Distorting history should be a criminal offence

YOURSAY 'Umno is sanctioned to politicise race, religion and also history to its favour. They control the press, and influence the police and the judiciary.'

A history of a Malaysian ship of fools

Anonymous #70881335: I flipped through my niece's history textbook and compared it with my history textbooks 40 years ago. What can I, or any right-thinking Malaysian, say? It's full of ‘bullshit' with a capital B.

Senior: Even now, history textbooks are being changed. For example, Parameswara is no longer a Hindu prince but a Malay prince, the founder of Kuala Lumpur is not Yap Ah Loy but Raja Abdullah who gave permission to open up Klang Valley for tin prospectors.

Sickening: ‘Creative' history is not worth the toilet paper it is written on. It is untruth and rubbish, damaging to the young minds and the uninformed.

Those who are responsible should be classified as criminals, to be charged with providing false information to the public with malicious intent.

Paul Warren: When my daughter studied history at school in New Zealand, there were really no textbooks to refer to.

There was a syllabus, and then you were left to your own devices to research a subject matter and to reference any published material from just about anywhere and you were asked to write your own history text.

Does anyone have the guts to let that happen in our schools in Malaysia?

Headhunter: It's not history that will be written, but 'his story', referring to DPM Muhyiddin Yassin/Umno's.

Ngecui: This classic crummy sophistry of evil Mahathirism - that "the Chinese and Indians have countries to go back to but the Malays don't" - must have made him very self-satisfied when former PM Mahathir Mohamad uttered those words (in an era when the alternative media was non-existent).

But today people know that everything that Umno does is self-serving and solely for perpetuating its hegemony.

FellowMalaysian: The problem is that Umno is sanctioned to politicise race, religion and also history to its favour. They control the press, and influence the police and the judiciary.

Laws are skewed and interpreted based on their fancies. And to compound the problem, BN cronies like MCA doggedly follow their masters.

!?!: Writer S Thayaparan can take heart. From my observations, even lower secondary students can see through the lies in their history lessons. Their history teachers subtly enlighten them.

Students themselves question some unbelievable ‘facts' peddled as history by Umno. They realise that these ‘facts' are directly opposite to what is related by their parents and elders.

Black Mamba: Thayaparan, you say it best with your opening sentence. Umno wants to rewrite history and acknowledge that all Muslims in Malaysia are Malays with their new identity, so that an Indian Muslim from Kerala married to a Malay Muslim automatically becomes a Malay.

And a Javanese Muslim can become a Malay and a menteri besar too. Likewise, a Bugis descendant from Makassar, Sulawesi has turned into a Malay and can be the prime minister.

Not forgetting a Chinese who embraces Islam after adulthood for only 20-plus years can suddenly become a Malay because he is an authority in the religion as well as a scholar.

What more with naturalised Muslim Bangladeshis, Burmese, Cambodians, Filipinos and Southern Thais migrating to Malaysia illegally who if given citizenship, will one day become part of the great race called Malays.

Opah: It all started with Mahathir's ‘The Malay Dilemma' - falsehoods, pseudo-history, institutional racism and corruption were all given an umbrella to hide beneath. All were permitted in the cause of helping helpless Malays compete against the ‘superpowered' pendatang.

Tangling: When motives are driven by greed, things go awry. Mahathir is power crazy, unable to let go of the post of PM. That's why he is manipulating from behind former PM Abdullah Badawi and present PM Najib Razak.

Mahathir is the de facto PM. He is so afraid to lose power and with that, all the ill-gotten wealth he has amassed. When there is a change of government, he knows he will lose them all. Worse, he may go to jail.

Jaguh: For the sake of our children and their future, the first thing that Pakatan Rakyat has got to do when in power, will be to revamp the entire education system, especially history.

Dr Jag#04496187: Freedom for the Umno wolves is death for the non-Umno lambs, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin.

History in Umno hands has always been fictionalised so that others can be demonised and victimised.

Shanandoah: The victors of any kind of battle write history. The vanquished has to swallow their rubbish. - Malaysiakini