Pakatan Harapan Is Rewriting The History Of Its Downfall

To justify appointing Mahathir as PM7, and to get the support of the Chinese who hated Mahathir like there was no tomorrow, you travelled all over Malaysia to explain to the Chinese that you are just using Mahathir to topple Umno and Najib (after which you will get rid of Mahathir) and you need to use a Malay to fight the Malays (because you tried to oust Umno for 53 years and failed).

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Raja Petra Kamarudin

All great or influential leaders such as Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Kennedy, Castro, Kim Il-sung, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Martin Luther King Jr., Saddam, Khomeini, and thousands more, had narratives. And they controlled this narrative from beginning to end. That’s what made them great or influential leaders and people would follow them to the end of the earth.

Narratives are not just about ideals. They are also about consistency and clarity of the message. They are simple to comprehend and digest. They are down to earth and believable. They are realistic and achievable. These are just some of the makings of a good narrative that moves the people.

Umno’s narrative is simple. It is about nationalism (or racism, if you listen to the other side). PAS’s narrative is about Islam (or religious extremism, if you listen to the other side). What is Pakatan Harapan’s, or PKR’s and DAP’s, narrative?

Depending on the time, date and place, PKR’s and DAP’s narrative keeps changing. And their narrative is too intellectual for the common man to understand, and who are more concerned with bread and butter issues and paying their bills at the end of the month.

For example, one of the most successful US presidential campaign slogans was Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” (bread and butter issue). And Trumps “Make America great again” (nationalism issue) helped put someone you would not trust to walk your dog into the White House. Simple narratives where the message touched the hearts of the voters.

Can you define what PKR’s and DAP’s, or Pakatan Harapan’s narrative is? And do PKR and DAP share the same narrative or are their narratives contradictory?

How did Pakatan Harapan win GE14? What narrative did they use? Pakatan Harapan’s strategy was two-fold. One was they played the hate card and the other they played the “land of milk and honey” and “roads paved with gold” card. And they played this message over and over again for three years, from dawn to dusk, from east to west, and from north to south — and the people swallowed this propaganda hook, line and sinker.

But such narratives have a very short shelf-life and they becomes basi very fast. Hence you need to give excuses as to why what you said did not happen, or cannot be done, and then come out with a new message and a revised narrative.

And this is why you see Pakatan Harapan coming out with excuse after excuse for their many failures and why they keep coming out with new narratives and new messages and why they keep issuing contradictory statements, sometimes in the same day.

Umno and PAS, however, have been saying the same things today as what they said back in the 1940s and 1950s before Merdeka.

Umno was Parti Perikatan when it was three parties. Then Umno became Barisan Nasional when it (eventually) expanded to 14 parties. Today, Umno is Muafakat Nasional when PAS and Umno decided to “remarry”. But there is a common denominator that binds Umno and PAS: Malay nationalism and Islam.

Umno and PAS are like two apples. The only thing is one is a red apple (Umno) and the other is a green apple (PAS). But DAP, PKR and Amanah are three different fruits altogether, which do not taste nice if you mix all of them into the same bowl.

Pakatan Harapan realises they are suffering from a serious case of credibility deficit. So, they are abandoning Pakatan in favour of Pakatan Plus. What is Pakatan Plus? Merely a different shell for the same thing. They are rebranding or repackaging what, in essence, is the same content. It is like “Darkie” relabelling the same toothpaste into “Darlie” to avoid being labelled a racist. Same thing, different name.

Amongst Pakatan’s biggest “black marks” (and they have many) is its February 2020 collapse. Pakatan is trying to rewrite history and come out with a narrative that they hope Malaysians can be fooled into believing. And that is why many DAP and PKR leaders are issuing statement after statement and are trying to portray themselves as victims.

The collapse of Pakatan means a return to kleptocracy. The collapse of Pakatan means a return to abuse of power. The collapse of Pakatan means a return to racism. The collapse of Pakatan means a return to Islamic extremism. The collapse of Pakatan means democracy suffers. The collapse of Pakatan means civil liberties would be denied. The collapse of Pakatan means non-Muslims would be persecuted. The collapse of Pakatan means Malaysia would go back to the “dark ages”. And so on and so forth.

But what did Pakatan Harapan do when they were in power for 22 months? Where is Pakatan’s list of successes and achievements?

According to Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia went downhill in the 15 years that Tun Abdul Ahmad Badawi and Najib Tun Razak were in power. Did Malaysia go uphill when Mahathir was in power for 22 months, or in the 22 years before that?

If Mahathir was such a good prime minister, why did DAP and PKR attempt to oust him from 1998 to 2003? What was the Reformasi movement for, then? Was it not to oust Mahathir from power? And if Mahathir was so bad, why put him back as prime minister in May 2018?

There is no narrative which Pakatan can come out with on that one issue alone to explain the rational of appointing Mahathir, who you once called the greatest thief in the world, as PM7.

To justify appointing Mahathir as PM7, and to get the support of the Chinese who hated Mahathir like there was no tomorrow, you travelled all over Malaysia to explain to the Chinese that you are just using Mahathir to topple Umno and Najib (after which you will get rid of Mahathir) and you need to use a Malay to fight the Malays (because you tried to oust Umno for 53 years and failed).

Then, as soon as Mahathir got sworn in as the PM, you constantly pressured him to step down, or to confirm he will step down in May 2020, as agreed in the “written contract”. Then, when Mahathir said he will not step down in May but might do so at the end of the year after APEC, you demanded he step down immediately, meaning in February instead of May.

This was what happened and this is the reason why Pakatan collapsed. However, instead of admitting that they committed hara kiri, and that they shot themselves in their own foot, and that they got played out by Mahathir instead of them playing out Mahathir, as they had planned, they rewrite history and come out with a new narrative of being the victim of foul play by Muhyiddin Yassin, Azmin Ali and Muafakat Nasional.

This reminds me of the story regarding the Terengganu Religious Department officer who lodged a police report saying that he was raped by four women in Dungun. And one of those women was the girlfriend of a Chinese police inspector. If that can happen then what happened to Pakatan is nothing by comparison — which is, according to Pakatan, they were raped by four women, just like that Terengganu Religious Department officer.