion, the Han government is responsible for the “heavy handed violence” against Uyghurs instead, even killing them. Below is the ethnic breakdown of those killed in Urumqi because of race:
Han – 137
Uyghur – 46
Hui – 1
Total – 184 (up from 150+ in initial count)
Death will not lie, but is one to agree with Nathaniel Tan that the 46 Uyghurs (who are Muslims) were killed by the Chinese government? How did the 137 Han die? In whose hands? By the government’s heavy-handed violence?
All know the answers, of course. But, beyond these statistics, there is the nagging question, should there be justice for the families of those killed? Incredulously, Nathaniel Tan’s implicit answer is, “No”. He goes beyond exonerating Uyghurs for the killings, blaming the government instead (as did the Western media), by actually suggesting that anybody from the Muslim Uyghur population who had killed anybody should be let off. Says he:
Mass arrests are (sic!) not the answer.
Murder is justified because there’s an ongoing “mass movement” (PKR’s favourite catchwords and available from Nathaniel Tan’s blog as well).
After A. Kugan was killed in a police lockup, Nathaniel Tan’s PKR buddies were shouting for the heads of the killers. Yet if, elsewhere, 184 were killed in their homes, shops and on the streets, they would count for nothing. Their killers should not be arrested, he says. Such is his morality; 137 lives with one ethnicity is cheap, one life (A. Kugan’s) from another is worth more.
That morality is reflected in his politics where it is obvious as to the reason Nathaniel Tan says the things he said. He is playing minority politics. It is a kind of victimhood, a kind of White man’s guilt-ridden liberal Left politics that say all minorities are innocent, all poor people are pure, all black Americans are good, all wealthier people are scums, and all majority governments tend to be “heavy-handed violent” oppressors. Transport those values into Malaysia, you have the Nathaniel Tan’s PKR buddy clique. In order to play minority politics (for the Chinese, Indians, Christians, and the PAS Malays) in Malaysia, Nathaniel Tan will defend minorities elsewhere, in this case Uyghurs in Xinjiang, even if they killed his mother. This is the way of the liberal Left, of Nathaniel Tan and of minority politics; it is called equal value treatment – minorities everywhere are wherever equal.
Under such an equality, the principle says, we have to defend the minority Uyghurs (never mind if they killed anybody) because we are fighting for the minorities in Malaysia (where Muslims are also the majority). A minority group suddenly killing the majority shatters all the moral equivalence but, what the heck, all is for the politics, you see; even if one kind of life is rendered cheaper than another kind.
This man, his values, his equality principles, and the PKR’s copycat minority politics of his days are mind-boggling, if not perverse. Imagine then the day the PKR comes to power; it could do more damage than a hundred Umnos stacked up.
After Sichuan, Tibet, Xinjiang, it is now Yunnan where a 6.5 earthquake on Thursday struck near Kunming. More than a million are displaced as a result; more than 300 are hurt; dead count uncertain.
Yearly, without fail, calamities of all sorts visit common people in China. Some, like those in Tibet and Xinjiang, are man-made. China’s rulers have said that those who made those calamities, clubbing to dead men, women, and children, burning property – in effect a 21st century tribal raid and killing spree – will be arrested, tried and, if guilty, executed. The executions do not constitute a threat (that AFP/AP and others have twisted it to mean); rather, it is a promise to the people to safeguard tianxia 天下 no matter what the rest of the world thinks and regardless of the opinions in the likes of Nathaniel Tan, BBC and the New York Times. Peace without justice is superficial and fraudulent – murders on account of race repeatedly go unpunished in the rest of the world because they are excused and they are done wholesale.
Tianxia 天下: All under heaven. For millenia in China peace is heaven’s mandate for the rulers. Common people, the laobaixing 老百姓, make almost no demand of their rulers – indeed, the mountains are high, the emperor is far away – but tianxia is one of the rare exceptions.
This principle of rule, tianxia, may be applied among Chinese Malaysians: Umno could have all the Chinese votes because keeping the peace is not terribly difficult to offer, beginning with leaving the laobaixing alone. In the converse way of seeing the same thing, three-fourths of the Chinese before 2008 won’t vote DAP because it is largely seen as cantankerous, rowdy and belligerent, all the qualities of Western adversarial politics that have come to infect Malaysian political life.
Such kinds of Western political qualities (using the “mass” public is favourite method) readily find a home among the Western-educated, Nathaniel Tan, et al, who have no inkling what that 天下 really, really means. This, adopting the adversarial politics and their Western acculturation, is no coincidence. You can tell from their web sites: they bow to the god of America, adore White man’s ways, and probably can’t read their mother’s name in Chinese. (Note, hence, how wrong was Mahathir Mohamad: it is not the Chinese-schooled, who he calls communists, therefore anti-Umno, but the St John’s types, the English-schooled, who would eventually turn against Umno/MCA.)
In fresh video images and domestic news from Urumqi, they speak of:
Banks reopening; residents have returned to burned-out shops and homes. In one case, a man squatting inside the ashes of his shop cries uncontrollably: his mother, younger brother, and wife are still missing.
The government has opened an office to take complaints of anybody missing and to help trace them; more than 200 cases have been received and recorded.
One particularly striking CCTV footage shows a horde of Uyghur “peaceful protesters” throwing rocks at the glass walls of a supermarket and trying to break in through the front door, quickly locked. As this went on, staff and customers, mostly Ugyhur and Han women, hunkered down between the shelves while crawling towards a door. A man was quickly herding the women towards the basement quarters of the supermarket staff. All later emerged alive, including the man, but the supermarket was looted.
Between heaven and earth (tiandi, 天地) are people (ren, 人)…
“Today it (rule? governance?) is all about you the people of Malaysia. Kalau tidak kelapa Puan, tidak juga kelapa bali, kalau tidak kerana tuan-tuan dan puan-puan, mana kan saya berada di sini.” – Najib Razak, Jul 11.
The disinformation is rampant. On television, Al Jazeera (Arabic TV that has copied the Western media techniques of influencing public opinion) leads the campaign. Huffington Post offers its services on the Internet. In America, the Washington Post leads. (Again, not by coincidence, all three are greatly admired by Nathaniel Tan, et al.) Compelling evidence of the disinformation have emerged: faked photos, the Press dutifully reporting the disinformation, demonstration at embassies, fund raising for Uyghurs, and plain lying.
Essentially, the disinformation is single-prong, straightforward and highly focus:
It exploits an ethnic minority status, with all its attendant inferences – good, innocent, powerless – in order to show they are victims of oppression, and so veil the fact that 156 people are murdered and 1,080 have their bodies and faces broken. (The same veil could even deflect the accusation that there is a terrorist group among the Uyghurs). This pure, guiltless, ethnic status is helped when focused on a woman, an old woman especially, in the person of Rebiya Kadeer. NPR, the American Liberal Left radio station glorified her with the title “Mother of the Uigher Movement” (rather than Mother of Uigher Racism), and Al Jazeera helps her disseminate a faked photo she shows to the world.
It is small wonder the likes of Huffington Post and the Washington Post speak vociferously of a free Press. Because, it offers the licence to say anything, write anything, promote anything. They grow to become above government, law and especially ethics; they make their own rules. And, under this banner of Press freedom and independence, it is small wonder Al Jazeera copies the technique and its principles: they can make a lie look and taste like strawberry ice cream in a 40 degree day, in the Lop Desert.
The state is now reached in which only the White man decides the truth:
after the murders, the White press admit to no murder,
then they say the government is the cause (the London Evening Standard says the Uyghur race kill is another “Tiananmen” rebellion against the government, but led by women),
now they say the killers were victimised, attacked and killed even.
And they all say this with a straight face; and, never mind if any of the reports is wrong or is a lie since all is about China, not London or Washington, and China is cruel place anyway.
