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Thursday, August 17, 2017

Pribumi’s Catch-22

It is inconceivable Pribumi can muster greater moral legitimacy when it is a near copy of the team it seeks to defeat.
Praba Ganesan, The Malay Mail Online

Pribumi is dead in the water. Last weekend’s mayhem will repeat, and the race supremacist party is set to fall on its own sword.
An elaborate hara-kiri is inevitable as the raison d'être to kick out Umno by offering itself as a better avatar of Umno was always sheer loco.
Consider this.
A government in power, and a crowded loose coalition of those who were in government, are not in parity when stacked against each other.
So when the Johnny-come-lately tries the same tricks or its progenitor’s when he was in office, it falls flat because Pribumi does not have the state’s machineries, open support from corporate Malaysia or adequate access to the masses.
It has not dawned on sycophants that Mahathir Mohamad has never been against the government — British Malaya or Umno administrations — till now.
He’s been part of it, expelled from it, recruited by it, challenged within it, revered by it and finally isolated by it in retirement. But he never was against it as a sworn enemy.
With the gloves off, Mahathir is in new territory, where former underlings need not appease the old codger, instead free to unleash their venom.
Fox-hunting comes to mind.
For the armed horse-rider assisted by foxhounds, the exercise appears challenging — respectable enough — with fair chance of success, though it’s mightily different for the prey. The fox is compromised from all sides and success wishful thinking, as it only seeks survival.
Mahathir has never been hunted, as he’s always been the hunter.
Spitefully, I’d chastise, “Hunting the weak has never been honourable, Dr M. You’ve made it natural in our national mind-set by repetition. These opponents of yours today are only doing what is natural to them, to win before the game begins.”
The charm offensive
What is available then?
Neo-fascist governments are resilient. They are death-stars.
They rise on populism and destroy critics, mercilessly so.
They are not defeated by a softer version of themselves, like a lite-version.
This is where I am bemused with strategists articulating how Pribumi fills a gap in challenging Umno in the rural heartlands.
For, they ask a presumably prejudiced electorate, to switch sides -- from one “feed-the-prejudice party” to another “feed-the-prejudice party” -- on account the new entity has Mahathir on board.
The strategy is as backward as the politics of the two parties.
Strong governments end by two means, either the system fails which is heavily pivoted to the economy’s health, or the administration loses moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
The first is unlikely, as Malaysia has amazing natural resources and geopolitical import and coupled by amazing entrepreneurial energy and a pliant workforce. This is not the failed old Soviet Union or steadily decaying Venezuela.
The second is viable. Strip the government of its moral legitimacy. The caveat is though, as perceived by the Malaysian people. Foreign awards, recognition and applauses, of how wonderful our local dissidents remain matters little if those dissidents are not celebrated by the locals.
The government is not invalid because opposition repeat it from every rooftop, it is invalid when overwhelming numbers of the voters are convinced it is invalid, and at which point there will be expectations which the electoral system has to match, not question.
It is inconceivable Pribumi can muster greater moral legitimacy when it is a near copy of the team it seeks to defeat.
The aftermath of the riot at its event has been anger, vehemence and condemnation.
But it cannot articulate that when there is a culture of blind obedience built on racial differentiation stoking up defiance reliant on upholding your constructed absolutes as above all other considerations, dangerous things will happen.
Because Pribumi promotes the exact type of obedience, differentiation, absolutes and a gross level of self-import.
How to condemn?
It has said on record, it has nothing against Umno, just the persons leading it. It accepts the Umno ethos.  
The Onn Jaffar Curse
It is remarkable race supremacists here and abroad had an eventful weekend halfway across the world from each other.
There is poetic congruity, albeit under unfortunate circumstances.
The violent protests in the American city of Charlottesville resulting in a death over a white Christian supremacist symbol — the statue of Confederate military leader and slave owner Robert E. Lee — echo the terrible thing which is the belief in racial supremacy.  
Umno’s first president and fallen son Onn Jaffar initiated the curse which straight-jackets our democratic evolution.
In 1951, he left the party to form a multicultural party. It failed spectacularly. Mahathir would have been a young 26-year-old doctor in the Malayan service. It would have left an impression in him. Though, be mindful, the youngest voter in 1951 will be at least 85-years-old, today.
For 66 years it’s been recounted as fact, rather than what it is, the limitation of a naïve and misled population from a different time.
Parties like DAP formed, but stuck to chauvinist lines to be safe. PKR theoretically is multicultural but does not possess the leadership to suck it into its lungs as oxygen. And Pribumi shows up with complete immersion in racism. 
But if it is Pribumi alone, facing aggression and intimidation, it has little to offer in self-defence. How to when it supports the Umno method?
These episodes will continue — the instigations and standoffs.
Mahathir might want to take a leaf from a friend of his no less, the late Nelson Mandela who looked at multicultural Malaysia’s economic might without much notice of its politics’ arrested development.
Ex-US president Barack Obama in response to Charlottesville quoted the great man, from his autobiography, The Great Walk to Freedom:
“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
I had that book after my first trip to South Africa in 1996, Mahathir surely was given a signed copy. He could do worse than rereading it.

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