Subjects of this essay – self, ethnicity, nationality and politics – have been flogged numerous times in these pages. They merit repetition only because the denouement is being reached: the Bangsa Anaks of Malaysia are unravelling at an incredible speed.
It demonstrates a point in Malaysian society: its politics shan’t be pigeon-holed, especially on white man, western terms.
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PAS Above All: Malay First
(Cited by Bernama) A Malay Muslim will be appointed the prime minister if the opposition pact wins the next general election, PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang said today. …
“We are going by the basis of the Pakatan Rakyat resolution, the constitution, Islam as the official religion of the federation, bumiputra rights, Malay as the official language and the constitutional monarchy. We give preference to these, nothing more than that. We move on that premise, we do not want to do anything rash.”
Meanwhile, PAS secretary-general Datuk Mustafa Ali said DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng had said that he had no intention of helming the country. “The constitution is silent. We (the opposition pact) are agreed that the prime minister must be a Malay Muslim,” he said. – Malaysia Today, 2012 June 1.
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ABU’s Death by a Thousand Cuts
Anything But UMNO … As we work to get rid of the rubbish presently occupying our Putrajaya, we are not prepared to blindly replace them with the same, bloody rubbish. – Haris Ibrahim, 2012 June 1.
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Stillborn Malaysian First PM: Dead before Birth
I had already stated in Parliament that I am a Malaysian first and Chinese second. — Lim Kit Siang
That’s a political vision statement of the highest merit, akin to one made on Aug 28, 1963 in a distant land by another visionary…. Thanks to their efforts, endurance and faith in themselves, today an African American sits in the White House as the 44th President of the United States of America. At home Lim Kit Siang espouses the Malaysian First doctrine to seek the same outcome. His objectives are clear and straightforward, and he knows he would still need many like-minded successors to chip away at the vested interests of Malaysian racism before his dream can come true that all Malaysians ‘will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’…
Lim Kit Siang and many like me do not want to see a Chinese as a future prime minister of Malaysia but rather a Malaysian. – Kongsamkok aka KTemoc in Malaysiakini, 2010 Oct 5 and in Lim Kit Siang.
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The Biblical Corruption of Bangsa Malaysia
Among the presumptions rooted in the ABU campaign of Haris Ibrahim and Peter Petra Kamarudin is that Umno is the defining face of evil so that, in its entirety, it is beyond salvage. Gobind Rudra shares the same assumption when, in comparing the DAP and Umno, he argued that the first has since 2008 morphed into a ‘form’ and ‘essence’ found in the second (both words his).
The genus of this idea - that there’s a birth seed – has an identical parallel in Bangsa Malaysia or Malaysian First or Anak Malaysia (all terms have the same meaning): leave behind your ethnicity, your self, and you would arrive at a new being.
In Ahirudin Attan’s case, the new being is a new Bangsa, a new Malaysian who, in Mahathirism, is predicated on being Muslim first (Ridhuan Tee).
In ABU’s case, the Malaysian society of new Anaks arrives at a fresh beginning. Peter Petra Piper calls it a migration from the existing political, social and ethical order into wholly new ways of thought and conduct.
He is vague into what exactly is this new culture, just as Lim Kit Siang is vague about what make up the ethnic or social characteristic qualities of the Malaysian First after a man is rendered Chinese second. To Kit Siang, he is primarily concerned that being Chinese first or Malay first is a bad thing, to be discarded, gotten rid off.
Khmer Rouge fascists have a phrase for such a comprehensive new social, existential and political beginning: Kampuchea Year Zero.
How had Haris et al arrived at (1) enjoining religious morality into (2) racial manipulation and after which to convert the synthesis into (3) a political doctrine as fodder for ceramah speeches?
Answer: Christianity.
The same genus seed of idea carried from Christianity says all people are and will be born into ‘sin’, no exceptions. Hell waits for ‘sinners’. Evil is Umno, no exceptions there as well.
In this western moral connundrum, the only available exit route is to turn away from the old self and start a new beginning by accepting Jesus – that is, be Christian. Conversion, or ubah in political terms, guarantees a new life guided by and under a new set of moral, western culture (Petra).
The new Bangsa Malaysia birthing a new society is essentially a biblical idea given a political slant.
Christianity as the seed of Pakatan and Anak Bangsa political culture spawns associated ideas like, all men are created equal (by Jesus, of course). Martin Luther King’s ‘judge not by skin colour’ was fundamentally biblical morality Kit Siang copied then inserted into his Parliament speech (cited passage above).
It was entirely self-serving but KTemoc (aka Kongsamkok, DAP’s mouthpiece among the kangaroos) would extol Kit Siang, calling the plagiarism ”visionary”. Says Kong Temoc Kong:
Lim Kit Siang and many like me do not want to see a Chinese as a future prime minister of Malaysia but rather a Malaysian.
That Haris, KTemoc, Kit Siang et al should presume that Chinese, Malays and Indians judge and have been judging others solely on skin colour terms, they weren’t just superimposing their western bias – white disdain for blacks as inferior – picked up from their English schools, they were especially presuming that Malaysians act exactly like gweilos. That is, Asians, like the orang putih, don’t judge others by the qualities of character although, contrarily, Chinese ethical culture teaches precisely that.
