Change Country, Change Everything

by shuzheng

When people change country, they change everything: entire neighbourhoods, the administration, a currency, a way of life, sets of ethical systems, everything. They cease putting up with not just corrupted lives, but also with Hannah and her god, with Anwar’s Syariah and Hadi’s hududs, collectively a sham. They seek to recover a lost freedom.

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Streaming out of political circles and from Pakatan Rakyat in particular have been a deluge of superlative glorifying epithets that appear completely inexplicable, not to mention the goose-pimples they raise.

It didn’t begin last week with Anwar Ibrahim’s wife Azizah who called her husband, Allah’s gift to humankind. At Lim Kit Siang, ten months earlier, the DAP called Anwar as Allah’s gift to the people of Sarawak and Sabah. Anwar’s own party associates had before labelled him a Mandela in rhyme with Messiah. Thomas Lee, mouthpiece for the DAP and the party’s evangelical leadership, has described secretary-general Lim Guan Eng as “luminous”. Lee would have had in mind the halo around the head of Jesus Christ you see in living room wall posters.

Within the chattering class, Haris Ibrahim has feted Hannah ‘Miracle Righteous’ Yeoh as equal a saint: ‘excellent, principled, with convictions, academic, strong and young’. And, when Hannah tweeted, ‘don’t lose hope; don’t change your country, change your government,’ the predictable happened: within 24 hours, her adorers graded it ‘inspiring‘.

In all the superlatives, there is hardly a tinge of, much less any deference to, modesty: Hannah, Anwar, the Lim family, all deified even before a 6-wheeler bus, driven by an Umno card-carrying member, hits and throws them into a longkang – dead outside DAP offices. They don’t even care if their claims are perverse.

But, they do attest to Zaid Ibrahim’s observations, he having just exited from the inner sanctum of PKR, that Pakatan politics are manipulated by slogan-fire breathing deities swarmed and championed by the ‘adoring’ faithful (Richard Loh, Ah Hoe aka Ass Hole) rather than politics by humans, as it should be conducted, with purposeful and meaningful ideas on the back of humanistic ethics that Zaid prefers to call, ‘old-fashioned values‘.

Out from this deification and its process, you begin to see what Zaid means when he says the Pakatan politics is ‘phoney politics’. And he would have none of that. Even much earlier than he, P. Uthayakumar of Hindraf had seen what Zaid saw and understood. He, too, would have none of the fraud and sham.

Malaysian political ascent into sainthood goes in parallel and in opposite direction to society’s descent into the depths of ‘evil’ (Najib Razak). You see it everywhere, camouflaged inAnil Netto’s supposed ‘analysis’, spread by Malaysiakini, Twitter, and Blogspot, and drummed up in the supposedly independent articles by persons such as Kutty Kee Thuan Chye. Their messages run much like the process of deification: proclamations and vacuous pronouncements.

An example from Kutty Kee:

“Someone said to me he was unhappy about the low number of scholarships given out by the educational arm of the Selangor government to non-Malays. He felt the Pakatan-led government was no different from its predecessor. I had to ask him: Why make a big case of this now just because it happens to involve the Pakatan-led Selangor government when the BN-led federal government has been doing it for far much longer? I also had to point out that we should cease looking at the issue from the perspective of race, and that the overriding criterion for giving out a scholarship, apart from scholastic merit, should be need.”

Plainly obvious in Kee’s statements is that he hadn’t even looked at the data. (Or is it because he can’t do elementary maths?) If he had then he would have had the refutation to his own question. That refutation would be evidential proof piled on top of his own admission that ‘BN used race why blame Pakatan’, which inferred that Pakatan also uses race, only don’t blame them.

In contradiction to Kee’s proclamation that Pakatan is ethical not racist, the data shows Pakatan does put race and not just need into consideration for giving out public money. It also shows that the general Chinese public – supposedly money mad – doesn’t want money from Pakatan’s hands and doesn’t trust it. Kee’s questioner was fundamentally right: Pakatan is no different from BN, the same kind of assertion Hindraf people have before said, and now Zaid.

Why has Kutty Kee and others like him, Anil Netto, Haris Ibrahim, et al, failed to see their own vacuity? Or, are they simply stupid?

One answer, among others, lies in deification’s process which does much to blur reality.

Consider Anwar’s track record. Repeatedly and repeatedly and daily for over 20 years, the man, along with PAS, had driven a Malay mass appeal and Islamist supremacist set of ideological designs into governance, into the bureaucracy, into education, into religion and into virtually every facet of daily lives affecting not just Malays but all ethnic groups. An entire generation has grown up knowing only Anwarista. The fruits of their agendas are showing.