Perhaps, China is right, as Japan once fought for: Throw up the hands and say, forget the White man, forget their democracy, their free Press because, all said and done, this is what you get – dead people, unsafe streets, barely disguised evil, and repeated, astonishing lies. Note that all the while China responds in the only way its people are raised to respond: bite its lips and speak only to its own, never mind the world of Nathaniel Tan or the BBC. “What the world says, doesn’t matter. This is our life, our land, and we alone decide in the best way possible how our forefathers have raised us to run both. Never again will White people tell us what to do and what not to do. They’ll not touch us again.”
In many neighborhoods of Urumqi, there evidence of violence — shops and restaurants destroyed, a brand-new supermarket with all its windows smashed in. The remains of two Han-owned car dealerships, charred black with overturned sedans, faced directly onto a desperately poor, traditional Uighur neighborhood.***
*The victim is now the Uyghur not the 156 dead.
**Emphasis added: note the shared language between Nathaniel Tan (below) and the New York Times.
***Emphasis added: note the instigation stuck into a supposed impartial report.
In all the Western reports, they share common characteristics:
There is neither mention of, nor focus on, the individual dead, of justice for their families, of destroyed lives and devastated businesses.
Uyghurs who went around town killing others, burning homes and cars and looting shops acted in a “riot,” a “protest”, a “dissent”, anything but murder.
Since there were no murders, but only a “riot”, the ultimate cause of the “riot” is the Han government, never the killer gangs.
Since the Han government is the cause, all motivation for the riots are purely political. Since they are purely political, then the riots were an expression of legitimate dissent against oppression.
Since the dissent is legitimate, nobody was killed; anybody who is dead is dead by chance, a casualty of history, of rebellion against Han rule – too bad, you, a Han, were at a bus stop when peaceful Uyghurs came by.
All minorities are victims; all majority peoples are “heavy-handed violent” aggressors. Nobody in the West (or Malaysia) will say Urumqi is race kill so all say it is a political insurrection. To admit that it is ethnic gives away the game: minorities are not the victims, are not innocent, and the government was right to put down the Uyghur killers.
Throughout the above, note the inversion of the morality as exemplified in Nathaniel Tan’s remarks:
I hope the world pays more attention to this. I really hope the Chinese government stops this heavy handed violence against Muslim minorities. Mass arrests are not the answer.
Here are the moral inversions:
Murder is innocent, not evil; no killing is intentional or, people are never killed in a race riot, they are dead by luck.
Only the majority government is prone to be violent; all acts, including murder, by minorities, any minority, are guiltless.
Nathaniel Tan is on record of having served Anwar Ibrahim. He, of course, does not speak for Pakatan Rakyat or the Justice PKR party but his remarks reflect the underlying morality within PKR, shared also by Elizabeth Wong (recall her moral, “private” defense of the naked story?), Tian Chua, et al.
Their politics, once passed through their morality (above), produces the following: murder is innocent in a given circumstance, even justifiable; all governments are bad; all minorities, the working class, are good; all sources of morality is with the individual (the individual alone decide what is right and wrong), not culture, not group, not society, which is to infer that if a group killed somebody’s mother at a bus stop, you could argued your way to innocence.
It is not by coincidence that the PKR people like Nathaniel, et al, share politics in common with the Western liberal Left that dominate the media today (in Malaysia, Malaysiakini). Nathaniel, et al, picked up their morality from the West. So then, you can see, why in tone, in judgement, and in pronouncements, Nathaniel & Co are identical to the Western media.
Someone has said, freedom of the Press undermines democracy and undermines freedom. There is much truth in it.
Last note: If PKR, backed by their Western minders, come to power, be aware that all murder on the street and if they involve a town and a minority group, then they could be legitimate. At the least, there won’t be mass arrest. So stick with the horde (try Malaysia Today).
Picture USA 200 years ago when the first White settlers arrived from Europe. As they ventured inland, their first encounters with local Indians were sporadic, growing frequent the deeper they were into the North American plains. What later became identifiable as Indians were in reality different small and large bands of tribes, most of them only quasi permanently settled in any one place, without a walled city or such like places. That is, they were by and large nomadic.
Central Asia tribes were like those in USA, but in existence 5,000 years earlier and the encounters were the opposite in principle. Whereas White settlers regarded Indians as getting in the way of their seizing arable land, the Central Asian tribes treated settled Han agrarian populations as granaries and treasuries for the looting.
China, as it is known today, was five millenia ago a multi-state country (each state with roman names like Wu, Jin, Yue, Lu, and so on). Around the region of the present Great Wall route, the settled people were mostly Han Chinese, who before the unification of multiple states by Qin emperor Shi Huangdi, were scattered in agrarian places with walled cities, each ruled by a patrician “lord” over a populated area with its own army, system of government, and taxation. The most famous of these country-size “estates” (they are not fiefdoms in the European sense) is Western Zhou (with beginnings along the upper reaches of the Yellow River). That lasted about 500 years before it was succeeded by Qin Shi Huang, following a period of turmoil known as the Warring States era (the time of Confucius).
No mention of Uyghur is found in the earliest Chinese records, the most famous of which is the shiji (3,000 pages with commentaries in translated English) written by a court historian named Sima Qian (died c 86BC). He lived during the Han dynasty that had succeeded Qin. Ancient historical records first mentioned around 300AD the Uyghurs only in terms of the jiuxing 九姓, that is, Nine Tribes all of whom are proto-Turks in ethnicity but each tribe ruled separately. But in the shiji and prior to it (eg. the Spring and Autumn Annals, c. 722-481BC) there was frequent mention of the Xiongnu, a loose confederation of tribes north of the Great Wall.
The ancestors of the Genghis Khan then and the Uyghurs today are the Xiongnus. They were the reason China during the Zhou, Qin and Han and well into the Ming dynasties constructed the Great Wall in order to stop the frequent cross-border raids to take the crops, jewellery and women from the settled populations. They were also the reason that the Great Wall expanded under each succeeding dynasty, growing from a thousand-odd km to almost 9,000 eventually. (In some episodes, early Chinese records speak of emperors – the Tang dynasty in particular – in order to win the peace, gave away princesses to head of tribesmen and military generals as appeasement “gifts”.)
The strategic military value of the Wall worked until Genghis Khan, whose conquest of China had the effect of redistributing the nomadic populations westwards, well into parts of Turkey and the areas bordering Eastern Europe. That would include the Xinjiang province today where Uyghurs finally settled in areas the Chinese had abandoned because water needed for irrigation had dried up and the desert had moved in. During the Tang dynasty (618-907AD) and after the fierce Battle of Talas (751AD) in present-day Kyrgystan against the Abbasid Arabs and the Karluks (a Xiongnu tribe related to the Uyghurs), the Great Wall was extended to the outskirts of present-day Urumqi. This western end is in the Lop Desert, near a place called Loulan, site of a Chinese pre-Han dynasty.
The riots in Urumqi.
What the Tangs failed against the tribal incursions, the Qing dynasty (b. 1644AD) succeeded, first militarily pacifying areas beyond Xinjiang. These territories were subsequently placed under direct rule of Beijing (Qing rulers, also non-Han, were Manchus). Republic China did not keep all the Qing territories. Instead, it retreated south and eastwards into the present border, surrendering vast country-size tracts of land in what is today broken up into the states west of Xinjiang; these end with the suffix word “stan”: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan.
Present-day Uyghur population today used the Western language of “human rights” and “freedom” to demand for independence on territories that their ancestors failed to obtain by force. Militarily the Uyghurs have aligned themselves to the Talibans next door, exploiting their only common identifier, Islam. Politically, they have combined forces with Tibet’s Dalai Lama (Tibetan tribesmen once fought Han Chinese in Xinjiang and occupied Xi’an briefly in 763). Hence, one sees frequent propaganda campaigns coming out of Europe and America in the name of Tibetan-Uyghur solidarity, again employing the language of “human rights” and “Free Tibet”.
