'Reality is anything I say it is'

By a quirk of circumstance, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad was sitting beside Annuar Musa in the group photograph of important personages at yesterday's Malay Dignity Congress (MDC).

The juxtaposition of the Harapan supremo with the Umno secretary-general ought to have been interesting to those of long memory.

Not just those of historical recall but also with a feel for the intriguing ways in which history repeats itself - the first time, Karl Marx observed, as tragedy and, in its re-enactment, as farce.

At the Umno general assembly in late 1983, it was Annuar, in his role as a Youth wing delegate from Kelantan, who sounded the warning about the-then Umno president, Mahathir's, thrust for overweening power within the party.

This was in the days – Mahathir was in the third year of his presidency – when the annual convention of the country's biggest political party was not what it would become towards the tail-end of the Mahathir era: An assemblage of drones propounding from pre-prepared, subservient scripts.

The party allowed scope for dissent and Annuar had the oratorical skills to give flight to his.

At a time when eloquence was still valued, the young Kelantanese framed his warning about Mahathir's imperial overreach with a quotation from the assassination scene in Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, when Brutus resorts to his famous justification for complicity in regicide.

Shakespeare has the tribune-friend of Caesar's say in response to a surprised Caesar's “Et tu, Brutus” (You too, Brutus): “It's not that I love Caesar less but I love Rome more.”

That line is chiselled in stone because of its powerful evocation of the tug of conflicting imperatives politicians feel when faced with grave either/or choices confronting a polity.

No doubt, Mahathir would think, in justifying his presence at yesterday's MDC, that it's not that he loves Harapan less; it is that he loves the Malaysian nation more.

A Malaysian nation in which the majority race, Malays, don't feel left out.

It is the contention of Annuar Musa's Umno and its erstwhile current allies, Hadi Awang's PAS (photo), that the Malays are being left out, that Islam is disrespected, and that the royals are slighted, in Harapan's supposedly New Malaysia.

It's not much help now to try to establish the truth or untruth of the claim.

This is because of an underlying reality best conveyed by the line from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “What is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is falsehood on the other.”

Not infrequently these days, what is truth for the Malays is falsehood for the nons.

One can hardly be surprised that this is the reality in present-day Malaysia.

Absent a core curriculum by which the nation's young are educated, how can you obtain a common perception of what the realities are of any day?

That was not the case in the country more than three decades ago when Annuar Musa enlivened an Umno conclave with his knowledge of a great writer's dramatic exposition of a fundamental question: Whether republican liberty can survive a supremo's thrust for untrammelled power?

Seventeen months after ejecting Barisan Nasional from power, we have scant knowledge of the content and scope of the reforms to our education system that are being contemplated, except that it will lean strongly towards TVET (Technical, Vocational and Educational Training).

Will it provide scope for studying a person like Caesar, to recognise in him the lights and shadows of his personality?

We have a tendency these days to see matters in either/or terms, to view our public figures as either heroes or villains.

Caesar, like Mahathir, was both. To recognise this is unnerving but also educational.

Without Mahathir, Harapan could not have removed BN from power.

Seventeen months on from being the saviour of the country, he is transiting to become Caesar, with vacuous statements, to wit, that because he did not hear the MDC chief organiser's assertion that Malaysia belongs to the Malays, that claim has no purchase on reality.

And that because so many still want to shake hands and be photographed with him, the most recent opinion survey that Harapan enjoys a popularity rating of only 37 percent has no traction with him.

We are in Humpty Dumpty land: “A word is anything I say it is.”

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. - Mkini