It Is Leaders Who Destroy Countries

 

Tunku Abdul Rahman decided to get rid of a headache named Lee Kuan Yew. So he kicked Singapore out of Malaysia and that Malay land is now Chinese land. Earlier, Tunku had agreed to grant citizenship to non-citizens so that Umno can take over as the new government, hereby reducing the Malay population from 95% to just 50%.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, giving the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia over to German conquest but bringing, as Chamberlain promised, “peace in our time.”

In September 1939, that peace was shattered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Chamberlain declared war against Germany but during the next eight months showed himself to be ill-equipped for the daunting task of saving Europe from Nazi conquest.

After British forces failed to prevent the German occupation of Norway in April 1940, Chamberlain lost the support of many members of his Conservative Party. On May 10, Hitler invaded the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) and France. That same day, Chamberlain formally lost the confidence of the House of Commons.

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, then replaces Neville Chamberlain as British prime minister following the latter’s resignation after losing a confidence vote in the House of Commons. (History.com)

In fact, Churchill was strongly opposed to Chamberlain’s decisions, who underestimated and trusted Hitler. If Churchill had been prime minister instead, he would have done the opposite, and most likely WWII would have had a very different outcome.

Lieutenant-General Arthur Ernest Percival thought the Japanese would invade Singapore by sea. So he defended Singapore from the south, with cannons cemented into the ground facing the sea. When the Japanese came in from the north, Percival was too slow to react, and by the time he did, the Japanese were already in Malaya. Percival mistakenly thought they could stop the Japanese in Perak and send them back to Tokyo.

Churchill, on the other hand, was more interested in fighting the Germans in Europe than the Japanese in Asia. So Singapore did not get the military support it needed and 130,000 British, Indian and Australians ended up as prisoners of war because of poor decisions by both Percival and Churchill.

The point of this history lesson is to demonstrate that decisions, or rather bad decisions, made by our leaders affect millions of lives.

A series of US Presidents decided to engage Russia, then China, in a war in Vietnam at a cost of 200,000 American casualties and US$1 trillion (or RM30 trillion today).

President Donald Trump decided to treat Covid-19 as a minor cold and about 80 million people have thus far been infected and almost 1 million people have died so far.

Tunku Abdul Rahman decided to get rid of a headache named Lee Kuan Yew. So he kicked Singapore out of Malaysia and that Malay land is now Chinese land. Earlier, Tunku had agreed to grant citizenship to non-citizens so that Umno can take over as the new government, hereby reducing the Malay population from 95% to just 50%.

In 2018, Najib Tun Razak ignored the Special Branch and Military Intelligence reports, which said a three-corner fight with Pakatan Harapan and PAS in GE14 will result in Umno-Barisan Nasional losing the election, and that cost them the election.

Yes, throughout history, bad decisions by our leaders have cost misery, hardship, and deaths to hundreds of millions. And the examples above are but a tip of the iceberg. Yet Malaysians choose their leaders based on how good they are at talking even though they have a miserable track record or have not yet proven they are capable of running the country.