From high hopes to shattered dreams?

I am glad I have been given the opportunity to contribute to an intellectually engaging forum Malaysiakini. Happy 20th birthday, Malaysiakini!

I started writing for this forum 15 years ago! Yes, I persevered as perhaps the longest-serving columnist, proud to be writing with a cadre of those who speak truth to power and ones who answer only to their souls. I hope to continue sharing my views and analyses pertaining to politics in the Southeast Asia region, educational philosophy and practice, and critical social perspectives on society in general. I have enjoyed every moment of writing my 400 articles thus far.

Glad, too, that I am given the will to continue writing about the country I grew up in, Malaysia, and of which I have been a keen observer for the last 30 years. This is perhaps the best time to talk about a forthcoming book on Malaysian politics I authored. It is my eighth in a series of political-economic-anthropological-philosophical writings on a country known as a “moderately-Islamic-hypermodern nation-state” with all the complexities and contradictions of a neo-colonialist political construct.

In my forthcoming book, I analyze the performance of the coalition party headed by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, 94 years old, who has had control of the country since 1981. Through Machiavellian manoeuvres and master-puppetry as his twin strategy, he continues to hold on to power, refusing to let go.

Mistrust and the fear that losing power will mean losing the ability to orchestrate dynastic shifts after he dies, is perhaps the name of this Malaysian game of thrones.

In “From High Hopes Shattered Dreams?: The Second Mahathirist Revolution a Year Later”, through 43 essays, I write about the issues plaguing the new government or regime that mutated from the ancien, and the inextricable link between critical consciousness and education as twin-forces much needed to have the country, any country for that matter, regenerate, renew its existential being, vis-a-viz nationhood, and to flourish with a renaissance feel of progress.

In this collection, I present views on radical change and hope. It is a “Freirean-Freudian” musing, after the work of two thinkers, the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire and the Austrian psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

The former wrote "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" in the 1980s, the latter wrote "Civilization and Its Discontents" sometime in the 1930s. Both wrote about how we think in an age of mental derangement. So, how do we educate people to think critically on religion, the state, and a hybrid of totalitarianism these days?

Especially in Malaysia.

Below I reproduce the preface to the book. Although the names and references to Malaysian politics may be alien to some readers, the theme is familiar: power and how it is used and abused, and its inextricable link to globalization, political-economy, ideology, spirituality, and education.

The tension between religion and liberalism, decadence and democracy, authoritarianism and altruism, and the “halal-haram” matrix in power relations, consumption, and economic development – all these are applicable in any country one is analyzing. Especially in so-called Islamic countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, or Afghanistan.

Here is an excerpt from my book, the eighth in my continuing analysis of hyper-modernizing Malaysia in an ever-changing complex world:

“It is April 22 today, as I continue to work on the compilation. It is Earth Day today here in the United State, in the New York city area. A reason to celebrate our fragile earth and a planet in critical condition.

"The two most important issues in the world today are climate change/ecological destruction and the rapid advancement of “dehumanizing technologies”. But there is also another perennial issue that destroys humanity: terrorism and the need for Peace Education I have alluded to in many of the essays in this collection.

"This week, as I was writing this, is a week of sadness as well. The horrible massacre of hundreds of Christians in Sri Lanka, by Islamic absurdist-fundamentalists, hurt me emotionally as an educator, especially after reading about the 50 Muslim worshippers gunned down in Christchurch, New Zealand a few months before that, and the attack and killing of Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the year before that – all three of these diabolic and despicable acts of terror committed by terrorists.

"Today these are my thoughts as I prepare this set of vignettes of a performance review of the Harapan government. I had high hopes that turned into something different than what I expected.

"Religion, race, and royalty dominated my commentaries on my “Freirean-Freudian Observations and Documentations” as they relate to critical consciousness and the education of this nation."

I don’t know what is happening to the hope for a “new Malaysia”. Your guess and analysis is as good as mine.

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AZLY RAHMAN is an academic, international columnist, and author of seven books available here. He holds a doctorate in international education development and Master’s degrees in six areas: education, international affairs, peace studies, communication, fiction and non-fiction writing. He is a member of the Kappa Delta Pi International Honor Society in Education. Twitter @azlyrahman. More writings here. - Mkini