Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Those who wield the ISA are the REAL terrorists! (reprise)

"Prisoner of War" - courtesy of Capt. Mike McGrath, USN (Ret.)

IT's INCOMPREHENSIBLE to me why anybody in their right mind and senses would endorse a piece of legislation as abominable, barbaric, cruel, and patently tyrannical as the Internal Security Act 1960.

According to Wikipedia, the original Emergency Regulations Ordinance 1948 was enacted "following the proclamation of an emergency by British High Commissioner Sir Edward Gent. It allowed the detention of persons for any period not exceeding one year. The 1948 ordinance was primarily made to counter acts of violence and, conceivably, preventive detention was meant to be temporary in application. The emergency ended in 1960 and with it ended the powers contained in that ordinance... The power of preventive detention was, however, not relinquished and, in fact, became an embedded feature of Malaysian law."

"Solitary Confinement" - courtesy of the Burlington County Prison Museum

In the first place, you can't arrest, torture, imprison or destroy an idea or vision - and those are the most dangerous threats to the status quo. You can arrest, beat up, attempt to brainwash, or burn at the stake someone who speaks of freedom, justice and truth - but his or her ideas will remain elusive, floating around freely in the collective psyche, ready to infect any number of human agents, regardless of artificial boundaries, beyond the confines of space and time.


The most you can achieve - if you happen to be an egoically insecure, pathologically paranoid, and pathetically ham-handed panjandrum (someone like Lord Farquaard in Shrek, perhaps, or Hishammuddin Hussein the Malaysian home minister) - is to force the subversive idea underground, where it will hibernate during the long winter of public discontent, only to germinate anew at the first signs of spring. And, because ideas are deathless and indestructible, and totally unbound by spacetime considerations, they invariably triumph over those who desperately cling to power and privilege.

Let's deconstruct the flabby reasoning that underpins the wicked and repugnant ISA.



The British Military Administration of Malaya found itself at odds with the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) at the end of the Japanese Occupation in September 1945. The MPAJA consisted mostly of hardcore members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) which had been on the scene, though not legally recognized, since 1930. Taking its cue from the Singapore-based Nanyang Community Party, the MCP's operational front was linked with the growth of trade unions. When the British refused MCP members who had fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese a well-deserved political stake in Malaya, the MPAJA became the Malayan People's Anti-British Army (MPABA) and continued their armed struggle, this time against the British Military Administration. That was when the Emergency Regulations Ordinance was introduced, which later became the Internal Security Act.

The Communist bogeyman was a Frankenstein's monster created in the secret laboratory of the New World Order Illuminati - an elite cabal of high-ranking Freemasons who, for centuries, have plotted totalitarian control of the planet and all her inhabitants by staking out monopolies on energy, mass media, education and religious indoctrination via mafia-like control of national governments.

Just as parents are in the habit of using scare tactics to control their kids' behavior, invisible governments have always relied on the formula whereby they create a problem that causes the masses to react in fear; and then offer the solution "for their own protection." For a classic study of this devious methodology, research Operation Gladio. More recently, the 9/11 atrocities served as a cover for the oligarchs to step up and accelerate the New World Order project.

The proverbial man-in-the-street is deliberately kept too busy dodging potholes, bad drivers, snatch thieves and collapsing banks to take time out, climb a hill, look around, and see the big picture. So, for generations, we have been told to watch out for those evil Communists. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists and China has become more capitalist-than-thou, the puppet masters have come up with a convenient new bogeyman - the Islamofascist Terrorist! In Malaysia, we have an even scarier bogeyman called the Anwarista - somebody determined to remove Umno from power and implement genuine reforms!

HOW DOES ONE CREATE A BOGEYMAN?

First you pick a bunch of oppressed and underprivileged youth. They could be underpaid migrant workers or slum kids from broken homes or hotheaded young fanatics from a religious school with a huge chip on their shoulder. Then you recruit them, feed them well, and convince them the only way they will ever see justice in this world is through violence and armed revolution - and those who get killed fighting for their religion go directly to heaven. (Problem is, this sort of bogeyman won't cut it in Malaysia - so our local version is invariably "a threat to stability and national security" because he or she insists on organizing "illegal assemblies," forcing the police to set up roadblocks and teargas the protestors, which causes tempers to rise and is generally bad for the economy, not to mention "Malaysia's image.")

Some say the most successful recruiters for Palestinian suicide bombers happen to be Mossad agents who speak fluent Arabic and pose as jihad leaders linked with Al Qaeda (which is itself a bogeyman created and sponsored by the CIA).

