In Zhao Mingfu: A Coroner’s Inquest into Politics

One of the most jarring revelations emerging so far from the coroner’s inquest into Teoh Beng Hock (accurately, 赵明福 Zhao Mingfu) is, it contains all the elements of a criminal trial, not  an inquiry to produce a finding or to deduce a conclusion.

In a trial, guilt and innocence have everything to do with what goes on in court. However, an inquest exists to resolve an inexplicable event, to solve a puzzle, to determine cause and effect. All persons, witnesses, the varied and related parties,  the lawyers in particular, were to turn up in court purely to supply information thereby assist the judge, a magistrate, to reach a conclusion into the cause of Zhao’s death.

But, assisting is what none of them do. In particular, and most striking of all, is that witnesses and lawyers for the government and the supposedly anti-corruption agency MACC, issue questions, offer answers and make assertions purely to prove the point: Zhao killed himself. This is to say, they have already decided for the judge how the death should be ruled.

Of course, that is to be expected; MACC and, indeed, the government are on trial and they have all the resources of the world to make black look white, to turn fiction into fact, or make the real look unreal. This willingness, ability as well, to influence reality is not extraordinary – white Europeans are pioneers in contortion (think of Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov). But, in Malaysia, it lifts life onto a new plane.

The English judicial system, conventionally a place to determine life and death but given up in Malaysia as a battleground tool of politics, is now the place to determine what is true or false, the real from the unreal. Once the court sinks into this role, then the whole country joins in (as MACC did here to brush-paint its innocence). This is because reality tolerates neither boundaries nor limitations.

Yet truth is remarkably simple. After the testimony of Thailand’s Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand on Oct 21, it is now established fact:

1. Zhao died from a high fall. (a Rojanasunand fact that supports the conclusion of two government pathologists).
2. The originating place of the fall is the tower building offices of MACC at Plaza Masalam (fact told by MACC witnesses).

The two pieces of evidences are critical because they offer starting points from which to trace backwards, from Zhao’s moment of death into the MACC offices and thence to events in its rooms on July 16, the fateful day. There is now only the question left to be answered: What caused his fall from a height?

The government, the MACC, its lawyers, all said he jumped, and so did Malaysian Insider which tried to help along the idea. They not only want to preclude judgement, they were suggesting to the judge an alternative conclusion of reality, away from the window.

Looking from the ground up – and backwards in time – Rojanasunand points in another direction, through the window into the building. Therein is the answer, such as in the person of Zhao himself:

• skull: linear fracture before impact;
• chest: heavy injuries at moment of impact;
• hands: little injuries at moment of impact;
• neck: line abrasions before impact;
• thighs: blow injuries before impact;
• anal: penetration injuries before impact; and,
• heels and one shoe, separated from the rest of Zhao.

Once the answer is known, then it is possible to know whether if Zhao Mingfu was asked: Are you Chinese? It is in the nature of such a question that the seed of many past genocides had germinated: in Nanking by the Japanese, in Rwanda, in Germany, in Sudan, American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Turk slaughter of Armenians and Kurds….

In Zhao Mingfu is also the inquest into a national body politic of institutionalised  racism, therefore, all the grounds to suppress as unreal.

From Bagan Pinang: Deniers and Denials

Even in conceding the Pakatan Rakyat loss in Bagan Pinang, the arrogance of power and self-righteousness is palpable. Here is DAP’s Lim Kit Siang:

“(Isa Samad’s) victory despite his record of Umno money politics would be a clear and unmistakable message that Umno/BN could not be redeemed.” (In his usual meandering, convoluted prose, Kit Siang, who prizes his English ability over MCA politicians, is wrong in the word, ‘despite’. It should be ‘in spite of’. Probably he doesn’t know the difference.)

Kit Siang then suggests that Pakatan leaders go back to the “drawing board” – an odd suggestion. Weren’t they finished with the drawing board when they went out in March last year? If they weren’t, what were they doing at the drawing board then? Doodling?

After him there is Salahuddin Ayub who, in saying that the loss arose because Pakatan didn’t do enough for Indians, is deflecting the responsibility away from PAS, his party. “It is not the fault of PAS, it’s Pakatan,” is the statement in effect. Kit Siang and he are on common ground.

But a cursory look at the numbers speaks to an entirely different picture. Umno up its majority margin by 3,100 votes from 2,300 last year. Even to grant the improbable fact that the entire 20 percent Indians  (of the 13,600 electorate) voted for PAS in 2008, Salahuddin is also saying all, if not most, of the 2,700 Indian votes it had pocketed before went back to Umno. Really? He said next to nothing of the Malay vote swing.

Salahuddin is like Hadi Awang before him, the latter blaming the uncivilised loincloth Sarawakians of Batang Ai for not seeing the “high culture” of PAS, therefore not voting it. Salahuddin has to blame anybody and everybody else but the Malays for rejecting his party because to say so he then have to concede that his party is a shadow, the Islamic Other of Umno. Being the Other means that wherever there is Umno, it’s redundant. Worse than that, the Malays, other than those in Kelantan, don’t give it a damn; because of or in spite of its religious credentials makes for no difference, it loses the vote either way.

Other than Salahuddin, there are also the Pakatan cheerleaders, fellows like Tian Chua, Nathaniel Tan, Azly Rahman, Haris Ibrahim, et al – people who before Bagan Pinang talk much about “deniers” and “denials” (by Barisan, of course). If they’re not silent now, embarrasing so, then they either blame “political immorality” or “money politics” that, in the flip side of the argument, slanders the people of Bagan Pinang for being corruptible, taking corrupt money when they knew Isa is corrupt. They don’t even have the courtesy to grant sovereignty to the people of Bagan Pinang to choose who like want.

