Supremacy of any kind doesn’t exist

Any quest for supremacy by a particular race, religion or nation also creates tensions for obvious reasons.

COMMENT

During the height of the Cold War, Russian schoolchildren were being systematically indoctrinated with the worldly view that there was no God. The brainwashing usually began with pre-school-going children.

One way was that these children will be asked by their teacher to close their eyes and keep their hands open during a classroom session. While the children kept their eyes closed and their hands open, the teacher will tell them: “Now let us ask God to give us some sweets.”

The children will excitedly and earnestly begin to ask God to give them sweets. A little while later the teacher will remark: “What no sweets. Why? There is no God, children.”

After this, the teacher will say: “All right children, let’s close our eyes, open our hands and ask our Great Leader to give us some sweets.”

While the children were asking their “Great Leader” this, the teacher will go round putting candy in each child’s hands.

The teacher then says: “Open your eyes. Oh, look, our Great Leader has given us candy. There is no God but only our Great Leader who can give us all we want.”

The Cold War is over. But even till today there are certain governments around the world championing the supremacy of their governance, the supremacy of their leadership skills, while the belief in God goes a begging.

It is the wise and prudent who realise that in the span of a lifetime, the quest for supremacy by any particular race especially is a downright folly. In hindsight, looking back from the time humankind evolved or was created, you will find certain races had championed powerfully to be regarded as superior to others.

During World War Two, it was the megalomaniacal Hitler and his compatriot Mussolini who bandied the widespread belief that the Aryan race was superior to the rest of the races of the world. Look what a dismal end their bid came to finally.

Supremacy of God

Perhaps it is time for the populaces of the world to embrace once again the concept and idea of God to make the world a kinder, gentler place and, most of all, to regain and awaken our conscience to right and wrong and to promote the truth of God and the supremacy of the human race as one.

Not the supremacy of an individual or a particular race but the supremacy of God and the supremacy of every race on earth being equal with each other. This was the lesson that Mahatma Gandhi taught despite being a staunch Hindu and it bore well for a remarkably poor and downtrodden nation like India.

The Gandhian philosophy of man has stood India in great stead and over the years it has produced a dynamic and vibrant India that is now propelling to the forefront of the world in its foray to become a great nation.

Yet this success and transformation had to be achieved on the back of a strenuous effort by Indians to eradicate the North-South divide of India. In this setting, the fair-skinned northerner, also of Aryan descent, often thought of themselves to be superior and looked down on the dark-skinned southerner, often a Dravidian.

For years after the Independence and partition of India in 1947, the country was besieged by this racial divide between north and south but the current economic rise of southerners has caused a balance in the race equation to arise. You witness very little of racial discrimination between northern and southern Indians today.

Race, religion and nationality are powder kegs, tinder boxes that can easily explode in our faces if we Malaysians do not tread carefully. Even language can be a powerful tool used by deceitful politicians to trick the populace into submission to the political causes they espouse.

But race, religion, nationality and language are best to be viewed as accidents of birth that were enforced upon us by fate and not through our willful choice or any doing on our part.

As such, the best option to navigate our way safely through these divisive factors of humans is through choosing to equate and give equal status, rights and privileges to each race, religion and language in a country such as Malaysia.

Only then true camaraderie will prevail among Malaysians as in the past and put an end to racial polarisation among the young as is evident nowadays. The lines that demarcate Malaysia’s multi-racial and multi-religious society should by now, after over five decades of Merdeka, begin to erode and start to blur.

Dangerous thinking

Creating a Malaysia where our commonalities and the common good are highlighted is the way forward for us. But there is also really no hard-and-fast rule as to how to go about creating racial and religious goodwill in a country. It should be left to us Malaysians to choose the best possible ways to promote racial and religious harmony.

However, it is something which Malaysians of all walks of life must be prepared to roll up their sleeves and put in serious effort to ensure the progress and prosperity that the country has achieved since Independence do not go to waste as conflicts of race and religion can turn the clock of economic growth backward.

Bear in mind the adage that “All men are created equal”. Supremacy of a particular race, religion, nation or whatever else really does not exist in reality. It is foolhardy and immature to champion a certain race, religion, or prowess of the people of a nation to the extent they think themselves of being “superior”.

It is this dangerous thinking subscribed to usually by people of inferior thinking that creates the “some men are more equal than others” mentality. Since medically and scientifically it has been proven that intelligence is common, we should put to rest the fear forever that certain races are inferior or weak.

Usually, in the case of certain races being considered weak or inferior, it is the result of the environment and not the result of genealogy. Success and achievement are within the reach of every individual in this globalised era but the effort must be put in to ensure the rewards are reaped honestly and to the satisfaction of all.

Maybe, therefore, it is high time we began by allowing Subang Jaya Assemblywoman Hannah Yeoh and her husband of Indian descent the opportunity to create a precedent by having an “Anak Malaysia”.

Prior to this, there was the proposal to drop the status of a person’s race from all formal documentation. It was viewed as the way forward. Now let’s go a step further and strengthen our bid to create further peace and harmony in the country by blurring out completely the lines that separate us and begin to stride towards celebrating unity amidst our diversity.

Christopher Fernandez has been teaching and writing throughout Asia since 1984.