INTERLOK – HAIYA, KASI LIA OLANG CAKAP LAH!

by Eyes Wide Open

When talking about Interlok, affluent liberals of all races continue with their cries of

“Don’t be so sensitive la!”

“Let them la, next election we will vote them out!”

“Things described in the novel really happened, so what?”

Tragically, such people are still choose to be ignorant of the fact that this is not about politics or racial sensitivities! This is about the brainwashing of hundreds of thousands of impressionable schoolchildren with the Ketuanan Melayu doctrine EVERY YEAR!

Pushing the Ketuanan Agenda to younger and younger minds

In case there are people who still don’t know what Ketuanan Melayu is all about – it’s an insidious doctrine placing the Malays as the supreme lords of the land and all others are mere “pendatangs” squatting here at the Malays’ favour – so the pendatang have to know their place. (And it doesn’t matter if your father was Indon and you are merely a 1st generation Malaysian – you are automatically a Bumiputra entitled to massive privileges over the non-Bumi whose family had been here for the past 6 generations.)

To justify this sense of entitlement, a standard line of propaganda has been promoted for decades after the British left Malaysian soil. The non-Bumi (especially the Chinese) are demonised as locusts who descended upon Tanah Melayu and stole the wealth out of Malay hands. Therefore, the Bumiputra privileges are a necessity to balance the economic injustices that the nons have perpetrated upon the Malays.

In the past, Ketuanan Melayu was a doctrine that used to be indoctrinated through political meetings. Then with the formation of Biro Tata Negara in 1974, the systematic mass indoctrination of the nation began in earnest. (What does BTN do? Read our expose about BTN here, and also eyewitness accounts here and here.)

The BTN’s Ketuanan Melayu indoctrination has immense reach as it targets all public university students. However, someone obviously thought that preaching the Ketuanan Melayu gospel to hundreds of thousands of uni students was not enough. So the BTN’s reach was expanded to include the hundreds of thousands of public servants and GLC officers.

Even at that level of penetration, someone somewhere still thought it was not enough. And so, the compulsory Malaysian Studies module (basically, a watered-down version of BTN propaganda) was introduced into all private higher learning institutes.

Now, someone somewhere again probably thought that this was STILL not enough and decided that they need to move upstream – secondary school students. Thus, Interlok was introduced as a school textbook.

“Ya meh? Sure or not?”

Well, let’s take a step back and look at the history of Interlok.

1967 – Interlok was submitted as an entry for a writing competition to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Merdeka. The writer, Abdullah Hussain, was at that time working as a senior assistant editor at Franklin Books. Presumably, his bosses recognised the novel as a hastily put-together piece of crap and refused to publish the novel.

1969 – May 13 massacre perpetrated by ultra-Malay elements, based on the premise of teaching the nons a lesson to know their place in the Tanah Melayu (raw Ketuanan Melayu thinking gone extreme).

1970 – NEP introduced on the premise that the “other races” had grown fat on Malay soil at the expense of the Malays and it was now the Malays’ turnto get some (Ketuanan Melayu institutionalised).

1971 – Interlok is finally published even though the highly charged racial atmosphere in the country at that time reflected the racial stereotypes of the novel.

1974 – BTN established, whose propaganda themes closely relate to Interlok’s depiction of race relations.

1996 – Abdullah Hussein crowned as National Laureate for his prolific writings

2008 – Malay ultra-nationalism outsourced to PERKASA after GE12.

2008-2010 – Desperate attempts to stoke racial tensions and spread Malay ultra-nationalist feelings by Perkasa & BN so far unsuccessful

2010 – Interlok made a compulsory component of SPM BM Paper

First of all, why was Interlok deemed unworthy to be published during times of peace? And why was it published after bloody racial clashes occured, caused in part by people’s reactions to racial stereotypes similarly found in the book? Was it because it was a convenient tool reinforce the Ketuanan Melayu doctrine among the populace, and to make sure the nons “knew their place” in Tanah Melayu?

Secondly, of all the books written, why choose a book that has no pedigree, a dubious publishing history, and perpetuates negative racial stereotypes? Is there no better book available?

It just doesn’t make sense, unless we assume that someone has a specific agenda in selecting this book.

Protesting the use of Interlok as a BM textbook is NOT about being racially sensitive or gaining political mileage – the emotional and ill-informed outbursts of people who have these motives are actually diverting attention from the real issues at hand and in the process harming their own cause as well!

Because while the Malay politicians argue about the supreme Malay right to use any Malay literature they like, and Indian politicians argue about racial sensitivities, and Chinese politicians totally blur cos they don’t read – hundreds of thousands of our children are exposed the the BTN-style racial propaganda coutesy of Interlok.

At the other end of the extreme are the affluent liberals who regard Interlok as a non-issue. They pooh-pooh the political outbursts but are totally oblivious to the novel’s contents or themes. At the most, they may confidently state that even though they think Interlok is a non-issue, they will vote out the dolts who caused such an uproar in choosing it.

They fail to see the bigger picture.

About 500,000 candidates sit for SPM EVERY YEAR. That’s half a million impressionable minds who are force-fed BTN-style propaganda via Interlok every year.

Let’s just assume that merely 5% of those students catch the BTN-style propaganda subtext evident in Interlok – that’s 25,000 minds poisoned EVERY YEAR.

Is 1 affluent liberal vote worth more that 25,000 BTN-minded votes?

You do the math.

- Hartal MSM