Like Lhasa last year, Urumqi on Sunday, July 5, was a race-motivated rampage: video footages showed two large groups of men (each in the hundreds), pummeling down two parallel downtown streets in a pincer movement, then congregating at one place to burn shops, cars, buses and kill anybody who looks Han, women included. Like Tibetans before them, the Uyghur men had marched with clubs, daggers and bicycle chains. However, in Uyghur Internet messages and a number of English-language wire reports, they have called these kill marches as “peaceful student protests”.
Expect, as a result, instant “analysis” in the American and English-language media, and in the like of AFP, Reuters and Malaysiakini (Manjit Bhatia, Dean Johns, et al) to justify the murder and plunder on some noble political cause, but which was oppressed by a tyrannical regime. The rampage, they would say, have political origins, human rights causes and freedom objectives – so the fault lies in Beijing – and it took place not because Uyghurs, like their Xiongnu ancestors before them, simply hated and wanted to kill Chinese. This they succeeded, with more than 150 dead.
Except for extended dynastic periods during the Han, Tang and Ming, China was repeatedly attacked and looted to serve foreign tribesmen on horseback: Jin dynasty (under the Khitan, a proto-Manchu tribe), Liao (Khitan), Jin again (Jurchen, proto-Mongols), Western Xia (Tanguts), Yuan (Mongol), Qing (Manchu). After them it was Japan and the Western powers. But, five thousand years later, expect China to feel sickened with twenty-first century tribal-scale plunders against Chinese sovereignty once again.
UPDATE: July 7
Dead 156; injured 1,008.
Vehicles burned 200+, shops looted and burned 240+.
The reaction, such as from Nathaniel Tan (below), is as well-rehearsed as it is predictable. Not knowing from which side he should begin to see the problem – worse, not even knowing what it is in truth – he sits on the fence and mouths platitudes, the kind you hear from Western do-gooders with ready-made answers. As you would expect, the state is the culprit (”government heavy-handed violence”) even as he stares in the face of the facts that a thousand or more people had gathered to kill on account of your skin colour, and so to plunder at the same time. It would be nice if it is possible to stand him in front of the mob so that he may say, no, preach, to them:
I hope the world pays more attention to this. I really hope the Chinese government stops this heavy handed violence against Muslim minorities. Mass arrests are not the answer.
He can stand there like Jesus Christ, to add: “Killing me is not the answer. Now, knife me on the other face.” You have to wonder where was Nathaniel Tan on May 13. Since arrest is not the answer, perhaps he should – if he survives the mob – hug them and invite them to his home for refuge. You have also to wonder what would be his answer to the families of 156 dead if, after inviting them into his home, his mother was clubbed to death and they looted and torched his house: the poor killers, they are just repressed people.
Lim Kit Siang speaks of crisis of confidence, Malaysiakini likes to imagine slaughter, and Najib Razak extols 1Malaysia. False, catchy one-liners like these reflect the present times, a mass media (“pigs over humans”) and their Internet followers, adrift, jobless, with nothing to do, are stuck with clichés that generate lots of noise, hollow, no way out, and all echoing in bad English.
It’s immaterial where problems originally arose. Buah Pala, the Kedah abattoir, Umno-PAS unity, the NEP of PAS, forced conversion of minors, all end in one place: Pakatan Rakyat. The Justice PKR party is a new mold only in packaging, but not PAS, which is 50 years old, originally made in Umno. The DAP’s version is longer than all three, but worse for it, made in Europe. Key elements that go into its mold are the following:
trust god,
people are naturally good,
systems make people bad,
individuals are inalienably righteous,
all cultures are equal.
Consequences of those premises? A DAP government can’t touch Buah Pala; you can’t even negotiate because simply to be Indian, as it is to Malay, is to be on the right side. PAS lies openly, works with the enemy, and all Pakatan can do is pretend, business as usual.
It is time for the DAP to re-examine its raison d’etre. Only two aspects of it are offered below.
Democracy: the best leaders are rarely, if at all, chosen democratically. Free elections offer equal opportunity, but opportunities for scoundrels, false prophets, pretenders, and incompetents. The best wants to stay away from this mess while, at the same time, the mass public is assumed to be smart enough to be able to tell the differences. Often they don’t.
Meritocracy: this is to separate the clever from the stupid. But for a nation to be well governed, rulers need not be clever; the system only needs to be self-regulating and regulating well. The system needs the righteous and righteousness is found not in god. It is found in humans. Discovering those is true meritocracy.
Recall Mencius:
A man lives in the spacious dwelling, occupies the proper position, and goes along the highway of the Empire. When he achieves his ambition he shares these with the people; when he fails to do so he practices the dao alone.
Kongzi (孔夫子) or even Ma Huan (马欢) and the other Ming era (明朝) government officials might have sworn, the Malays and Chinese are such natural allies. Sadly, that has not happened. Instead, grievances were before invented and this, below, is the result.
Table 1: Dewan Rakyat as at March 2008, votes in millions, “outcome” is guessing on seats, 112 seats to win
Votes
% of total
Seats
A outcome
B outcome
Barisan Nasional
4.1
50.3
140
Peninsula-BN
84
Umno-All seats
2.4
29.3
79
<70
<84
Sabah-BN
26
Sarawak-BN
30
Pakatan Rakyat
3.8
46.7
82
PKR
1.5
18.6
31
42
42
PAS
1.1
14.0
23
27
13
DAP
1.1
13.8
28
39
39
Sabah
11
11
Sarawak
20
20
Table 2: Dewan Rakyat seat strength – how PAS-Umno unity looks like, past, present and future (112 seats to unite)
Seats
1986
1995
1999
2004
2008
2012/13
PAS
01
?
27
7
23
27
Umno
?
89
71
109
79
75
Total
98
116
102
102
Notes to Table 1:
A outcome = Scenario A, 2012/13 election outcome, conjecture.
B outcome = Scenario B, 2012/13 election outcome, conjecture.
Notes to Table 2:
The 2012/13 figures are pure conjectures.
Without comments, the above tables point to the conclusions as follows:
A federal government of only PAS and Umno, with no other Barisan Nasional partner, is an arithmetic possibility. (See Table 2, 2004 column.)
With 1.1 million votes in 2008, the popular vote for PAS was 14 percent of total, close to the 15 percent in 2004 (7 seats), in 1999 (27 seats) and, possibly, in other previous elections as well.
Without getting more votes, PAS got more seats in 2008 than in 2004, evidence that Umno’s loss is PAS gain and vice-versa. In each election season that PAS has more seats, these came following dissensions within Umno (1999 and 2008) and not because PAS is intrinsically the bigger draw of the two Malay parties. This also means they contest the same electorate.
Unlike the Barisan that hinges on one large party (Umno), while each of the multiple small parties can do little to bring it down, the Pakatan Rakyat parliamentary set-up is vulnerable to destabilization.
Unlike the present situation in which some PAS members are for defection (”unity government”) to Umno and others are not, an electoral change in the relative strength of PAS in the future either increases or decreases its likelihood of defection. There is no standing still.
If Pakatan is to neutralise the effect of PAS defecting, then it has to deal with two out of several future electoral outcomes. (a) Seat gains by PAS require the other Pakatan members to substantially increase their individual shares from the 2008 numbers to produce the 112-seat parliamentary majority (Table 1, A outcome). (b) Paradoxically, seat losses by PAS require the same aggregate number of other Pakatan seats (Table 1, B outcome), a situation that calls on Pakatan (ex PAS) to go for the same high seat targets (as in A outcome), without encroaching into PAS territories.