Related to the slandering  excuses, Malaysiakini tops all when it says Isa, not Umno, won Bagan Pinang. What’s the basis for that “independent” assertion? Answer, Isa is popular. What if Isa had lost, then it would still be because of him and not Umno? Malaysiakini, thus, have to reach the following bizarre conclusion, if it is not to be contradictory: Isa winning or losing arises from his personal popularity, a corrupted self included. And, since Umno didn’t win (or lose) Bagan Pinang, Umno must be clean as whistle.

Covered in this raft of chest thumping, hail-and-brimstone justifications over Bagan Pinang, what lies beneath the loss by PAS? What’s the reality? The answer is so self-evident it seems nearly pedestrian to have to say so: PAS. The party lost because the party went in. Only the ramifications need debate, not why PAS lost (it lost because of it).

• One ramification: the so-called March 2008 tsunami of Lim Kit Siang was purely an accident, too many voting at the same time against Barisan and not because of the godliness of Pakatan. March 2008 was a coincidence and a nation-wide mistake. But, later, Kit Siang will have to go to his grave without seeing another tsunami – lucky him – while his son can dream on about water rafting into Putrajaya.

• Two: As long as PAS is the reason for the loss, then all the talk of going back to the “drawing board” will amount to nothing. Kelantan excepting, Bagan Pinang says this: where there is PAS, there won’t be DAP or PKR – that, or they will go down with it. Umno sees this, and use it effectively in the by-election; only the Pakatan cheerleaders and Lim Kit Siang wish to deny this reality, either out of stupidity or of the vague hope of tapping into the Malay bank of votes. They can’t answer convincingly why, between Umno and PAS, should a Malay choose PAS? They can say why people should not choose Umno, but why should they choose PAS? Because it has god on its side, and no money?

• Three: DAP-PKR-PAS makes for a highly combustible, even dangerous mixture. One adores the rule of law, one loves to make everything law (especially the godly kind); in between them, a third veils the mutual authoritarianism by talking justice and equality. There is a phrase for their eventual outcome: democratic despotism. You see this future all over Britain today (so admired by the Malaysiakini types): what you can say, what you can’t say, where you can smoke, where you can’t, when you can swim, where you can’t. And, of course, what to drink and where. The lesson from Pakatan Selangor and learned in Bagan Pinang is not that the DAP and PAS disagreed on beer sales. The lesson is that they, DAP, PKR and PAS, agreed on who can drink beer and who can’t. But Malaysians and Malaysian culture are smarter than, and came before, this DAP-PKR-PAS claptrap. Even the poor of Bagan Pinang sees through them, the danger in them: their god, their law, and after which, to subject everybody, equally, to both.

So, why not take Isa’s money and be safe from their tyranny? Immorality? Bagan Pinang just said to Anwar Ibrahim, to Lim Kit Siang and to Hadi Awang, in moral terms, f— off.

I’m No Paki. I’m Bangsa Great Britain

You call me a ‘Paki’? Did you?! I’ll sue ya …. Now, where is this Bangsa Bolehland? I hear Pakis can go on to be prime ministers in that country.

The Bangsa Malaysia types, along with the PKR Nathaniels, Elis, and the Malaysiakini Swee Engs, look to Britain for inspiration on multiculturalism (no Kadazans, no Dayaks, no Chinese, no Malays, no Indians, only Malaysians – how cool!), and which they have only a vague idea about. From Tim Black at the Spiked! is a lesson in multiculturalism for these types…

First, the background:

It seems that two weeks ago (Laila) Rouass, whose mother is Indian and father Morrocan, emerged from the BBC’s Star Bar having just had quite a severe fake-tan session. Beke caught one glimpse of her Dale Wintonesque appearance and quipped, quick as a flash, ‘Oh my god, you look like a Paki’. In (Anton Du) Beke’s head, it was probably hilarious. Unfortunately, outside of Beke’s head the audience was not quite as simple-minded. Rouass, who had apparently already been annoyed by Beke’s numbskulled exclamation upon discovering her foreign parentage – ‘You’re not a terrorist are you?’ – glared at him in silence for a bit, before collecting her stuff from the dressing room and going home in a huff. And that was that.

Then the fallout:

Politicians (…) spotted an opportunity to prove their anti-racist credentials, with Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda declaring: ‘[That] kind of language is totally unacceptable. It sounds to me as if Anton Du Beke needs to be sent on a race awareness course.’ Which sounds like a great idea.

Perhaps they could turn it into a show.

(… A) spokesman for Hope Not Hate, a campaign run by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, was therefore able to conclude: ‘If calling someone a Paki is not racist behaviour then what is?’

After that, the apology:

‘There was no racist intent whatsoever (said Beke), but I accept that it is a term which causes offence and I regret my use of it, which was done without thought or consideration of how others would react.’

It is a strange kind of apology, but it is also very revealing.

… ‘If calling someone a Paki is not racist behaviour then what it is?’ And therein lies the rub. What exactly is racist behaviour these days?

And here is the legal definition by a White judge, who is equal to saying that you can go to jail for calling Mahathir Mohamad ‘mamak’:

Lord Macpherson provided a broad definition of racism as ‘unwitting racism’. Writing of the police, he wrote that such racism ‘can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’ And if people do not know that they are racist, not to worry; it is enough for others to judge them as such. Or in the words of the report, racism is evident in ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or by any other person’ (emphasis added).