This, in Kit Siang’s ‘Chinese second’, produces a bizarre, contradictory outcome: he is saying, in effect, don’t follow Chinese ethics, meaning, don’t judge by character. In Kit Siang, all lessons in humanity from 5,000 years of Sino civilization are thus thrown out the window. Confucius is considered voodoo, but follow the bible instead. When Kit Siang (or KTemoc) declared, “I’m proud of my ethnicity” he was merely asserting skin colour – which is racism – and not the cultural heritage of ethnicity that he knows nothing, except maybe Chinese New Year.
A consequence in the negation – discarding a heritage – is witnessed today in the character of a person named Lim Guan Eng: belligerent, impatient, bigoted, deceitful and tyrannical. Guan Eng isn’t alone. There is a whole list of such characters – all bananas and coconuts – that Kit Siang says are the character models for a future Bangsa or race: Kit Siang himself, Anwar, Hadi Awang, Hannah Yeoh, James Ngeh….
Haris Ibrahim went a step further, naming Hannah Yeoh – literally – a living saint. Human character in Haris’s reckoning is race-free.
All this raises questions more than they answer: what exactly is Barack Obama’s character that is the fruit of a, KTemoc says, ‘vision statement’ by Martin Luther King in 1963. From where had his character come about, and how was it formed from the passage of infancy to adulthood?
The answer is self-evident, and so it is easier than the questions that seemed complex. And it is this: Obama is a white, biblical character because if he was and had been informed by, say, native American qualities that put the collective welfare above the individual ‘rights’, he wouldn’t be elected.
That says, briefly, two things: (a) America, in spite of Martin Luther King and the nigger named Obama, remains a white dominant society, and (b) ethnic culture, or race if that’s the preferred word, forms a man’s character.
Hadi Awang of PAS has since June 1, 2012, when he says only a Malay-Muslim can be PM material, called out the contradictions and the lies in Malaysian First, in Bangsa Malaysia and all their Anaks.
In repudiating Kit Siang, Haris et al, Hadi confesses, in effect, that their equality and colour blind principles are just so much of hogwash. PAS was never For All. That too was a lie that Haris helped spread. All along it had been PAS Above All.
But, Hadi indirectly and inadvertently reaffirms a fundamental idea in Sino philosophy: culture, ethical culture specifically, is the font of a man’s quality.
This says, in PAS terms, that the quality of any Malaysian PM material has first to be informed by Islam and after that by political expediency. Those rules form the basis of Pakatan’s political ethos, regardless of whether the qualities constitute (in Chinese thought) a good or a bad thing. Kit Siang merely excelled in hiding those rules under a blanket of Malaysian First propaganda, but he had to know all along that the Malay is First. He had acted duplicitous.
Like Kit Siang, Haris Ibrahim, if he is to be intellectually and morally consistent, has to conclude within his western, biblical, Martin Luther King morality worldview that the Pakatan position as told by Hadi is bad. It violates the supremacy of his equality and skin colour ethos.
But, if bad, why wouldn’t Haris bring himself to qualify and label Hadi Awang as ‘rubbish’, like he has of Azmin Ali?
Haris’s dilemma is his own making.
Like in his ABU campaign, he had presumed too much: only Umno has a monopoly on evil for example. If Umno is the standard of evil, why absolve those coming from the party? Anwar Ibrahim was, after all, 17 years in Umno, much of the time in top positions. Why not Anwar? Has he converted, giving up the old self for a fresh new, pristine human being like Hannah Yeoh is saint?
Haris’s refusal to admit to his contradictions – hence the legendary failures of his many campaigns – stems from the tyranny of his western, biblical worldview: equality is absolute; zero tolerance for corruption, by which he means financial corruption only.
His stupidities, like that of Kit Siang’s and KTemoc’s, stem from his belief and acceptance of every thing white morality has to tell him, the bible in particular. He doesn’t question Jesus: Love of money is not the root of all evil. There is simply no evil because little and no good has ever come out of the white man’s god.
Corruption is never a morality commission that western law has taught him. It is an amoral idea where the fundamental problem lies not in the act but in the damage – the outcome – done to the fabric of the social relations. This, other way of looking at things has profound ramifications: such as, not every act of corruption needs to be tackled once the evil is gone from it.
Yet when Haris writes – “As we work to get rid of the rubbish presently occupying our Putrajaya, we are not prepared to blindly replace them with the same, bloody rubbish” – he is in effect corrupting the concept of Anything But Umno. He has begun to qualify ‘anything’, to mean to include anybody outside Umno…. More contradictions.
It signals, along with Hadi’s repudiation of Kit Siang, the beginnings in the self-corruption of Haris Ibrahim, the biblical pure, anointer of saints.
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When necessary and with considerable effect, Pakatan, PKR in particular, forgets about Malaysian First and becomes skilled in exploiting Chineseness - their history and ethics. Why doesn’t the MCA do so when it is the natural inheritor of the culture and a branch extension of Chinese civilization? Subservience to Umno? Malay hegemony?
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