置之死地而后生
Life lays outside a sovereign land called death. – Ancient wisdom
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Xiaode addresses a Melayu:
People seemingly as varied as Mahathir Mohamad, Hannah Yeoh and the UK racist Reuters employ the same slight: Chinese the chauvinists, Malays the extremists even though the actual meanings intend another quality, but identical to the different terms. That is, these are peoples acting merely true to their histories. White culture had embedded deep in the local consciousness its racism from which Anglophiles (Caliph Lim, SatDee, Joshie, Sivarasa) today deploy as a method of insult.
Fascism is not inherent to Asians; it is imported.
Although born political (to seize power), Umno relied on its continued existence on a completely non-political driver: culture (identity and Malay custom are some of its facets). This cultural dependence finds expression in Article 153, ketuanan, the NEP and, in particular, by positing the Malay ethnic construct against the Chinese who, in turn, is treated in policy and in the bureaucracy as an antagonist, alien force and not a country kinsmen.
Of all Umno politicians Mahathir Mohamad played up to this bigotry the most, which is in turned carried on today by his legacy boys, people like Aziz Sabri, Anas ‘Anus’ Zubedy, Ahiruddin Attan and others.
The political responses to them are, so far, DAP Christian evangelism (to bypass the ethnicity in the politics), Anwar Ibrahim’s Malay branding of a white man’s justice morality, and Haris Ibrahim’s fascist Bangsa Malaysia that’s copied from a black man fighting the white.
In comparison, Umno’s partner the MCA was a cultural organisation thrust into a political role but with its legs cut off by Umno. Hence, it hobbles around playing second fiddle to the DAP, loses elections, after which Umno hacks like Pure Shiite would, in perpetual error, attribute the losses to Chinese ‘chauvinism’ – the same Anglophile language deployed by DAP hatchetmen (Joshie, Jackson Ng, Stanley Koh) against Umno’s partner the MCA.
Umno’s struggles were thus defined by the DAP rather than by the internal logic of its politics and its constitution. Today, the same influence continues. MCA becomes not its Chinese partner but an enemy proxy tolerated at the same conference table.
Clearly, something is badly wrong … and false.
Umno replacing its cultural raison d’etre for brute political power is a reason why Mahathir Mohamad could use the party to beat up on the monarchy. It explains why Ibrahim Ali’s Perkasa has stepped in, even though its goal is, bottom line, existential. It is the same as Umno’s. This therefore makes the two groups side-by-side an anomaly. Perkasa especially has the wrong patron (Mahahtir) for its existential task and so makes the anomaly odder still. (How do you preserve the monarchy institution by having the same man who once pummelled it for a political end?)
MCA is the flipside expression to Umno’s ugly political face; so one sees the former running kindergartens, conducting tai-chi and hanzi classes instead of championing Chinese ketuanan. The reasons might be historical. But that’s how, in the main, the Chinese look at MCA and how the party looks at itself, that is, as an intrinsic extension of Chinese-ness, to be modest, to be a force of junzi virtue and education. Politics is something to do on the way home after business hours.
While Umno’s transformation must be more cultural, MCA must be more political – get dirty. This means that, as they shift in the grounds on which they once stood, they will meet in the centre destination place to become a potent force, as a combined national institution.
(At this juncture, note that neither Umno nor the MCA has each an opposite number, a diametrically opposite opponent in Pakatan. How then to fight them? In that situation, the old thinking – be more Malay or be more Chinese, whatever ‘more’ means – doesn’t make sense. That’s passé.)
The price of Umno’s failure has been Perkasa but it is Anwar Ibrahim who harvests the booty. The price of MCA’s weakening by Umno is the DAP and its Hannah evangelists playing footsie with race but veiling it in the shadowy Anglophile morality of evil and righteousness, cleanliness and corruption. All that has worked in Pakatan’s favour – so far.
Anwar’s new politics in its roots are cultural: how a Malay should be a Malay. (He can only use the Malay because Chinese identity is next to impossible to shake.) This new Malay is the green Malay, the justice Malay, the harapan Malay, the Arab spring Malay, and so on – never mind what those terms may mean, never mind that spring never comes to Malaysia precisely for the reasons those terms are intended to obfuscate and to defy clarity. Nik Nazmi Ahmad and Nurul Izzah best personify this new Malay identity.
Parallel to the Malay idea is Malaysian First or Bangsa Malaysia – the construction of a new individual, cultural, political identity but entirely wishy washy.
Like Islam, the Church is fundamentally a political institution (who gets what and when; who gets heaven and hell and when). The idea that Christian religiosity is personal to an individual is Anglo-Saxon claptrap. It camouflages the ultimate intent of the Church (plainly stated in the New Testatment books of Matthew and John): seizing power and control in order to advance its other worldly, voodoo goals. Buddhism and Hinduism are secular religions; Jesus is a proselytizing religion that takes no prisoners. (Daoism is none of the above.)