Once PAS and Umno are joined, the PAS mullahs would access enormous power by the back door what they couldn’t, for 30 years, gain through the front door. The mullahs (Hadi Awang for example), by definition and reason for existence, are not democrats and don’t want to be. Theocratic rule would supervise democratic bodies; Iran offers PAS such a model but, there, the women in particular reject the iron-fist of theocracy so that one of the earliest targets of PAS is the group Sisters-in-Islam (SIS). Umno’s policies (NEP) have less reason to be dismantled, and it sees how PAS is in fact strengthening those policies in Kedah and Kelantan, never mind if ordinary Malays suffer as a result. Note, finally, that PAS never calls for upholding the Federal Constitution.
Mahathir: 1. Ancient China considered itself the centre of the world and called itself the Middle Kingdom. And well it should. It was far more advanced in every way than Europe of the Dark Ages. Maybe China is thinking of making a comeback.
Answer: The definition of the “world” where ancient China thrived included neither India nor Pakistan? Those are (still) parts of the Indian subcontinent world at which Mahathir’s ancestors kowtowed to the Arabs then joined with them to convert the Malays. China is not “thinking” of a comeback. It has come back, so that never again will it be ruled by some smelly barbarians from the North or the West, and it comes back not because Mahathir said it.
Mahathir: 2. But we already have a new Middle Kingdom now. During Lee Kuan Yew’s triumphant visit to Malaysia he made it known to the Malaysian supplicants that Singapore regards the lands within 6000 miles radius of Singapore as its hinterland. This includes Beijing and Tokyo and of course Malaysia.
Answer: If Singapore’s hinterland runs 6,000 miles, then that would include India and Pakistan. Why? Singapore must not have either? Mahathir is dreaming of keeping Pakistan for his in-laws? They can have it, by all means please. And if this is so, is Mahathir worried more for the Malay or his ancestral homeland?
Mahathir: 3. Of course this self-deluding perception places Singapore at the centre of a vast region. It is therefore the latter day Middle Kingdom. The rest are peripheral and are there to serve the interest of this somewhat tiny Middle Kingdom.
Answer: Self is what it perceives, so perception is never delusional to the self; it can only be erroneous against reality. Peripheral by definition does not serve the center; it is served by the centre. (The “rest”, in the periphery, is collective grammar form and must be followed by a singular “is”, not plural.) Or, to put the same thing in terms of physical laws, the centre holds the periphery from spinning off into oblivion.
One could go on … and on. But that’s enough. That was largely to demonstrate how an intellectual midget in Mahathir the Great could have once ruled 20 million inhabitants, and he can’t even make sense. And what has he to show for the rule? Empty, unusable tower buildings that twinkle only in the sun, and failed and corrupted institutions, and a crumbling political party named Umno. And he knows it, especially when Lee Kuan Yew comes around and flashes off at him like a mirror. This is the reason he hates Lee Kuan Yew. Side-by-side Mahathir’s failings immediately show up, and Mahathir the Great is revealed as Mahathir the Great Goofer.
Note the two themes running through the Mahathir ranting.
One. Hollowness. Nothing substantive; no intellectual content; lots of puff. And yet he says he has “a lot more to say”. Well thank you very much for your future report. We’d be happy to see you take your “lot” with you, into the next life.
Two. Racism. Mahathir just cannot get away from pitting the Malays and Chinese against each other. Why? What have the Chinese stolen from Mahathir for him to pit the two groups together? Mahathir had to invent grievances (Malay Dilemma) 30, 40 years ago to get to power. After he has got that power, what has he delivered to the Malays? Horse riding clubs? Nothing, other than regress the Malays from their sanity, stoic tranquility (reminds of the good Kelantanese Nik Aziz, excepting the moments that Nasha fellow came along to vomit on his lap), and self-reliance. Think of it: more than 30 wasted years, a whole generation ruined and more. Further proof of his misdeeds? Today, two million Malay voters don’t want him to rule them.
There is a third theme in Mahathir’s posting, but this says only of his individual personality. This personality is a reflection of his generation as well as age: English educated, yet bigoted, yet illiterate, yet undiscerning. The English-educated social class likes to think they have a generous multicultural worldview and because they went to St John’s and some elitist Kuala Kangsar College they are therefore liberal and indulgent. Yet Mahathir is evidence of the opposite: racist, authoritarian, intolerant, and – dare we say? – stupid. He is, in spite of their mutual animosities, identical to the Malaysia Today horde, a motley of St Xavier types, drifting, selfish, quarrelsome middle-aged and old men, endless days on the Net, illiterate in maths, science and history, jobless, absent of identity roots, confused personalities, Chinese who can’t read Chinese, not even their mother’s name, Tamils who cannot read Tamil, and all write in bad English.
The contrast between Mahathir and Kuan Yew is all the more glaring if you consider that both were former premiers and today over 80. Kuan Yew, exploiting his influence from the past, spends the remaining days of life working for his country. But what is it that Mahathir does? Alone at his desk, his mouth froths bitterness, he fights old ghosts and is today useless in the service not only to himself but especially to “his” country because, in the past, he made enemies out of everybody.
There is also another difference between the two.
Kuan Yew neither despises nor envies the Malays, but he is concerned about preserving the Chinese identity while he is astute enough to know that it does the Chinese a world of good if the Malay neighbour improves his lot. Mahathir’s racial hatred is visceral so his policy actions, especially those during his time as premier, stem not out of any respect for the Malay existence, but if those policies undermine Malay economic welfare because they would put down the Chinese, then he wouldn’t mind. Such an attitude, his, explains why the Singapore-Malaysia issues over bridges, sand, water and railway are so intractable. The misfortune of the last 20, 30 years is the general Malay population didn’t see through Mahathir, drowned as they were into deadness by the bellicose shouting, name calling, quarreling and insults all of which he now delivers through his blog site. Added to this dint obstructing clarity is the drum beating from the sidelines of Mahathir, the Malaysia Today illiterate horde.
N.H. Chan has spent 4,113 words to decide on the question whether words spoken by Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh were of a “seditious tendency”. Certain words in the legal definition will tend to be seditious once they “bring hatred or contempt” or they “excite disaffection”, etc.
Chan’s defence of Lim and Karpal is an exercise in unpacking dictionary words for their legal meanings. The three operative words are “intention,” “sedition,” and “tendency”, plus their related verb and adverbial forms. Chan’s argument is tedious because intent and tendency are conflated. So the way to see what he had done is to split it into two: (a) what makes for intent, hence, seditious intention and (b) what tends to be seditious and what not, hence, what constitutes seditious tendency.
Seditious intention, the wording in other laws, are in Malaysia replaced by “seditious tendency”. Yet the same word, intention, is sprinkled into the various clauses. In spite, or because, of this word-switch, Chan’s argument takes apart the two words, intent and tendency, then accepts that intent need not be proved. However, he does not say whether intention is a part of tendency, because tendency speaks of propensity, a desire, an inclination towards some objective, which is the intent. One is ongoing; the other is a final, end state.
Regardless, once Chan is done with un-bundling the word “intention”, and discarding it after that, he goes on to (b). That is, what goes with words that would tend to be seditious? The answer is in Section 3 of the Sedition Act 1948. That has six categories to put anybody away for a long time, one of which, (f), is widely deployed; it says, “promote feelings of ill will”.
Hereon, that is, at part (b), Chan’s defence of Lim and Karpal is straightforward. It rests squarely on flipping the argument around, which to the logician is known as double false: the proposition of the charge is rendered false if it is true that the proposition is false. Say, for example, Lim is accused of bringing something “into hatred or contempt”. This is false once it is true he was merely “pointing out an error”, and this is exempt from the crime of sedition.