In effect, the bogeyman serves one essential purpose: to disempower people through their own fear. And why would anyone wish to disempower the rakyat? Very simple: it's so much easier to steal from right under the noses of a fear-enfeebled rakyat, trembling in its own soiled pajamas. With enough control of the mass media, any government with larcenous intentions can put their victims into a hypnotic trance, paralyzed and powerless to act or retaliate while those in high office steal their children's futures. Indonesian housebreakers and robbers employ a low-tech version of this technique - they call it pukau.

I believe it was Osho (the erstwhile Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) who remarked that Capitalism and Communism are two ends of the same stick. To begin with, if you have no capital, what are you going to share with your neighbors? So, just like breathing in, we must go through a capitalist phase wherein we accumulate energy, knowledge, knowhow - and then, just like breathing out, we share it with our community - and from the word "community" comes the word "communist." So what's the big quarrel between Capitalism and Communism? A mere distraction from the psychic warfare that continues to rage between Prometheus the Titan and Zeus the Olympian (known to the Hebrews as Yahweh and to the Romans as Jove).

Here's an interesting footnote on Prometheus extracted from my book TANAH TUJUH: Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos:
Prometheus: in Greek mythology a first-generation god (or Titan) of Fire and Intellect, who returned the gift of Fire to Mankind (which Zeus the second-generation Olympian had withheld) - and for that was chained to a rock and his liver devoured by an eagle every day. Every night, the liver would regenerate and Prometheus would come back to life, only to have the eagle eat his liver all over again, and so on, ad infinitum.

(It's less gory, but a lot scarier, when you approach this mythic morsel as a giant metaphor for compulsory reincarnation: Prometheus is the Soul, the rock is the physical world, the liver represents a lifetime, and the eagle is the emblem of Higher Authority or Spiritual Law. As a symbol, the eagle is interchangeable with the Indonesian garuda, the Chinese phoenix, the Mexican quetzal, or the Russian firebird, which represents Eternal Return. And Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer, is often identified with Lucifer, the Light-Bringer.) From the 'Management' point of view, Prometheus is a subversive element - but 'Labor' would see him as a cult hero, a freedom fighter, a System-bucking Little Red Robin Hood...
What happens to Capitalists who decide they've "worked hard" for their wealth and refuse to reinvest it in their own communities, preferring to hoard it all in Swiss banks and offshore accounts? Well, too much of a good thing invariably turns toxic and corrupts the soul. So be warned, all you Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and nouveau-riche Umnoputera: an excess of power, wealth and privilege will definitely be the death of you - and all the nasty laws you use to keep the rakyat fearful and ignorant.

[First published on this blog 12 November 2008]


Sunday, August 9, 2009

Mei's excellent letter to Malaysiakini

This letter from a Malaysiakini subscriber named Mei was published August 7th, 2009. I think it deservcs as wide an audience as possible...


POLITICS OF FEAR WON'T WORK ANYMORE

I read with utter disgust that the BN government is considering net censorship. Isn't this absolutely contrary to the commitment that Mahathir gave when he was trying to lure investors into the MMSC?

The man is not even dead and you are telling me that his word is not even worth the paper he has put his pen to? And why? Because we cannot have full-blown democracy?

Look, you are either a democracy or you are not - you cannot do democracy half-way. If you are a dictator, or aspiring to take the country to such lows, at least have the guts to admit that and not hide behind rubbish like we need to be protected from ourselves.

We are 52 years old, not 12! If the memory of the bloody 1969 racial riots WAS strong in Malaysia, it is because the BN government wanted it that way, they deliberately kept it that way and milked it for as long as they could.

They encouraged the rakyat to remain fearful and mystified because they know that in making the facts known, they will not be able to hold it over the rakyat any more.

I grew up in the midst of the "riots" and whilst I remember them and I know of families who have lost family members, the fear lingered only for as long as the facts behind them remained unknown.

Now that the mystery has been removed, a lot of that fear is gone and I'm better able to relate to and learn from it - you fear the unknown, you learn to deal with the known.

The need to preserve peace between the races commonly invoked by the government? It is the government that is driving the wedge between the races.

I spent my childhood under a government whom, I think, really had the good of the nation at heart, under leaders who really did love us, and the country, in a way.

I grew up in the era where we - my Malay, Indian and Chinese friends - were truly friends and we did things together, we lived together, we played together, we ran the hills together, we snatched at fallen durians together, we ate together, albeit from our different plates because we knew enough about each other to be aware of and respect our differences, and we were not pre-occupied with looking for these but rather our commonalities and most of all, we did not spend the days tottering at the edge of suspicion and always trying to second-guess each other.


The country must survive? Aren't BN getting a little presumptuous here? This has nothing to do with the survival of the country but everything to do with the survival of BN and the BN is NOT the country!


The country will survive, there will be life after BN - probably a better one than what we have now and if we don't give it a go, we would never know, would we?