See, it isn’t only Malaysian judges who write inane judgements; they studied under the Macpherson types, for whom crime is, suddenly, to be “thoughtless”, to be “ignorant”, and the other, any other, person has only to “perceive”, that is, to accuse, in order to get a conviction. Such is a White man’s multicultural, all inclusive, equal rights law they promote and sell to the world: “I perceive, therefore you’re racist. And therefore you’re guilty.” Tim Black concludes:

While racism is certainly not what it was, neither is anti-racism. Being against racism, the act of taking offence, almost always on others’ behalf, has become a self-affirming posture for politicians and media proxies alike, a moral crusade in times of limited purpose. … Even the most informal of social relations (Ed. note: the fracas had started as a banter, innocently enough, in privacy, between two friends), the most knotted of negotiations, are now fodder for official anti-racists to pick over and dissect for offence potential. The effect has been stifling and petty. Contemporary Britain resembles not so much a comedy, as a tragedy of manners.

But Black (Oops! Was that racist?) might be mistaken on one count: No, there is no tragedy in the lesson because, once accused of racism, you are guilty until proven innocent. Britain is never tragic, the White man had it good for more than a century; the UK is an international, imperial joke today. White Britain introduced, and actually wrote,  racism into the Malaysian federal constitution more than 50 years ago. Now, to see British, white on white, brown on white and so on, drive stakes into each other, spit at each other, tear at one another, over the word ‘Paki’, said so in jest, is so poetic; sweet justice, as they say. Many in the rest of the world pray for it to continue down that way. It’s, as Sharon Stone says, karma. Cheers, mate!

浩气长存 Beneath the Autumn Cypress

Poems from the past to the dead…

On a mountain slope, at the end of a flight of concrete steps, total count 240 because 2.4 millon (soldiers) is in Chinese script writing 240 wan 萬, the timber gateway is painted red, as it is always, and topped by a roof that says in hanzi and Korean “Martyrs Cemetery of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army”. There are dozens of these cemeteries spread throughout North Korea, a reminder of a war ignited 59 years ago by the United States, the United Nations in tow. The war still goes on today, though in different ways. At a Washington newspaper forum, they have described the martyrs’ cemetery as a consequence of the Korean war against the US. Yes, “against”, rather than a defense from US invasion.

But, here, it is Hoechang County, about 100 km east of Pyongyang. After the gateway, and still among the cypress and pine trees, is a hexagonal pavilion, the kind you see in Chinese gardens. Chinese porcelain tiles are hexagonal; traditional Chinese lanterns are hexagonal; the Chinese checker is hexagonal of two overlapping equilateral triangles. Why hexagonal? The answer is embedded in the naturalist philosophy of the Daoist yijing (易经) or Book of Changes where earth is symbolically three equally split lines of a trigram, like this: ☷. Beyond the pavilion a soldier, sculptured in bronze, stands alone on a 14-metre high stone pedestal. To the soldier, and to ten of thousands others, all dead, away from home, China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao offers a wreath laid in advance. He has come to pay his tribute, for Chinese memories are long and deep.

Behind the soldier are the grave mounds,  shaped a globe split half, of 134 Chinese soldiers, Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s eldest son, among them. You could tell it’s him from the bust: name inscription, the farmer’s felt cap, youthful, but with perhaps a certain likeness of his father. Now in front of the bust, Jiabao speaks to him, dead at age 28 from an American napalm bomb that so badly flamed his body and face he was only recognized by the watch he wore then. It is as if Mao Anying was still alive, for such is Chinese honor for the past, the dead, the alone, the ones far from home:

“Anying, my colleague. Many seasons have come to past. I am here to see you on behalf of the Chinese people. China today has prevailed and is stronger. Our people have endured. Rest in peace then.”

Three times Wen Jiabao bowed; they are deep bows from the waist up.

There are in China, and elsewhere, many Anyings, the un-consoled, detached and alone in their dignity, sacrifice and suffering for such is the nature in the Chinese perception of the human heart, always impenetrable and more profound than reason. Kongzi has said: “You have not yet comprehend life, how then can you know death?” This is why life takes time.

Expect however the West to heap scorn on Jiabao’s visit to the cemetery as “propaganda”, for such is their cynicism and nihilism wrought from a self-centered culture – I think, therefore I am – begetting a self-righteous morality, now promoted as human right. How then to expect they will understand anything: here, a senior government official standing among the dead, talking with them. No White government in the world does that; they rather speak to those alive, to White reporters and their brown, yellow-skinned underlings (think of Malaysiakini and this), because only crowds deliver votes. Dead people don’t.

Even so, that is a minor point. White, democratic governments serve the present; but, here is a Chinese government reporting to the past about the present and this says, “we know our responsibilities, our duties”. The West can’t understand that an unelected government does have responsibilities. It is, variously, called tianming, and the Mandate of Heaven. So then, expect the Westerns editors and newspapers to say, instead, North Korea is “intransigent” and “provocative” while China, 60 years on, continued to support a “rogue state”, without “freedom”, without food and penniless.

