Toxic Advice From A Dying Dinosaur aka Dr M

Dinosaurs, to my great regret as a child, have been extinct for 65 million years. Clearly a lot of us wish they were still around which would explain the popularity of movies like Jurassic Park and Ice Age. Unfortunately the dinosaurs that we do still have around are neither cute nor funny.

I am speaking of the wrinkled old bag of leftovers that is former premier Mahathir Mohammed, who at 85, realizing perhaps that his time is almost up, appears to be engaged in an attempt to spread as much hatred around in as short a time as possible. And so this poisonous geriatric, this slithering serpent in verdant Malaysian Eden, still drags himself around the country spreading discord and spitting venom.

He appears to have four big objectives, one to spread racial hatred and keep Malaysians divided, the second to decide who will lead the country, the third to ensure that his three mediocre sons somehow continue to prosper without him and lastly that Anwar Ibrahim is finally and totally destroyed. In all of his objectives he will fail.

Strange thing for a dictator to say

Just on Thursday alone, Mahathir made several statements that duly appeared in various news-sites. First he declared that it is uncivilized to fight for individual rights. The majority he said, must take precedence over the minority. The problem with this was that uncivilized individuals like Mahathir himself when he was Prime Minister, would decide what the majority wanted.

He then proceeded to systematically destroy the country’s institutions and to reduce them to the miserable state that they are in today, enrich his cronies like Daim Zainuddin, Tajuddin Ramli, Francis Yeoh, Ananda Krishnan and Vincent Tan among others, and allow corruption to become the rampant, all-consuming force that it is in Malaysia today.

One of the problems with Mahathir was that it didn’t matter to him whether you were corrupt or not, it only mattered whether you supported him or not.

Mathematical impossibility

The rights of the individual are sacrosanct and cannot be tampered with by vicious old dictators. What are majorities but collections of individuals. We could present Mahathir with a copy of John Stuart Mills but it would be wasted on so self-serving and hypocritical an individual. The only individual’s rights that Mahathir would be concerned with is his own.

Mahathir then suggested, as he often does, that Malays are in danger of becoming a minority in Malaysia. This is, of course, a mathematical impossibility. But then Mahathir is not a mathematician, he is a demagogue, and they are not dealers in neither facts nor figures.

By Mahathir’s reasoning the Malays, who form 60% of the Malaysian population, will be divided into three groups. In the first place there are only two groups, BN supporters and Pakatan supporters. There is also the fact that BN supporters are decreasing on a daily basis.

Therefore Mahathir’s argument that the Malays, who form 60% of Malaysians, have the highest birthrates and the lowest potential to migrate; will become a minority; is simply preposterous.

That's right, you should be ashamed of yourself

Mahathir also preached that Malaysians should feel shame if they do not give 100% to any job that is handed to them. Mahathir should take this advice himself, unless he feels it too bitter a pill to swallow.

His premiership of the country was a failure with his pet projects like Proton, Perwaja and the Twin Towers an economic drag on the country to this day. The ills that the nation faces today including crime, racial tension, foreign workers and a myriad of others are of Mahathir’s making.

If at all anybody should learn the meaning of the word shame as he suggested today, it is Mahathir himself. No number of self-promoting, dishonest books that he writes about himself can change that. And like him, his legacy belongs in a trash-can.

Malaysia Chronicle