Two among scores of examples most recently:

• a Syariah apparatus to decide on a matter as personal and as private as is marriage, now legalizing 14 year old girls, not Form Three yet, to marry, a practice which clearly goes against secular, pedophile laws;
• a Syariah apparatus that permits the abduction of non-Muslim children, as in the case of 7-year-old Tan Yi Min from her father and her school, the legitimizing against all constitutional entitlement to left alone, to be free and from forced confinement by persons.

These are cited because the central issues – individual liberty, freedom and independence – underneath their religious façade are traceable directly to Anwar’s initiations while in Umno. They are cited also because they strike at the roots of popular perception that Malaysia has turned into a deranged, dysfunctional society.

A mother and a son, a father and daughter, saints, gods and messiahs: collectively, a Malaysian sham. Changing a country is to cease putting up with them.

It wasn’t like this 40, 50 years ago – a point alluded to by Razaleigh Hamzah. It wasn’t like this before Anwar, before Mahathir, but when there was still Umno then, and MCA and MIC. It wasn’t like this when people then knew how to live and let live.

A teacher in Sarawak whipping a 10-year-old boy for eating pork sausages wasn’t inspired to do so yesterday and out of any sudden, moral impulse. He would have had seen, heard and experience an entire train of events, ideas and influences stretching back to his youth, beginning with Anwar, PAS and with ABIM and maybe as far back as the destruction of the Hindu gods in Kerling, Hulu Selangor, which Anwar said, blamed it on the Indians for leaving animal potteries everywhere, roadsides and trees, as if they were getting in his way. That’s the exact, same argument which Umno and Islamists were to use 20 years later when hundreds were destroyed in Selangor.

Malaysian descent into complete insanity, absolutism and tyranny couldn’t be the resulting work of government alone because it wasn’t just a government that was intolerant, absolutist and tyrannical. Even the people also, specifically the religious types, Islamists and Christian evangelicals among them, were intolerant, absolutists and tyrannical.

The Syariah rulings against Yi Min and against naïve Malay school girls were made not by government. The whipping of the Sarawak boy wasn’t instructed by a government. All that was carried out by people, different to the common folks only because they have some authority, and by perhaps a neighbour living next door and not resident in Putrajaya.

The policemen who kill Indians in police cells surely couldn’t have been instructed by Umno, but they are as Malaysian as Lim Kit Siang is Malaysian. That says that when Malaysians emigrate, they weren’t giving up not only a government; they have effectively changed the government overnight, and society as well. They were especially giving up on a society – Malaysian First or 1Malaysia society it didn’t matter – that decent people could no more stomach. They were giving up on the Muslim neighbour in Kajang living with a converted woman separated from her husband and together had plotted to steal a kid from a Penang school. They were also giving up Umno and PAS, PKR and the DAP; they had given up on saints and their Allah and their Jesus gods.

Yet, here is Hannah Miracle Yeoh proclaiming: ‘don’t change your country, change your government’. Basking in the adulation, she must think she’s very clever. But out there, among the people, idiots like Richard Loh, who trumpets after Hannah, believe her: that it has all to do with the government only, meaning Umno, when the person who must be made to account for Malaysia’s descent into insanity is Anwar Ibrahim, Hannah’s political bed-partner, as well as the teacher living across the street. You couldn’t trust your kid with your neighbour.

Now, just when Anwar seeks to find his way back into the pinnacle of society, into government, and into influence, they call him a Messiah. His bed-partners are called saints, ‘inspiring, excellent, and luminous’.

Small wonder people change country.

Governments they can put up with and people elsewhere, Iran and UK for example, have tolerated worse governments. But society? That’s gone too far. When people change country, they stop being Malaysian and being a part of the Malaysian society and that’s a legal, formal and empirical truth. They stop wanting to be a part of a perversity, of an insanity, of politics (and this include Pakatan’s kind of politics), or of Malaysian First or 1Malaysia, of ketuanan Melayu or ketuanan rakyat, and all those vacuous slogans.

When people change country, they change everything: entire neighbourhoods, a way of life, a set of value systems. They seek to get away from the Hannah’s god and Allah’s Syariah; they wish to recover their lost freedom – an idea that is alien to Hannah and don’t expect her to understand. She, Guan Eng, Anwar, Nurul Izzah are saints and messiahs, which is to say they’re above humanity, above common people. Why put up with a sham nation? Or worse, become like the phoneys?