Stopping at last among the mounds of graves, shaded by autumn trees of cypress, Jiabao say to the rest:

“It’s been a four hour travel. … I have come to see you. All the (Chinese) people (wish to) honor you. … They have not forgotten. But it’s been been more than fifty years. Life’s great where it excels / death stills where you may lay.” (浩气长存 haoqi changcun)

No White government official visits graveyard (Western reporters call Wen’s visit, a “tour”), let alone cite poetry to the dead. Democracy has no time for such pieties nor esthetics. Yet, all is normal. Wen Jiabao does what all Chinese are raised to believe and what a good Confucian does; democrats do not equal virtue, to the contrary. This “goose-stepping” country, so vilified by the West and its underling daily mouthpieces, possesses the qualities of virtue that they have yet even to see exist, much less understand.

The clip below has the underlying meaning, the essence in Wen Jiabao’s visit to those among the cypress trees:

Rebel Against Umno: For a Mongol PAS?

That’s no moon a dragon will swallow… (also see earlier entries ).

In the 5,000 years of written Chinese history and its cycle of dynasties, about 20 came to preside over China and Han Chinese society. Seven of them – Xia, Shang, Zhou, Han, Tang, Ming, Qing – lasted longer, far longer than is American history since its “independence”, actually White conquest, settlement and internal rule. The Yuan in the 14th Century is not one of those dynasties and was, to the contrary, one of the shortest reigning eras (no more than 100 years).

How could Mongolians rule? True to Han Chinese understanding of them, they were nomads on horse backs and when the time came to rule, they were in every sense of the description barbarians without a civic and an ethical culture, inflicting endless rounds of bloodletting, including making slaves of children from the farms and where the Mongolian ruling class helped themselves to grain, women, and animals. Contrast this to the Qing dynasty, among whom the Manchus learned hanzi, detached government from the peasantry, left alone to Han Chinese as best as is practical, adhered to the Confucian code of conduct in supervisory rule, and administered stockpiles to redistribute food from the abundant to the poorer regions.

One of the lasting characteristics of Chinese society is known as 吃苦, chiku, literally “eat bitterness”, that is, enduring great hardships. When some “Malay” commentators (Mahathir Mohamad, for example) described the Malay individuals as patient and forebearing until they go “amok”, they were actually describing an ideal pre-Islamic Malay society. And Chinese society, as well. Chinese forbearance last centuries.

PAS towelheads

When Nizar Jamaluddin (here and here, where Malaysiakini, under the cover of “independent” reporting, pines for PAS) compared the present political state in Malaysia to the Yuan era, he missed, perhaps deliberately, a point: how should the Chinese substitute Mongolians? With PAS? But PAS is not Ming, not even by an iota. And even within the Ming, it arose a betrayal in Wu Sangui 吳三桂, who for power his own will let in barbarians through the Shanhai Pass. Who is going to be the Wu Sangui in PAS or Pakatan Rakyat? We have already seen the likes of Hadi Awang and Hasan Ali and what they will do once in power. Then there is that Zulkifli Noordin…. And the Ngehs and the Ngas of DAP Perak.

Trust PAS? But the Chinese, and equal numbers of Malays and Indians, have already been betrayed, a dozen times over.

Nizar fails to understand this: the beginning of good, decent rule is in qualities of persons, not in god. And he has, in spite of or perhaps precisely because of his good nature, such terrible company that they use him rather than the other way around.

我的祖国 The Motherland Rejoice: Chang’an Songs

The background song you might have heard sung by a choir of 1,200 on Chang’an Av, Beijing, on the morning of Oct 1, 2009:

This is the conductor…

The singers…

The people of the farms…

The forces, men contingent…

The forces, women contingent.

My Motherland:

The Western Other: Rushdie, Mkini & the White Burden

The West is the White man, White once he is conscious of his past, his conquest, his plunder, his god and whatever else he is conscious of. This coloured self-consciousness surfaces in the mirror of his thoughts. It used to happen once he leaves England or Scotland or Amsterdam, arriving thus in Africa or in Goa or Malacca or Macau. Such consciousness requires, hence, a reflection, another person to posit the self – a kind of Cartesian, geometric self which requires two points on a plane to establish a location. That other point, or reflection, is called the “Other”. The White man need not go far today to find his self nor the Other. With the Internet, he need not even go anywhere. But who is the Other in,  say, London or Los Angeles? What is it that the White man sees in the mirror of his consciousness, now versus the distant past?

Salman Rushdie lives in London, Manjit Bhatia in Australia. Consider, then, the Other.

What’s common between the Salman Rushdies and the Malaysiakini types, the Josh Hongs of Malaysia and the Manjits in Australia? Below, excerpt of an article in The Hindu equally applicable to Malaysia as it is India; only substitute those exotic names with the Joshes, the Premeshes, the Nathaniels, the Manjits:

After a very short period of looking around, the West has increasingly turned its gaze onto itself in recent years. There it stands in front of gilded mirrors, gazing at itself in admiration. What it sees is no longer the whiteness it saw in the far past. What it sees now is multi-hued, variously dressed, many voiced. For, the Western self, particularly in literary and cultural circles, has long accepted the fact of being creolised. Even the opponents of multiculturalism cannot see themselves (thank god for small mercies) as snow white. When the West gazes into its mirrors, it sees its own new post-war multicultural self. It sees Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru, Zadie Smith. And it likes to pretend that it is seeing the Other. …

They are not the Other. They are not even different, really. They are the West today. …

If the West likes to look into gilded mirrors and admire itself in the guise of novels about multi-cultural London, or poems written in chapatti English (or is it paratha, for a fair bit of butter seems to have been applied?), or stories about the Raj and its off-springs, the West also likes to look into gilded mirrors and admire itself in the guise of “global” literature. Perhaps these are the same mirrors. Perhaps they are different. Who knows? For, their existence has not been faced up to. …

They constitute, to repeat the article’s author Tabish Khair, not just another face of the West: they are the West, fighting Western causes, taking their money, chest-full of their “democracy” medals, then make pretend they are more virtuous than those whom the White multiculturalists despise for refusing to convert to the Western cause. This raises a question of ethics: if Malaysiakini, Bersih, et al, would take American (taxpayers) money, and preaching political pieties while doing so, what’s wrong with the Makkal Sathi party (even if) taking Umno or Barisan money while shouting freedom? Some say it is whoring, but are not the Malaysiakini editors and their cohorts also whoring? Only different causes, another audience.