Chan’s argument is not without weaknesses (what exactly is the charge against Lim?). In another, more generalized way of phrasing Chan’s dissertation the law is not what words say they are, but what the judge says they ought to be. In this respect, the fate of Lim and Karpal is not even with the judge because guilty or not guilty then becomes a matter of luck (if not malice). Land with a sympathetic judge you are free; land with another you’re doom.
If the pain inflicted on Lim and Karpal is not on a guilty or not guilty outcome, what then is? It is the charge itself, is it not? It is the charge with all its attendant consequences, so guilty or not guilty is only part of the projection into terror unknown. This is to suggest that the law is an instrument of terror, in their cases, politically motivated terror. Chan knows this, or ought to know this. But the net effects to be drawn from Chan’s dissertation are these:
It once more paints a halo around the law and proclaims its sanctity, but not that it has become an instrument of terror.
It suggests there is nothing wrong with the law, so law enforcement is merely misguided rather than malicious and capricious, and so to be a reliable policeman you’ll have to be first and foremost a judge.
It speaks of impenetrable meanings and allusions out of reach of common people so you better stay out of the streets if you are not a lawyer. Or, hire a lawyer before you speak up.
All that says why Chan’s dissertation, while noteworthy, also detracts from the harsh reality that numerous Malaysian laws are not just bad; they are plainly oppressive. Much of what is fundamental to this country’s problems are rooted in such laws, the Constitution included:
Thinking aloud is now a widespread crime, otherwise known in Orwellian-speak as thought crimes. You need go nowhere, nor go anywhere with a weapon. Merely to sit in a wheel chair, or in your house, speak up, and you’ll land into trouble, because the law is no longer the arbiter between state and person. The law visits you with the greatest of all Malaysian terrors: a knock on the door. It actually facilitates the charge, therefore the oppression.
Sedition goes with the numerous speech, blasphemy and defamation laws that exist with countless other legal colorations one finds in the UK, India and so on. Malaysia is one of the biggest importers of an entire legal regime, all having to do with mere words, inspired by doctrinaire institutions, religious from Cairo and Riyadh, secular from London. None are intended to be helpful to common people so certain social classes of people draw power and impunity from such a legal apparatus. Chan’s dissertation amply demonstrates it.
Sedition, like racism, is a charge for which there is no defense. If, as policeman, I only have to “feel” to be condescended to, or to feel ill will, then I may launch a charge against the politician I despised listening to. My allegation is frivolous? Prove my “feeling” false. This is everybody’s dilemma, especially those on police bail for myriad offenses. The moment a person is charged he is guilty until proven guilty, regardless of what they teach students in law schools.
Under such a legal regime, judges and lawyers can no longer cite the excuse, “but-I-didn’t-make-the-law” (Auschwitz camp guards employ the same logic), and then proceed to pronounce life and death, dress up inanities in obfuscating judgements, collect fat fees, and continue as attendants to oppression. The law is seditious.
“Wham! The war broke out … I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn’t wait to go and fight.” – Saul Bellow in “Augie March”
They wanted to get into North Korea. They wanted exposes, the dirtier the better. They wanted a headline that reads, in New York, “We Were in North Korea”. Hurray! Who knows, maybe they were thinking of a Pulitzer? After that, untold riches? They pursued the American-style evangelical journalism, “investigative journalism” by another name. This says North Korea is Evil, we are the Good. After all, didn’t an American president say it is among the Axis of Evil?
Well, Euna Lee (picture, left) and Laura Ling got what they wanted and pursued: 12 years inside North Korea. And, when and if they get out, they can write about it and sell lots of books, give speeches, tour campuses, and talk about how badly they suffered.
It used to be just naive White American kid journalists that get into trouble in Russia or East Germany. Now, it is the converted, stupid Yellow-skin American women journalists (Singapore’s Straits Times has such types) that get into trouble – everywhere. And, worse, they betray and embarrass the Chinese government that allowed them into the country and near the border. (Remember the fat American boy who swam up to Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma?)
Who should be held responsible? Who is complicit to Euna and Laura in jail? American can-do, cowboy media culture for one. For another, it is organisations like this which promote the underlying idea that you can do anything and whatever you want; there are no boundaries. Words without Borders – what a clever idea! It’s also called Freedom of The Press. If it is constitutionally guaranteed for America then it is also good for the Rest of the World and they must have it, like it or not (Malaysia has imported it, Malaysiakini being the model). American condescension is eternal. Poor girls.
And while the girls spend time in jail, they continue in America to detail – this itself is a story on top of a story – about the wretched and the banality of diplomacy, and about cruel North Koreans: “We can’t even get a phone call through (sob, sob). See, how evil they are? It’s proof.” That, too, is evangelical journalism, but by other means.
[Craig Calhoun, New York U., author, Neither Gods nor Emperors, UC Press, 1997] makes the important point that democracy, as many of these young Chinese students saw it, had very little to do with free competitive elections. He quotes one young student who says ‘Oh we have a much more fundamental and radical understanding of democracy than you liberal Americans! We read Rousseau and we care about the general will.’ So Calhoun suggests that although the West really embraced this as a democracy movement, these young students in China really saw themselves much more in the tradition of the May 4th movement, or the New Culture Movement in China: a movement of intellectuals who are speaking out as the conscience of the country, who are very concerned about corruption, and are very anxious to safeguard the sovereignty of China. The student protestors saw themselves as the latter day incarnation of earlier Chinese intellectual protestors and were not necessarily trying to turn China into a kind of blueprint of the US or England or some other liberal democracy. – Elizabeth Perry, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University
There was a time when the Middle-East countries like Iran shout at America and call it the Great Satan. America shouts back, and the former become in turn the Axis of Evil.
International politics, like kids playing cowboys and Indians, belonged, and still belong, to a certain religious hype. Their politicians and institutions and their hangers-on – reporters, academics, “activists” – grew up in that Garden of Eden tradition, Judeo-Christian, so their language is couched in that space, you are either Good or Evil.
Yet Nietzsche was right. Christianity represents a fake morality; after all, the last Christian had died on the cross. Religion, pushed forward, is mass psychosis, and farther on it is an ideology with a morality to enslave one group and exalt the other, to make a master of them.
Nietzsche is cited here because he offers not only a framework to consider what the West – White people – think but because Tiananmen Day came to past and they have so many judgements to make of it. The number of people, and the range, piling on Tiananmen is astonishing coming from people, even Malaysians with their pathetic institutions.
As Najib and the Chinese leaders bid goodbye, their minds are preoccupied with the growing demand for democratic change both in Malaysia and China.
You immediately sense something is not right with the entire sentence. “Minds are preoccupied” – how does Josh Hong know? He is some voodoo mind reader? Then this, “growing demand for democratic change” – isn’t Malaysia a democracy? Already? And how does Josh Hong knows that, in China, there is a “growing demand for democratic change”? What’s so good about democracy?
But the one “article” that beats all in the Tiananmen expositions of Good versus Evil is this: and to save you the trouble of reading it, here is the summary, oozing in biblical language
That came from a man named Dean Johns, White man from Australia, drifter, unable to nail down a job, and so he will take one “anywhere in the world”, and he is in Kuala Lumpur. And what work can he do? Copywriting. His intellect is surpassed by only his vocabulary range.
Dean Johns is not atypical, but he is revealing in the sense that Tiananmen offers a bait, and very convenient one at that, for an anti-China, anti-Chinese racist rant (no prizes for spotting those revealing parts).
The reasons White people pile in on a country they once tried to carve up among themselves is because China is not going to come after them, Tiananmen is easy to write, and they may even get paid for it. But, above all, it makes them feel good about themselves; righteous because the Other is evil, just because the Other is unjust, democratic because the Other is totalitarian, upright because the Other is corrupt. Only the Johnses speak the truth, the Other is a liar.
