Suffer, suckers!

As you may or may not recall, I wrote a column last week entitled ‘Always April Fools’ in an attempt to make the all-too-obvious point that the Umno/BN ‘government’ is not only a joke at the expense of ‘ordinary’ Malaysians, but, to add insult to injury, openly laughs in their faces if they complain.

But I must have expressed myself badly, because by no means everybody got the point.

For example, somebody calling him/herself ‘Peacemaker’ commented that “Mr Johns’ sense of humour is offensive when he laughs at the billions looted from the national treasury by BN-Umno insiders. It is a cause for tears of grieve (sic) brought on by the systemic impoverishment of the vast majority of Malaysian (sic) who have trustingly entrusted these Ali Baba’s (sic) and their band of more than 40 theieves (sic).”

Let me say first that my reason for quoting this comment here is not to poke fun at Peacemaker’s slightly imperfect employment of English, as it is far better than that of the cyber-bangangs that Umno/BN pays with public money to stage gangbangs against articles critical of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his ‘first lady’, Rosmah Mansor.

And in any case I’m not about to laugh at slight errors in anybody’s use of his or her second or even third language, as I not only have a pathetically poor to non-existent grasp of any language but English, but am far from word-perfect even in that.

But I would like to correct Peacemaker’s misreading of my previous column, which was to remind as many people as possible of the preposterous practical jokes their ludicrous government has been playing on them for decades, not to ridicule Malaysians themselves.

Even as I type this, however, I realise how remiss I was last week in lumping all ‘ordinary’ Malaysians together as deserving of sympathy for their being the butt of Umno/BN’s criminal antics, as a significant number are either too stupid to see that the joke’s on them however obvious it becomes, or else either passively or actively complicit in helping the regime make fools of them along with their more enlightened their fellows.

For a start, there are all those suckers in the so-called ‘silent majority’ who, while doubtless claiming to love Malaysia, are so apathetic if not outright pathetic, or cowed or simply bovine in the face of the laughing-stock that the regime has so long been making of them, their families, fellow citizens and allegedly beloved country that they can’t be bothered raising their voices or even voting.

Much has been made of the alleged 52 percent popular vote for the opposition in the 13th general election (GE13), as against around 48 percent for the regime. But in view of the combined facts that only around 70 percent of potentially eligible voters were registered, and only 70 percent of this 70 percent bothered casting their ballots, the result was actually more like 26:24.

That little more than a quarter of adult Malaysians were sufficiently fussed about the ludicrous situation they found themselves in after more than 50 years of the bad-joke Umno/BN regime to bother registering, voting or otherwise lifting a finger in their own or their nation’s defence was very, very far from funny.

Devoted not to serving but deceiving

And even less amusing than the passivity of this silent, seriously stupid and spineless majority is the active complicity of those of those of their fellow Malaysians prepared to prostitute themselves in the service of the clownish government’s conspiracy to keep the majority silent, stupid and spineless for as long as possible.

All the so-called ‘civil servants’, for example, who, for relative pittances in pay and whatever perks they can pick-up from petty thefts and corruptions are prepared to shame themselves and their families and sell-out their friends and neighbours by staffing entire government agencies that, like the bloated Prime Minister’s Department and the Home Ministry, are devoted not to serving but to deceiving, misleading and silencing the populace.

And like the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), which is apparently powerless against massive corruption, fraud and theft by its political paymasters, and even, in the cases of Teoh Beng Hock and others, capable of getting away with murder.

As, of course, is the Royal Malaysian Police Force, which in addition to half-heartedly protecting the public from common criminals, also routinely engages in extra-judicial and custodial homicide and acts as suppressor and silencer of dissent on behalf of the regime to which it reports.

When it comes to spreading public silence and stupidity, though, there’s nothing, not even the determinedly dumb and endlessly-plundered Department of Education, to match the power of the Umno-BN owned and/or controlled mainstream news media.

Ever since self-styled ‘wit’ former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad made a joke of the media along with the judiciary back in the 1980s, the so-called ‘journalists’ of Malaysia’s print and broadcast media have been betraying their fellow citizens with a corrupt combination of secrecy and spin about Umno/BN crimes, and lies about opponents of the regime.

In fact these polluters of the truth and perverters of the public’s constitutional right to be informed have been such total suck-ups to the ridiculously criminal ruling regime that it’s a delight to see them starting to get their comeuppance.

As far as I’m concerned, the fact that, as a result of more than a decade of legitimate reporting of genuine news online, the regime’s joke mainstream ‘news’ media have lost so much credibility, circulation and advertising revenue that they’re having more and more trouble paying and keeping their disgraced staff is quite a chuckle.

But don’t, like Peacemaker so evidently did last week, get me wrong. I’m as sincerely sympathetic as ever for those upstanding, outspoken, enlightened Malaysians who deserve better than to be the victims of regime jokes like the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) mega-scam, splurges onVIP jets and a goods and services tax (GST) designed to recharge the Umno/BN funds and justify crony price-gouging as in the current hiking of transport charges.

On the other hand, however, all I have to say to such jokers as unemployed mainstream journalists and the silent, stupid, spineless majority they worked so tirelessly to create and support, not to mention the 24 percent of Malaysians persuaded by Najib’s laughable lies and petty handouts and bribes to vote Umno/BN last time around, is suffer, suckers.  —  DEAN JOHNS