In the end, it means all people whore all the time; the difference is, who is master, who has the pulpit – control of the Press in order to make one look biblical. It also means the West doesn’t mind a little mass subversion, some destabilization here and there, to bring round people to their convictions they sell like evangelical tickets to heaven. They don’t even have to leave their chairs in London or Washington or take with them their guns and their god. The Malaysiakini types are not above taking American money, especially since democracy, human rights, Press freedom, etc, make for a nice, dandy job description, even as cover.

It used to be just some banana republics in America’s backyard, but now in more than 70 countries. Friends of Taiwan’s Chen Shui-bian qualified for such American “assistance” – it’s for the advance of democracy, you see. But after the ex-president and his entire family were found out to have stolen billions, those friends have disappeared back to America no longer shouting “Freedom!”. And the NED, after helping to hand over to Taiwan a family of thieves, quietly puts it into the backburner. China has been set up instead for special “attention”, that is, subversion; Malaysia remains on its target list.

The serious-sounding, almost scholarly named National Endowment for Democracy, NED, makes overt what used to be covert by the CIA. For what the NED does today, funding so called “democrats” and the M’kinis of the Third World, they do so thumbing their noses at brown and yellow peoples, saying so what? It is for “freedom”, you see, it’s legal, and it’s backed by the US Congress. (Outside America, US legislators talk pious of “free speech”; yet, they have never allowed Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, and countless others to speak to Americans, not even if it is only to sell books.) Here is a short, schematic idea into the American political job creation programme the NED has spawned among the Other:

The Malaysian friends of NED (recall NEP, NDP?) make for a long list, only click on malaysiakini.com to know them. What NED manages to do, through Malaysiakini the last 10 years is to engender, to foment, to stir, and to saturate poison in an already poisoned atmosphere: who kills who, who is plotting against who, who is vile, who is saint, who lies, who cheats, who scandalizes. Malaysia, to judge by the news and views that matter, is an insane place.

The Other who the White man sees in the mirror, before and now, is still a barbarian: long ago no god, no civilization, no guns; today, no money, no democracy, no freedom. Still the White man’s burden (that was from Kipling).

On Soh Cherwei: A Response

On Soh Cherwei’s post: a response. Borrowing Li Bai 李白 (701-762 AD), with apologies.

Chinese version, 李白

長干行

妾髮初覆額，折花門前劇;
郎騎竹鳥來，遶床弄青梅。
同居長干舉，兩小無嫌猜。
十四為君婦，羞顏未嘗開。
低頭向暗壁，千喚不一回。
十五始展眉，願同塵與灰。
常存抱柱信，豈上望夫臺。
十六君遠行，瞿塘灩澦堆。
五月不可觸，猿聲天上哀。
門前遲行跡，一一生綠苔。
苔深不能掃，落葉秋風早。
八月蝴蝶來，雙飛西園草。
感此傷妾心，坐愁紅顏老。
早晚下三巴，預將書報家。
相迎不道遠，直至長風沙。

An equally exquisite English version of the above, Chang’an xing 長干行 (Chang’an, present day Xi’an), was published in Cathay (1915). That Ezra Pound translation retitled but was faithful, in every way, to Li Bai’s original:

The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever, and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden,

They hurt me.

I grow older,

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

NB on Cherwei’s post: Some of the English translations (examples here and repeated here) of Cherwei’s post are riddled with errors, concepts, ideas and meanings inserted where they don’t exist in the original and others removed or badly mangled. Also, watch the pack of street dogs that invariably turn up over the bones of such matters. Think of them as the Ridhuan Tees, also present among Malaysia Today and the Siew Engs of the Malaysiakini quasi illiterate horde. Consider, for instance, that the English word “pawn” does not exist in the Chinese character original, even its meaning, thus illiciting inane comments from the like of “Loyal Malaysian” who reveals to be a Stupid Malaysian.

F* America? Yes, Please, By All Means …

Since the world has gathered in New York to pay America homage, here is to continue the series on the Great Western civilization…

Girls…

American Apparel…

Stores … and

Stickers.

Now, do you see how America is well and properly screwed…

Don’t you simply love America?

素沁 Ah Suh Sassies Up to PAS

Among all the inanities under the banner Sassy MP, this, below, takes the prize (Full version here; it reads like a confession from the pew and you can almost be sure it was written by a converted soul, testifying for Jesus before and now for PAS):

I fear not its grandstanding for an Islamic state for I know we have neutralising forces in Pakatan partners who will make sure Malaysia is, like Pas, untuk semua.

I shall not judge Pas on its history of religious ultralism (sic), for I shall now benchmark it on its promise of “Pas untuk semua”.

The argument is straightforward.

PAS has Hasan Ali, who despises beer. But it also has Khalid Samad, who once went to a church (church-goers don’t drink?). Hence, one minus one equals zero.