So what were the students after at Tiananmen on June 4? Answer: better student dormitories, end nepotism, lower university fees, cheaper goods, stop police brutality, cut the bureaucracy, limit official privileges, better jobs, more jobs, more land for their peasant families – indeed everything under the sun except liberal democracy. In other words, they wanted better socialism, actually improved communism. These were students of Marxism: a chance to work half a day and spend the other half fishing.
The students and China’s ruling politburo were after the same thing – 以人为本 yi ren wei ben and that is as ancient as is China – only different ways of getting there. But what do the Johnses (or the Joshes) know? They have only the King James dictionary, which is all they will ever need.
If there’s any doubt into what the students wanted then, ask Wu’er Kaixi or Li Lu. These former student leaders have, 20 years later, made a good life for themselves, waking up mornings with some guilt for instigating naivety then, and now making all the money that Dean Johns envies as exploitation and serfdom because Johns could only get little of it. China could have got Wu’er, Number Two on the wanted list, when he turned up in Macau but they let him go to take the return flight to Taiwan. He tells Guernica, Tiananmen is an inconvenience to the world (by that, he means the West) not to China, and there is no right and wrong.
But that, a better China, or truth or falsity, is not what is commemorated on June 4. White people, with the like of yellow skins in Josh Hong lined up behind (America pays, Malaysians perform a five-minute song), play a vastly different tune called democracy. The pull of narcissism to make a Great Morality tale out of a bunch of student demands is so great that even a reporter, such as in the Financial Times, willing to step up to the truth have to apologise before hand. “I don’t deny the atrocity of the event, nor the repression after it,” he says.
To the Johnses, other races, if they are not inferior, they are evil; the two are the same.
Nietzsche was prescient when he said: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
The closer the Malaysian Islamic party PAS is to the central seat of national power, the closer it gets to the fundamental basis for its politics. The 55th party muktamar has only one issue and which, all said and done, reaffirms unanimously this: what is the reason for the existence of PAS?
Quick observations, and the tentative answer has two inter-connected parts as follows:
Nasharuddin Isa, Number Two in PAS, is for talking to Umno; Husam Musa is not, but note his reason for refusal – it’s only because PAS is likely to end up as second fiddle. Conversely to say, Husam would be willing if PAS came on top (which is improbable to him) or, at the minimum, equal to Umno.
Q. But nobody is laundering the question why Umno and PAS talking should ever be thought of? Ans: a possible Umno-PAS alliance.
Q. Why is an Umno-PAS alliance even necessary? Ans: If not to uphold Malay political supremacy – and in the corollary, Malay-Muslim dominance – then what else?
Q. Why is Malay political supremacy thought necessary? Ans: “Awang Selamat” from Utusan has supplied it; see, it’s the Chinese. Utusan, representative of thinking by street thugs, has merely phrased supremacy in terms of raw power; PAS however puts it in more religious terms and so is sacrosanct and therefore un-seditious. Here’s the evidence:
“It (missionary work) must not just be to get non-Muslim [Malaysian] support for PAS but to save them from hell,” Yusof (Embong, Pahang delegate) said to shouts of “Allahuakhbar” from the delegates. (Nga Kor Ming, are you listening?)
Those answers are consistent with the founding of PAS. It is that the way to Malay political dominance has to be through the religious route on the extreme left as opposed to the pure ethnic route taken by Umno coming from the extreme right. After 30, 40 years both are now meeting in the centre, so the logical outcome is necessarily an alliance because both were intended to serve the same purpose.
That conclusion, which is historical and self-evident, leads necessarily to the post-March 2008 question …
(b) Leadership in Pakatan Rakyat.
To say (Nasharuddin) that PAS and other Pakatan members, DAP and PKR, should establish once and for all time over which party should lead the coalition is the same as saying (Husam) PAS should replace Umno.
Q. Why, fundamentally, is PAS likened to Umno? Ans: That depends on the answer to the question, what is Umno today?
Q. What is Umno today? Ans: It is all things parochial and national – Malay culture, politics, Islam, Constitution, monarchy, NEP, language. It is all except this: it is not for Chinese or Indians or Iban or Kadazans or Christians or Buddhists, their culture, and so on. How is PAS different from Umno rests squarely on this: Islam is first on the former’s check list. But collapse religion into Malay constitutional identity, Umno and PAS become fundamentally the same.
According to Kedah PAS representative Ahmad Yahya, the current strength of the PAS Supporters Club (KPP) was a sign of growing support by non-Muslims for the Islamic party.
However, PAS Youth deputy chief Azman Shapawi Rani cautioned care in deciding on the KPP’s place within the party.
“We have to refine our plan, and study it in greater detail. We cannot hurry,” Azman said.
PAS doesn’t want dilution (if not, it is no different from PKR), just as Umno has to be exclusively Malay.
Q. If PAS is Umno, what does that make of DAP and PKR? Ans: DAP is Gerakan; PKR is MCA, MIC, and all miscellaneous thrown together.
Q. Why is Umno relevant to Pakatan leadership? (This question came, surreptitiously, from Nasharuddin because he has simultaneously posed two things alongside each other: Umno-PAS alliance and Pakatan leadership.) Ans: Both Husam and Nasharuddin want the same thing. That is, Umno is to Barisan as PAS is to Pakatan. But here is the implied threat from Nasharuddin: if PAS isn’t going to be chief, then we are going to Umno. And, Husam reinforces it: if we go to Umno, then expect us to be the big chief.
The raison d’etre reaffirmed in the PAS muktamar exposes the fiction in several pieces of assertions cultivated so far by the DAP (Nga Kor Ming, Jeff Ooi, Ronnie Liu) and PKR (Anwar Ibrahim, Elizabeth Wong, but not Zulkifli Noordin) and their footloose sympathesizers (Raja Petra, Haris Ibrahim). The assertions:
1. The days of race politics are over.
2. A new dawn of equality awaits all who vote Pakatan.
3. PAS for all, the corollary of which is Bangsa Malaysia.
4. It is impossible for PAS to rule alone, so vote for it.
5. Pakatan is New Politics (and this has to be the biggest prize in fiction).
POSTSCRIPT: The Pakistani path that PAS may seek.
Lessons from Pakistan, the Islamic State. From Ali Eteraz in Dissent magazine:
Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law.
Later,
Until Pakistan is recognized not as a secular state with an extremist problem but as an Islamic state overburdened with political ambitions couched in religious terms, change is not going to come. Pakistan’s 1973 constitution has to be criticized. It is not unreasonable for Islam to be the country’s official religion, but making it the state religion in a truly heterogeneous and heterodox religious milieu was a mistake.
The decision was made under duress by a Machiavellian politician who did not care very much for religion, which was why he was so happy to exploit it—not to mention that in the guise of Islam he smuggled in anti-democratic institutions from the dictatorship that preceded him. The subsequent empowerment of Islamist groups; the religious tyranny of Zia ul Haq; and the rise of Talibanization, legal balkanization, and militancy calling itself Islamic are all clear proof that 1973 led Pakistan down a dark and dangerous path. …
Pakistanis cannot simply ignore the ‘73 constitution and go to an earlier document, largely because one such instrument does not exist and also because, for all its flaws, that constitution has become central to the modern Pakistani state. For example, both dictators that followed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto—Zia and Musharraf—felt they had to manipulate the ‘73 constitution rather than step outside of it. It is also not possible to delete the nearly four decades of Islamization.
For a long time I believed that rather than deletion the better option was that of dilution. Under this approach, one would add more liberal interpretations of Islamic law into the mix to soften the hard-line wahhabi version that has dominated since Zia ul Haq’s time. Such an approach would use “good” or humane Islam to defeat “bad” or inhumane Islam. The hope would be that over time these moderate views would become mainstream.