Correct for their shortcomings, Umno and MCA will then meet Pakatan on their turf. That is, the fight veers from politics to culture on the one part and, simultaneously on the other, from culture to politics. The problems with these tasks are multi-faceted but they rest principally on one thing: Barisan’s history and structure permits Umno’s political dominance but deny others, MCA most pertinently, to each act as an independent political force. (Note, in contrast, how the DAP or PKR can take up issues independent of each other and yet there is a mystique about them as if speaking in one voice.)
An example into the shackling of Umno’s partners is hudud, which could have been used to pummel Pakatan to the ground. Yet MCA has to tip-toe on the issue, worrying about knock-on effects on Umno while Umno itself wants to stay out of it when it is not evasive. That is, Umno acts as it always has – a political animal not as a cultural identity, what is the Melayu? Even Perkasa has not been up to that existential job.
There’s no short cut to the resolution of the problem. Yet the task is necessary and important because, if Umno doesn’t go the opposite direction of Anwar’s – that is to countermand the man’s idea of Malay – the Messiah takes over, along with all the political prizes.
There’s another example to the frigidity and incoherence in Barisan’s politics. It is MCA’s silence to DAP’s Bangsa Malaysia or Malaysian First because, for the first time, the MCA, as a cultural entity, is facing another opponent not Chinese (in spite of what the SS Malaiyoos might claim). This shock of inaction, not knowing who, what and where is your opponent, harks back to the party’s cultural identity and how it is so politically structured inside Barisan’s ranks, a weakling.
MCA’s beginning, Umno’s as well, was also not constructed to address the issue of, for example, Malaysian First. OneMalaysia is an effective counterweight but doesn’t press far enough. It is therefore bizarre for Umno’s Muhyiddin to be standing up to the DAP when that should be MCA’s job. Malaysian First was natural enough to every Barisan party, only the DAP had twisted it to mean there is a dichotomy, a contradiction, a mutual exclusivity, between being Chinese or Malay to being Malaysian. (Kadir Jasin, as do the SS Malaiyoos, buy into this contradiction.)
Muhyiddin and Umno’s Nazri fell into that dichotomous trap by choosing one or the other – the candy or the cyanide – when they don’t have to, or they could choose both. To be Malaysian First is to be like Lim Kit Siang. Why, Muhyiddin could say, should he be like Lim Kit Siang, a gweilo copycat fascist?
Or, they could say that being Chinese First is a requisite to be Malaysian First – this is empirical truth; it says so in the birth certificate. Hannah Yeoh can attests to it. Similarly, Malay First. The Chinese press would be trumpeting all that in their front pages the next day and a hundred DAP voters would have switched to the Barisan.
She is one of us: a ‘Melayu’ outside a Chinese temple – but Indonesia.
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In the new construction of the Barisan alliance, here then is the governing principle: what is good for the MCA is good for Umno and vice-versa.
The Umno has-beens of the Aziz Sabri mongrels may insist otherwise in order to fight politics – that is, mutual exclusivity by being ‘more’ Chinese or being ‘more’ Malay. But there is no such less Chinese or less Melayu to fight against. There is only a different Melayu today in Anwar, not less and not more, just as the DAP is constructing today a different sort of a Chinese by constructing a different Malaysian – in all cases, fascist to the core.
This issue – a different Melayu and a different Malaysian – brings us round to the Satu Sekolah Malaiyoos, the SS Malaiyoos (Aziz, Mahathir, Ahi Attan, Anus Zubedy, Pure Shiite, and others).
It is not by an supposed maturity in politics that the mongrel Aziz Sabri should give up Umno for the DAP, although he claims otherwise. That is, he finds DAP ‘principled’. What principles? On that he is evasive, because what’s so principled about a party that eschews religion from Day One of its inception but then flaunts and uses it endlessly?
It might surprise you, Melayu, to find Aziz and Mahathir grouped among the SS Malaiyoos. Aziz’s opportunism aside (he dreams of a minister post in Malay-scarce DAP), his political conversion is epitome of a Melayu political culture deeply infected and influenced by western morality: like Mahathir was, mostly schooled in the La Salles and in the Kuala Kangsar colleges. And the way to see how this works is to ask the countervailing question of the political opponents: what’s common between Anwar and the DAP Christian evangelists that brings them together?
Anwar today is not the Anwar of Abim – this much is clear. The SS Malaiyoos are closer to the Anwar today than they are farther from Umno. (Confused? Imagine a straight horizontal Melayu axis line: Umno one end, Anwar today the other. Then placed SS on this line. Where would you put them ideologically and morally?) The reason for this is that Anwar and the SS share the same rostrum: the western principle of equality.