And what is zero? According to the post, zero = I fear not PAS for it’s part of the future.

What is the future?

I now fear Pas not, for I know the winds of changes (sic) are also blowing through the party.

But which direction the wind blows? The man becomes god, seeing the future … Glory! The wind blows towards the church. Thus, we are back at the starting point: Khalid went to church, therefore vote PAS.

Najib Razak went to a temple, why not vote Umno? Sassy went to a mosque, who do you vote?

With imbeciles like this ‘I-fear-not’, it’s going to be a long wait in the church – three years at least. Waiting for the wind? No.  For the Resurrection? Of course not, stupid; he ain’t coming. It is for Khalid! Why, why, why don’t they get it? (Jacqueline, will you please, please, please explain it one more time to that church, god-fearing moron:)

As for Sassy? Perhaps she simply does not remember why the Lembah Kinrara Malays did not join PAS. So, she goes on a fishing expedition. (Her favourite catchphrase, “fishing”; always thinking of the fisherman of Galilee, eh?) Go, take a walk Ah Suh 素沁. It helps clear the brain.

Postscript:

Carol Chew, are you collecting notes? Or else you’ll be running again merely as MCA token. Sassy is not invincible. Don’t you see: Sassy moonlighting…?

Hands Up, Boy! This is America!

(Pix: via Sisyphus)

The USA is host to the United Nations (due for general assembly this week), but it goes round the world, in the name of democracy, destabilizing other countries (at last count 78, including Malaysia via Bersih, but not counting Iraq). Now, if America does all this dirty work, why not extend the same courtesy to Americans on American soil? That question gives rise to the principle: if you do no evil why fear the devil. Thinking through that principle, America is so paranoia and xenophobic it can no more trust its own kid. Mama mia…

In Chinese Thought, Who Goes There…

In salute to the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the modern People’s China…

Calvary, Oct 1, 1950. (Pix: sina.com)

Rehearsing in Beijing for the anniversary.

They are our masters: the people who seeded, shaped, and ultimately influenced China, hence individual Chinese lives, Chinese society, Chinese thought, and East Asian affairs (including the value system so reviled by Farish Noor). They are without doubt the following:

• Zhou Gong (Duke of Zhou) 周公旦
• Kongzi (Confucius) 孔子
• Laozi 老子
• Xunzi 荀子
• Menzi (Mencius) 孟子
• Mozi 墨子
• Zhuangzi 庄子
• Zhu Xi 朱熹

The Duke of Zhou in the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BC – 221 BC)

There are more, many, many more, for the history of the Chinese society is long. But the Duke of Zhou (b. c. 1100 BC), the brother of King Wu of Zhou (周武王),  deserves special mention. He is constantly referenced to by Kongzi, his contemporaries, and philosophers and Chinese historians (not the Khoo Kay Kims) till this day. Often overlooked, he conceived the political concept of the Mandate of Heaven (never understood but so often maligned by the West and its daily mouthpieces) and contributed to the shijing (詩經 Book of Songs). He might even have added to the 64-hexagram Daoist naturalist philosophy. Upon his brother’s death, the Duke ruled for 4-5 years as regent in what was then China, and returned the throne to his nephew who had reached a mature age.

Today, China, indigenous Chinese society as well, is reopened again to the world, knowing it can take on any amount of assault and aggression, the good and the vile, because the foundations are there built even before the Duke of Zhou, and it opens to the world in spite of communism, capitalism, Marxism, Wall Street, US Treasury Bills, the crusading French and Americans, the racist Guardian and Washington Post newspapers, the Uyghur terrorists, the Dark Age Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, Buddhism, Islam and in spite of Obama and his ilk in the West and their admirers in the East. At Global Times, they have a shortlist of 60 people all from outside China who, for the better or worse, have influenced Chinese thought and attitudes the last 60 years (queer, Western societies never talk of the influence on themselves by outsiders):

The influence by, therefore inclusion in, many of the above names are questionable, even laughable. They may have influenced the world’s perception of Chinese societies, but not contemporary Chinese views of themselves and the world. Example: Soros is a joke, his investment grade papers being fuel for zhongyuanjie 中元节, as is Koizumi and Kentucky chickens; the latter a fad. Takakura, through film, has revisited the way Chinese look at their past and the idea of filial piety. Lee Kuan Yew is also listed, rightfully, but note the absence of his nemesis, contemporary and next door neighbour (the man who doesn’t wear slippers).

Pretty Belarussians sing for the 60th Anniversary in Minsk, the Belarus capital. (Pix: sina.com)

USA: O! The Horror! The Horror!

Continuing on the series, the Great Western civilization and its Great Values …

Malaysians, the world in fact, think much of America for a number of reasons. Among Malaysians, they consider it a place where there is “rule of law”, a fair place where you can get ahead on the sweat of your skin, not colour. Consider the following:

• You can be jailed for sleeping on a sidewalk; they call it “criminal trespass”. Asks Al Szekely, a homeless man.

• In Las Vegas, there is a law that ban sharing of food. Another town in Connecticut wants the same law.

• Truancy? Fine in Los Angeles is US$250. In Dallas US$500. Most poor people fall into “truancy” not because they don’t turn up in school but because they are late and they are late because they live in neighbourhoods with lousy bus services. Hence, poor parents rather not send children to school than to be “truant” and pay a fine that is a week’s income.