The dilution strategy was on display in 2006 when reformers from the CII successfully argued that various elements of Pakistan’s Islamic criminal law were simply “un-Islamic.” At the time I thought this was a great move. By purportedly using Islam to thwart the hard-liners, the reformers were able to pass legislation that undermined the Hudood Ordinances and benefited many women.
I no longer ascribe to the dilution strategy. Not because it does not sometimes work but because it does nothing to challenge the essential flaw in Pakistani society: the state currently empowers citizens on the basis of their relationship to Islam rather than upon their status as “people” of Pakistan—an entity that is national and political and should not be defined by religion. The paramount purpose of a state is to guarantee political equality between its citizens, whether they are devout Muslims, non-practicing Muslims, heretical Muslims, or non-Muslims. The dilution strategy is a pragmatic approach that is unfair to those who are non-believers; not to mention unjust to those conservatives who do not wish to practice Islam progressively. Pakistan needs a document that extends itself to all Pakistanis.
There is not a power on earth that has not relied on some form of terror. Man lived not merely in fear of invaders who would ride furiously in from the distance, he lived in fear of gods or of God and his representatives on earth. He lived in fear of the authority of officers and of the bailiffs of his own masters, in fear of losing his home or the food he needed to stay alive or his land or his work. Every effort to liberate man has in fact been an effort to liberate him from fear…. – Ivan Klima (The Spirit of Prague, 1994, Granta)
Jenice Lee’s description of the humiliation inflicted on her is revealing to some, not unfamiliar to others. But, above all, it scratches only the surface. She describes only the women’s part of the police prison, and she was there for three nights. In the men’s side, she might see cannabis rolled in plastic films cut out from bags brought in with the breakfast and these are then distributed in the anus of men to Sungai Buloh and other prisons. There are nightly beatings. The police conduct periodic raids against foreigners – Indonesians, Bangladeshi mostly – bring them in, order them to empty their pockets and change, and take all their money. Young Malaysians brought in for the first time are allowed one telephone call; for that prison guards charge MYR50 a call, that’s dollars not cents. Other policemen act as couriers to bring in cigarettes; prices vary.
Note the part that Jenice describes the policemen loitering in and out the changing room; they act not just as voyeurs, they may have the mind to rape her. In another circumstance, she won’t be so lucky and the uniform the policemen wear doesn’t count for a thing. For proof of what a policeman is capable of, asks the ghost of Altantuyaa Shaariibuu. The ravenous sexual appetite in the policemen is stirred not only because she is youthful, so much the better if she is Chinese because decades of race politics does not produce neutral ethical consequences, or none. Rather, it renders anybody who is not a bumiputra inferior in status far, far more than just share ownership of companies. Racism is rewarded, after all; dishonest work is also rewarded, whereas genuine, independent meritorious work is badly paid. The corollary in all this is that anybody not assigned the preferred race is inferior, and would be treated as such. The police department is not inure to such influences.
This inferiority status is supported in a user comment below the video. The comment user, a kid really, ridicules Jenice and calls her “amoi”; it is the kind of vernacular sexual description of some lowly women to serve his penis, if ever he gets his hands on her. Farther evidence to this, treating in particular Chinese women as objects of penile fantasy, is reflected in numerous forums (Malaysia Today for example). You see them in Parliament (recall Bung Mokhtar Radin, et al) and in the Cabinet, in one Ahmad Zahid who pimps Chinese girls to strip to the pelvis for an election campaign and he calls it “culture”.
But, there is a problem to the police prison description. It doesn’t square with numerous other accounts in summarizing police conduct, “police state” being the most common. Legislator Teresa Kok of the party DAP refers to the police, and by context the Brickfields police, as the lapdog of political masters. Fahri Azzat, not equally sanguine about the state of affairs, prefers to define the arrest by Brickfields as an abuse of power. Another lawyer and politician, says the Brickfields police chief is “out of control”.
One reason for the anomalies in these mass media cliches rests on perspective. For Fahri to suggest there’s abuse of power, it is only because he took the arrest of the five lawyers and 14 others on May 7 in isolation. Teresa saw police arrests only through her political lens, that is, as a pattern of political conduct stemming from the Umno government. Jenice, in contrast, described what she was subjected to. So, her personal account is a series of objective snapshots driven from inside the police and out into the world. This is a kind of reality vastly different from the abstract labels, lapdogs, police state, and so on, that mostly convey little, if any, concrete or substantive idea. You don’t get a sense of what exactly they mean.
There is a more sinister, if unintended, consequence in describing police capriciousness and brutality in terms of mass media cliches. They conceal the true identity of the police. Concealing the true identity renders impotent a fact of public knowledge and that which common people have lived with for years. It is that the police are a gang, not as a sinister description but in the activities many of them live by. Some go for extortion and blackmail; many offer services (Tunku Aziz’s word) on payment; the lowly have their street methods, the higher-ups have their business and political connections graduating to positions in the board of directors once they retire. They have hired-guns on the payroll (think again of Altantuyaa), common people think of some as racketeers, others as political cohorts, that is, as an armed political unit of the ruling party.
Such assertions seem either far-fetched or exaggerated only because, until the arrival of Pakatan Rakyat, extra-legal police activities bear no serious political ramifications. Without political ramifications they were tolerated. Law enforcement was primarily a household affair, of little national significance. One common household notion: thieves get what they deserve, even if they are treated badly in lockups. Either thieves pay with a bribe or they pay a fine from jail. It is the same dilemma that confronts a driver each time he faces a traffic policeman.
The piece of fiction that the policeman is either ethically or professionally neutral is not a common place idea. Yet it survives in present form, such as in Tunku Aziz, who has had a good, long life, with nothing to worry about being picked up by the police and who essentially advances the few-bad-apples argument. Indeed, he suggests that the police are, by birth seemingly, upright, doing an unenviable job in impossible circumstances. Which is to say it is not the police fault that they behave the way they do. The police get a bad rap because of a “hate campaign”; that is, the police, too, have opponents who lie.
Thus spake Tunku Aziz, who it must be remembered was brought in by Lim Kit Siang into the DAP central committee so he has yet to say that his party mate Jenice was “deserving” of the police lockup service.
The willingness to call the police by its true name will help the Opposition not only deal with it but offers some answers to intriguing questions. It answers the question why, and not merely how, thieves and robbers have taken over the streets from the police. It answers the question why the police are against the setting up of vigilante groups, such as the DAP Polis but don’t mind paid neighbourhood patrols, and why agencies like Rela under its supervision is so noted for their brutality against immigrants.
There is one way to deal with a gang: put it out of business. Of course, the police are aware of this prospect under a new government. And this prospect raises a dilemma. If the police are available for the hire – for instance, as an armed political unit – it makes no difference to them who is the paymaster. True? This probably underlies the reason that the police are tougher on the DAP than on the PKR, on Hindraf than on PAS. On the same issue, Perak, police are tougher on Karpal Singh than on Nizar Jamaluddin. Such a discriminatory tactic poses a problem within Pakatan Rakyat. Can they agree on police reformation as a priority of its government, first to disband the entire structure, fire the top dozen officers, then to reconstitute and to rehire every rank and file, case by case?
But there are signs of differences in how PKR, DAP and PAS regard the police. Only, however, the mass arrests of 160 people in recent weeks finally tore apart the veil of the police as an independent guardian of the law and comes out the other side as an armed political unit for hire.
There is, therefore within Pakatan, an uncoupling of language from reality. In the clip below, Perak DAP leaders are talking about who constitutes the legitimate government with, of all people, the policemen.