This shared, common root, although surprising, is not odd: it underlies the SS idea why everybody should go to same school, to be taught by the same teachers, speaking the same language. That is, essentially to be the same; if need be, in all aspects of life and not just in education or speech, for that’s what language lends to ultimately.
Transpose the same equality principle to Malaysian First or Bangsa Malaysia and the results are near identical. All of them demand the same, equal outcome; the only difference being is that Malaysian First demands beforehand the eradication of the Malay identity, culture and value systems alongside the Chinese (and Indian). A bureaucratic expression to this idea is DAP’s demand to remove the ‘keturunan‘ box in the birth certificate.
The SS Malaiyoo response, instead of challenging the basis of Bangsa Malaysia construction, actually augments it. How? By saying that MALAY(sian), which they use in the uppercase to stress Melayu-ness, constitutes and supplies the core of the Bangsa outcome in an eventual, single Malaysian identity.
But that’s getting ahead of the Malaysian First project. Or, in other words, the SS weren’t just being presumptuous, they were being fascistic as well.
Fascism isn’t borne in East Asian ethics, nor is it necessarily antithetical to western liberalism (to which the German Hegel, fascism’s precursor, was the spiritual guru). The equality that underpins both ideologies, the liberals and fascists, explains why Anwar and his Christian gang have come together in the same rostrum to draw political inspiration from white society.
Aziz Sabri is their Umno expression, not coincidentally because of their acculturation into a western morality that was pickled from the same education system. This is why he is one of the Hannah SS Malaiyoos, as is Haris, Anwar, and others.
The ex-member of Utusan Melayu radicalism Hata Wahari joining the DAP is neither contradictory nor an oddity. Rather it suggests the shared ideological tilting between two radicalist groups. It is evidence to the point that the SS Malaiyoos are closer to the DAP than they are farther from Umno, explaining why Ahi Attan and Haris Ibrahim once shared the same rostrum. Hata Wahari was simply inducted late into the game; he with Aziz Sabri’s ministerial dreams because they are so few DAP Malays to fill the vacancies.
On the surface, Ahiruddin & Co, is opposed to Anwar and his DAP Christian clique. This leads to the confusion and the contradictions, frequently finding expression online and in blog sites: how is it the SS Malaiyoos seem to trumpet the same Bangsa agenda and then going forward with it even?
But, as a consequence, any Chinese sympathy (such as the readers of Sin Chew and China Press) left for Barisan or Umno would have evaporated by now for a number of reasons. Just two will be cited.
One, MCA’s political weaknesses emasculate its attempts to preserve the Chinese cultural identity. Umno once did the shackling. Today, it is reinforced by hidden hands, the fascist SS elements who stood aside to watch Chen Yimin abducted from Penang and converted to Islam. The MCA never saw a helping hand extended from Umno especially since the Islamic bureaucracy was Umno’s creation.* (See End Note.)
Another example: in Huang Mingzhi or namewee who the SS Malaiyoos took turns to beat him up even though he is Umno’s perfect ally by positing Malay identity next to the Chinese, an act which has the effect of asking the Malays to question Anwar’s construction of the new identity.
Two, the online propaganda from the SS Malaiyoos turned Umno’s transformation into a bluff. Melayu culture and identity became, simply, their constitutional instruments to continue serving their politics, rather than the other way around. Perkasa might as well take Umno’s place in Barisan – at the least, they would leave the Chinese alone. The SS Malaiyoo message is clear and dated, which says Umno exists not to preserve Malay identity. It exists merely to project raw Malay power, which was both pointless and needless.
Not even Anwar challenges raw Malay power, so that Mahathir, stupid as always, proposes an inane solution (Malay unity) to a non-existent problem (weak political Malay).
Instead, Anwar is redefining the source of Malay power by re-defining what is to be Malay: pure, uncorrupted, righteous, transparent, just, clever, equal to the Chinese in being smart, able to run universities and make them first rate – all the qualities of culture, not of politics or ketuanan. PKR’s Khalid Ibrahim has fleshed out this new Malay identity by separating the Selangor government’s portfolio of Malay customs and Islamic affairs.
The rejection of the Malay identity before it was sequestered by Umno for a political end is also the essence in Haris Ibrahim’s Anything But Umno (ABU) campaign. The Umno Malay in Haris’s words is an incorruptible thief and swindler, therefore dirty. Even laundering won’t do it. It has to be changed. DAP’s Lim Guan Eng has proclaimed the same ABU message. In last year’s Wesak Day message, he called on all Buddhists, Hindus – anybody and especially those from ‘non-Umno’ Barisan members – to fight Umno and Perkasa.