• Contempt of court? Not paying a fine is contempt of court although, plainly, poor people simply don’t have the money. Hence for contempt of court, people are jailed for being homeless, for sleeping in parks, for sharing food, for truancy, for jaywalking, for begging, for taking home a beer bottle with cap opened, and countless other crimes. In short, being poor is a crime. America has no Dickensean debtor’s prison, but contempt of court has become an excellent substitute.

What’s the point? It means the following:

• The law is the end, not the human being. America has 2.3 million sitting in jail although the number of murders per capita is not different from the rest of the world and it has lower robbery and burglary rates than Australia or Canada. To put the prison numbers in perspective, America has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners, that is, 751 out of every 100,000 people are in jail. Britain is 151, Japan is 63; the world average is 125, which is also roughly Malaysia’s.

• The Western value system, so much admired by Anglophiles like Farish Noor and the Nathaniels, has little compassion, much less mercy. English-speaking nations have higher prison rates than others. America, like these societies, demand punishment all the time so if a person is poor, it is his fault and not because, as East Asians say, a matter of fate and sometimes circumstances. (Imagine, thus, the Anglophiles want to teach Malaysian kids more English – their children may end up jailing them the next time they sleep on a park bench.)

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” says Michael Tonry who wrote Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” says another. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

Western Value #114: All are Equal, Dead

If there is any more doubt into the merits (or demerits) of the Western liberal value system – democracy, equality, free Press, etc – consider the two cases below:

• Free Press

Against all advice, the New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell went into Taliban territory in Afghanistan. Within hours he was captured. To rescue him from captivity, a British soldier and Farrell’s Afghan interpreter paid with their lives. (Recall the two Yankee women reporters who in June stole their way into North Korea and didn’t have to do time for immigration offences because freedom of the Press supersedes international law and criminality.)

Stephen Farrell remains intact.

The West now argues that Farrell should have been left to be beheaded (how else does the Taliban conduct war?), like many White journalists before him. But now that he is freed, at the expense of two other lives, how is Farrell and the New York Times to compensate the families of the dead men? In the Forbes:

Farrell took a huge risk on behalf of his for-profit employer to give it an edge in the news business. Afghanistan is an extremely competitive beat; and war and competitive journalism make for a very perilous–and profitable–alloy. So whereas one would be loath to corral and stifle reporters, why can’t there be some financial incentive for journalists to behave responsibly when they venture into battlegrounds? Why not bill publications for the cost of a rescue and require journalists to give half the royalties from any books they write to the military, in the event of a costly rescue?

• Equality

This case, in Britain, takes yet another prize for White stupidity that arises from the inherent contradictions and the inanity engendered of its political values. It begins with Thomas Hobbes in 1651:

“NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind….”

Four hundred and fifty years later the British government is demanding that the British National Party (BNP) subscribe to the same equality principle that had been made into law. What principle is that for a party of skinheads and White Caucasians? In the Spiked:

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, formerly the Commission for Racial Equality, argues that the BNP’s membership policy breaches the Race Relations Act, because it ‘discriminates on the basis of ethnicity’. So it issued proceedings against the BNP in August. Many see this action as a test case for the government’s Equality Bill, likely to be passed by parliament in the coming months, which will ban all political parties from discriminating on the grounds of ethnicity.

In other words, White people, following the example of their beloved Jesus Christ, insists that nobody should discriminate – a moral value that, if broken, is a crime today. Yet being indiscriminate is like being reckless. And people do discriminate all the time, it’s the very quality of humanity, of compassion and to distinguish between good and bad, the worthy and the unworthy. The Spiked continues, but on another plane because equality runs against another British law:

The fact is that, unlike public bodies, private bodies must be free to discriminate. Freedom of association and the right to organise politically – two key rights in any democratic society worth its name – inevitably involve choosing who to associate and organise with, and therefore excluding those who, for whatever reason, do not live up to the standards, political beliefs or membership criteria of your organisation. For Ramblers’ Associations, whose business is walking, that might mean excluding wheelchair-users; for a gay men’s discussion group, whose business is homosexuality, it might mean excluding heterosexuals; and for the BNP, whose rotten business is racism, it means excluding blacks and Asians. Forcing all manner of private and political groups to open their doors to everybody and anybody would represent a stinging attack on freedom of association, and on the choice, independence and freedom of thought that are bound up in the forming of private associations and political groups.

Small wonder Britain and Western civilization have turned into a mess. And Malaysia has all the ingredients – the value system – copied from White people (and Arabs after them).

God Seditious, Arrest Him!

The fallacy in the Belief in God

God is on the loose and, below, is why he must be returned into the genie bottle. This is, after all, guijie 鬼节 season, time to can the ghost that White superstition calls “God”.

One of the central tenets in Malaysian political life, primarily imported, is the “Belief in God”. This tenet, although Western in origin, is explicit in the Rukun Negara, so giving the appearance of a core element in local cultural milieu. In the Constitution “Belief in God” is largely implicit, even though many politicians and commentators continuously cite the document as “secular” – that is, non-religious; hence “secular” law. But, from Article One to the last the Constitution is also a religion-inspired document because, how else do you begin to write a new Constitution for a new country? Appointed by the British rulers for the job, where do you start?

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult in Malaysia’s case. The constitutional principled underpinnings – equality before the law, right of religious belief and so on – borrowed chunks from the American constitution, the French, and then a couple of lines from the Indian or the Pakistanis who became independent a decade earlier. It looks like true rojak, and it is. But jurisprudence (including the so-called “human rights” regime) in all these models was religious in origin – God made law in the Bible, White Europeans copied the idea therefrom sometimes with exact words into their constitutions, which if you were to scratch out all its legalese and its jargon is purely a document about how people are to get along with one another and what a government should do in between.