Such kind of talk harks back to the notion of a lapdog. If the police can have its uses by Umno now, could not the Pakatan use the police in the future should the occasion demand it? To accuse police as lapdogs is also to concede that the police are subjected to a higher power (Umno) and that they, especially, have no volition, no free will, of their own. Without an independent free will, the logical conclusion is thus reached: the police is not entirely responsible for what they do, says Tunku Aziz. Yet this is not what a Malaysiakini report says. To say, “Cops aggravating BN’s headache” is to infer that the police acted not on orders or in contravention of BN orders. They acted out of their own volition.
If there is confusion within the Opposition into seeing the true nature of the police – that they are a gang reporting only to themselves – it is probably because different members draw conclusions from different backgrounds and experiences. Typically, PKR criticisms of the police are directed at assumed political masters, that is, Umno. They (Selangor chief minister, for example) talk of “excessive” police enforcement but never the malice and the ogling that goes on in the women prison cells. If the PKR keeps at this, then it offers the moral justification – if Umno, why not us? – for the day when the police becomes of use to the party. This is also to say that, like Umno, the PKR treats policing as an extension of political activity, but it has yet to answer the question a gang institution will demand: how are you going to cut us a deal? Like the judiciary, is policing not a business?
Inside PAS, whose members have stronger moral strictures than the PKR, they appear to despise the police in their hearts, without saying so. Few of the 160 arrests in May are PAS members and this speaks of their unwillingness to have anything to do with the police because, unlike the PKR, they seem not to see policing as political activity but as an Umno appendage. There is a nuanced difference between the two. The question they appear hesitant to answer is this: Is the police an independent, institutional gangland answerable only to itself and, if so, what is to be done?
The DAP is somewhere in between the PAS and PKR positions. As long as Karpal Singh is around, Lim Kit Siang will only use echo boards to lean towards the PKR position. Chief among the propagandists is, of course, Tunku Aziz, followed now by one Augustine Anthony. The latter reminds of Augustine Paul with an appetite for bullhorn phrases and of Kit Siang struggling with tortuous 70-word-long sentences in pretence of Shakespearian prose. Here’s one inanity from Augustine, a man who is no respecter of history, culture, the dead, or religion:
These YB’s must bear in mind that it takes more to continue winning the hearts and minds of the people than apple distribution in parliament house or bicycle paddling to the parliament entrance or constant holding of candle light in vigils and screaming “Saya YB, Saya YB” when apprehended by the law enforcement officers or even offering prayers to the ghost of unknown Ghengis Khan descendant who was blown to smithereens.
Thus spake Augustine Anthony, the man who, in employing the words of Yankee occupiers in South Vietnam, reduces politics to one formula, hearts and minds. He bears the exact same condescension – “you stupid morons, next time ask me before you get arrested” – as Glenn Anthony, the Ipoh CID chief shouting, One-Two-Three Tangkap. Decades of race politics produces this ethical, superior-inferior quality in Malaysia. It includes talking down to people: “Sit boy! Sit!” It used to be just race; now it extends to political persuasions. (And note, not one PAS member were among the eight legislators arrested and Augustine – conveniently for him? – was not in the way of the police.)
Augustine’s ranting is closely associated to Tunku Aziz’s comments in one respect: Opposition people like Teresa Kok and Jenice Lee asked for trouble. They invite arrest (incidentally, both articles are posted in Lim Kit Siang’s blog). If this is true, then it follows that the police are merely doing their job, that is, Teresa and Jenice “deserve the police service” they get. Here it is from Tunku Aziz:
Criticisms of the PDRM (Polis Di-Raja Malaysia) have lately turned ugly: they have been reduced to what amounts to a hate campaign. I believe this attitude is totally counterproductive because as citizens we deserve the police service we get.”
Note the commonality between Tunku Aziz’s core message – don’t blame the police – and Anwar Ibrahim’s proclivity for intellectualizing that says, in effect, “mass arrests is a symptom of a fearful and tottering Umno.” Which seems to suggest this: “the police are being made use of, don’t you see. In time, we can have use of the police as well.” Truth, reality, ethical conduct – the underlying problems of the nation – gets second place in political machinations coming from Anwar, Tunku Aziz et al.
Or, is it simply, they don’t see?
But none of that intellectualizing afflicts the most precious thing – the heart – that goes on in a prison cell where Jenice was thrown. This explains why she is so troubled.
Once the police act to inflict fear (in common parlance, to teach you a lesson), then the problem for those in police hands is no longer centred on the law. The problem shifts and falls into another category, that is, staying alive – which is typically the kind of fear that accompanies sudden disappearances from the home or from the street. The death of A Kugan in police custody, along with other brutalities, is a reminder of the consequence of falling into police hands. This has become so dangerous, so fatal, that it suddenly matters how long you are kept in a lockup. The longer the duration, the greater is the anxiety. Why?
The answer has already preceded the question. Of course, police must get a remand order; Kugan was under remand, after all. There is no shortage of magistrates to offer police the maximum period of detention, and note how consistently the police refuse lawyer access in order not to set any more precedents; sometimes they will not even tell where people are held.
But this, the fear of what’s to happen next, is a crucial agent in inflicting terror. Once police conduct an arrest with impunity (as Fahri has suggested), the life that is your own automatically dissolves. That life falls into the mercy of the terror. There are safeguards, of course, but these are so rickety they amount instead to complicity. For one thing, the law exists no longer to protect society, it exists as a tool of terror. And then there are honourable people who lend support to the terror; Tunku Aziz comes to mind. Magistrates issuing remand orders are now so routine they act like premeditating brutality. Tunku Aziz praising the police was being pernicious, spiteful of common people, and he had acted as an attendant to tyranny.
This, then, is the same tyranny: the police have not changed in forty, fifty years because the law has always been its instrument. The one difference between now and before is in numbers: as the statute books swelled, policing powers grew and, with it, the increased capacity to inflict fear from households to politicians. The police have now a range and a diversity of laws to put anybody away.
The other difference is that it has lately been more political and therefore more public. Being public, the two functions – law as instrument, police as executioner – visibly merge. The police becomes the director. As director he visits the scene, picks the cast, takes them home, assign the roles – you live, you are charged, you stay two more nights, you go to jail. This is to say the executioner takes over the law; he becomes the law, he is the new force in politics. His powers have grown to the extent it is now possible to arbitrate over who wins an election gang war.
When Umno politicians and legislators (remember Bung Mokhtar Radin, et al?) tell us, “leave if you don’t like it here”, perhaps one should listen to them for a change. After all, what a country… one steamy hotpot and why not let it stew in its own chillies, after which watch them screw it further and have their women suffer their handiwork? Today, racketeers run the country, the political parties, and the police department while their kids poke around the streets thieving from hapless women, and yet they can’t see that none of that happened by chance.
Here is a story of a man who got out, but not for political reasons it must be emphasised. He went to Greenland.
Rather, the point is this: train, get a skill, keep your ears to the ground, and always, always keep close to the guanxi 关系 (關係) – we’ve been through this before, remember? – and then with a little luck it is possible to make it, anywhere. qian shi bu wang, hou shi zhi shi前事不忘，后事之师
GREENIE-LEFTIES
Ghani Ismail, fading reporting Star, aging Leftist, probably once a Marxist, now certainly an Islamist, wants us to go to the Islamic PAS party if DAP or PKR is not to our liking. Even so, he thinks there is a Red-Green alliance going, personified in persons like himself and very likely Elizabeth Wong as well. You might know what it is to be Green, religiously speaking, but what is it to be on the Left, being Red?
Here it is from a man who spent half his life living on the Left; in the very properly liberal Left. As a child, the parents of Jan Fleischhauer won’t let him eat oranges because they were grown in countries ruled by the conservative Right. Reminds you of the forbidden White garden fruits of Eden?
Reading Fleischhauer, you begin to see how the Red and the Green have anything in common: religiosity, dogma, prejudice, bigotry, intolerance and, above all, they are envious of McDonalds. The horror! The horror!