The SS Malaiyoos can’t contribute to Anwar’s New Politics and ABU construction but they don’t get in their way. Instead, they undermine Umno’s cultural being and MCA’s political work. So the Sabris, the Ahis and the Anuses do more damage than they are of help either to Umno or MCA. That is, they serve Anwar and his Christian clique by getting in Barisan’s way. (Ahi Attan’s past alliance with DAP’s mouthpiece Haris Ibrahim and his willingness to sacrifice the political weight of Barisan and Umno in order to dethrone Badawi show him to be dishonourable.)
On the propaganda front Anwar’s Christians appear to be winning only because the SS Malaiyoos continuously damage the Barisan and Umno. Worse for it, they have no meaningful, countervailing ideas to Pakatan fascism because they are informed by the same fascism, rooted in the same Anglophile sensibilities.
Umno needs a smart, authentic Melayu raised outside but with a working knowledge of the western constellation – that is, the tyrannical American Values – in order to properly expose the sham and the fraud perpetuated daily by Anwar and his Anglophile cliques.
小的
*End note: In the hands of the Hannah SS Malaiyoos, Umno’s existential task – preservation of the Malay identity – has instead become the conversion of the Chinese into being Malay. After which, why would the Chinese take Barisan’s side, MCA or no MCA?
The Muslim abduction of Chen Yimin from her school in Penang is where the line in the sand was finally crossed. Umno could still salvage the situation: establish an unassailable reason, get the legal paperwork ready, put the finger on PAS for causing the problem, use its executive power to return Yimin to her father, then blame the MCA. Umno cannot lose more Malay votes than it already has so that any further losses would be more than compensated by the Chinese return.
But, better than the electoral rewards, Umno, by returning Yimin, will mark a new beginning in re-defining the Melayu away from Anwar’s tyrannical orang putih, Anglophile terms and by positing instead a considerate, sensitive, rational, reasonable Malay race against the Chinese whose culture teaches that value system. Thereafter, the Malay and the Chinese will behave like country kinsmen. There is no need for any trade-offs, no sacrifices; just pure respect.
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Melayu, fate has brought us together, so together we’ll endure - not as equals but as kin. It’ll be for a common good.
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Malaysia’s Chinese Answer to DAP Hannah Fascism
More than Umno realises it, the DAP, in spite of its size, has been exerting a powerful influence on party thinking, hence, national, Pakatan and Anwar politics. This is because it acts as an independent force, which is in sharp contrast to the MCA. But, unshackled from and by Umno, Umno’s Chinese partners can emerge as a formidable opponent to Pakatan, the PKR and DAP in particular.
Although only a mid–level ranking member in Gerakan, Ceylyn Tay (in the video above) is evidence into the likely results once Umno’s Chinese partners find a new political freedom and to act as an independent political entity. For those purposes Umno must learn to trust its friends.
Before a Chinese audience Ceylyn speaks well, and she is articulate with a sharp, persuasive intellect. She speaks more like an MCA politician on the campaign trail than the Gerakan she represents. With astonishing honesty, she takes on the DAP on their turf and on nearly all of its core themes: ethnicity, citizenship, justice, democracy and equality. After which, Lim Guan Eng looks like a water bucket full of holes. (Some of Ceylyn’s ideas parallel those contained in the pages of shuzheng.)
Bottom line in Ceylyn’s arguments strikes at the essence of what DAP represents: without culture, motherless, ill-bred, without manners, completely inept, and deceitful - all the issues fundamental to Chinese ethical cultural. It isn’t, therefore, good enough just to win against the DAP. For the sanity of the country and the welfare of both the Chinese and Malays, the DAP Christian Anglos must be - thank you Jesus – annihilated. Irreversibly. This is not impossible.
Contrast Ceylyn to hanging Hannah Henny Yeoh, below. Note the different language use, which then suggests that Kadir Jasin and the Hannah SS Malaiyoos would therefore prefer hanging Henny to Ceylyn because, according to Kadir et al, the latter’s Chinese language is a cause of disunity. This is a strange, perverse logic that in their forked-tongues deliver an equally strange, perverse Orwellian outcome: two contradictory positions side by side. The fascist DAP Anglos are Chinese chauvinists and the fascist Anglo Malaiyoos are not extremists.
Doesn’t the Hen look bloated? One DAP Jesus Ah Hoe has commented that hanging Henny is ‘pretty’. No class Jesus Hoe. Or, maybe it is because Henny has been fattening on Selangor riches. Chunjie is here: time to slaughter the fat hen for the table, throat first, never mind the eggs she lays. They are a Sham anyway.
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