All that worked, or perhaps half-worked, so long as everybody is Christian (even if only in name) or, in Pakistan, everybody is Muslim – at the minimum, there would be no quarrels on which god to pursue, what to eat, drink and wear, who to sleep with and so on. What if half the population is neither Christian or Muslim? Or worse, if the other half was made up of both?

The presumptions, therefore, of “Belief in God” are many, most evidently:

• without (a monotheistic) god there is no morality;
• without morality, people are bound to be cruel to one another;
• without god-imposed peace, a country cannot lasts.

The presumptions boil down to this: You can’t be good, if you had no (monotheistic) religion (NB: in Malaysia, full of god-fearing people, crime rates on theft, cheating, thuggery, incest and rape are at record levels). Hence, the Bible in the West, and later the Quran, became the ultimate authority in defining good and evil, that is, in how to conduct oneself, how to live. But if the words in both books are to be obeyed to the last letter, men will be enjoined to keep slaves, slaves to obey their masters, women must keep silent in church, idols must be destroyed, believers are to kill unbelievers, or convert them, and on and on. This is to say, the books are full of contradictions (after all, if you believe god, then you’ll have to accept Satan beside you all the time). In correlation, the Federal Constitution is full of contradictions: it promotes equality as an end-good but turns up with passages on how to do the opposite.

Even this – the contradictions – is the least of the problems besieging the country.

The worse about the “Belief in God” are turning up today, every day. It now allows for one class of people to feel superior to another. Before them, classifications like gentiles and infidels (Christianity), ummah and the kaffir (Islam) became prototypes of wide-ranging political significance in modern times. In Malaysia, it became bumi and non-bumi, Malays and non-Malays – the Chinese and Indians are non-persons. Religion, Islam in Malaysia, became the perfect tool for asserting Malay political supremacy, and its flip side the suppression of others. Otherwise, how else is PAS to sell its politics? Why else would Najib Razak now say Umno is an Islamic party? This is why in PAS assemblies the party delegates talk down to the Chinese, primarily (but not to Christians), who are considered godless or else kaffirs destined for hell unless the party converted them. And they say so openly laughing, without batting an eye, without worrying about sedition.

The end state of this imported worldview “Belief in God” makes for a perfect tool for apartheid, sanctioned in the Constitution. Small wonder, people like Ridhuan Tee welcome Islam, if only to be unshackled and, conversion does mean an upside down change in their social pecking order, political, economic, and official status. That kind of order leads in turn to other consequences, explaining why the Mahyuddins (while shouting “Syaitan”) have no problem spitting on Hindus and the Ibrahim Alis of Kelantan spit on both Indians and Chinese and tell them to return to India and China if they can’t accept the Malay terms on how to live.

To begin to unravel the problems that the Abrahamic faiths have left behind worldwide, then one must go back to its root source (no, not Palestine but the intellectual crucible, White man culture). That intellectual crucible has since turned against itself, now challenging the presumptions that for centuries underlie “Belief in God”. The challenge is necessary on a number of grounds:

• God is being appeased all the time. Kartika to be whipped, after all said and done, is but like a voodoo offer of a woman sacrifice, alive, to god. PAS and their holy men chant: “Hear! O God! is a woman who did not obey your commands! See! We whip her!” In medieval Europe they burn women on a stake. In Acheh, they want to stone women. In Saudi Arabia, they prefer slicing heads, like all the Al-Qaeda men.

• Morality has preceded monotheistic religions, but people have thrived without them. Abrahamic religions rather than promote the well being among peoples actually destroy ethics that could have been the means to direct relations between peoples peacefully, use now instead to make all the same brand. The law of god becomes the end, not the human being. The third point follows.

• Impossible standards: “God is dead!” and “If God is dead, all things are possible” are, respectively and in point of fact, Nietzschean and Dostoevskean arguments for the return of religion – not secularism – to the original Abrahamic standards. But numerous Christian and Islamic standards are humanly impossible to fulfill; the standards are non-human.

A slew of books have in recent years appeared in the West and a counter-movement against religion-based ethics (note, not against freedom of religion) have emerged there. Some of the discussions and books:

• Konstantin Petrenko: Imagine, No God!
• Walter Sinott-Armstrong: Morality Without God (mp3 audio)
• Book Review: Morality Without God
• Joshua Leach: How Christianity Makes Kindness an Enemy
• Spiked: Towards a New Human Morality

If the West is at last waking up to the plausibility, 400, 500 years late, that morality is possible without (their) god, how then are we to live, they ask?

Three thousand years earlier and struggling with the same question was Chinese culture – so without Arabic and White man gods, therefore so looked down upon by PAS Malays, the Ridhuan Tees, and the Anglophile Siew Engs. It was Kongzi who said:

務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。(論語 6:20)

… respect the spirits but keep your distance … wisdom follows.

Since Confucius, Chinese society has worked out both the answer, or rather answers, and the mechanism to the dilemma that few (that Anwar excepting) among Malaysians have even begun to ask themselves. The answers won’t be given here, but below is a primer from the sanzijing 三字經, an ancient poetry anthology compiled entirely of line-pairs of three-character rhymes and used as Chinese primary school text as late as the 1960s. It begins simply:

人之初，性本善。ren zhi chu, xing ben shan
性相近，習相遠。xing xiang jin, xi xiang yuan