Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
COMMENT
An anticipated relief from having the 13th general election sooner
rather than later is that the country would be saved the gibberish that
gushes these days from its supposedly retired fourth prime minister. Its profusion has arrived at the point where those staggered by the
drivel would be inclined to harbour the wish that the polls would be
held soon and would yield results that would shut him up for good.
On
second thought, that would be wishful thinking - not the real
possibility that the election results would give him the hiccups; it's
the notion that there could be any eventuality that would leave Dr
Mahathir Mohamad tongue tied for long.
He is the sort of man
who, even if the imminent polls produce results that would have him
plastered, will find ways to secrete his offal which, if not given due
diligence by the media, would prompt a round of whining from him that
his freedom to disport has been denied.
People who will say anything are often the victims of diminished self-esteem. But
Mahathir teems too much with ego to be suffering from anything like a
want of self-esteem, though one is tempted to suspect something like
what psychologists call projection theory is in play when he recently
suggested that the Arabs are not capableof planning 9/11; theorising that only the CIA and Mossad have that capability.
True, the looming possibility of a defeat to BN may have rendered
Mahathir distinctly unnerved. And so Umno's one-time doctor and
prescription writer can perhaps be excused for sounding less than
coherent lately.
‘We will shoot them'
But his most recent outburst, at an international forum on conflict and
conciliation yesterday, sounds like he is close to being unhinged by
the prospect that BN may lose the election. Judging from the convolution
that emerged from the press conference Mahathir held after he had
delivered his speech at the forum, the man displays facets of the
voluble excitability that marked the reign of (the recently deceased)
Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk and the juvenile truculence of one-time
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Both references in the
comparisons reveled in causing surprise in their deportment before the
international media besides being theatrical when declaiming from
podiums. Khrushchev once banged his shoe on the rostrum of the UN
general assembly. Mahathir isn't as crude as Khrushchev but he
shares with Sihanouk and the communist leader their penchant for making
statements that lend themselves easily to succinct and high voltage
headlines that the press thrives on.
Recall his "We will shoot
them" remark to the international press with regard to Malaysian policy
towards the rickety boats laden with human cargo that were landing off
the Terengganu coast in the late 1970s.
Khrushchev's
1959 threat to the West after Soviet engineers had beaten their Western
counterparts by sending Sputnik into space that "We will bury you" and
Sihanouk's (left) charge that the US engaged in "feminine
seduction" when Jackie Kennedy visited Cambodia in the late 1960s, a
cultural tour to which the once sybaritic monarch played the gracious
host, were examples of both leaders' bent for bellicose posturing on the
diplomatic stage.
Digital democracy
Understandably,
the immediate prelude to a closely fought general election is a charged
time, propitious for hyperbolic statement and exaggerated comment. What
makes Mahathir's musings on the current position of Umno vis-à-vis the
nation remarkable in his evident surprise at his failure to understand
the new workings of powers in an Internet-liberated country. The
locus of power in this country has come unglued from its previous
moorings in Umno: it does no longer reside in one party or in a power
elite, or in one institution, economic interest, media outlet, or
popular movement, but in shifting imbalances among them.
Mahathir must have thought that in the course of his 22-year tenure as
PM he had fixed the locus of power in Umno and the plutocrats that are
empowered to lead it.
He
had managed to do that by destroying the hindering mechanisms to power
centralisation that had resided in the federal constitution.
Now
those mechanisms, in the digital democracy that has flourished in the
last decade or so, are gradually kicking back into life.
Mahathir thinks that this revival can be beguiled away from ejecting
Umno from the locus of power by the party president dispensing goodies
to clamorous interest groups.
Hence the public is witness to
Mahathir's ire that this strategy is not working and his frustrated
denunciations of the phenomena. But amidst his drivel, there is a
morsel that is sensible in his observation that only Umno president
Naijb Abdul Razak seems to be campaigning. Mahathir's
speculation as to the inertia of much of the rest of the party is that
they want to see whether their favoured nominee is preferred before they
elect to be active. In other words, there are interest groups at the divisional level of the party that have to be bought off too.
In sum, in an anatomised nation of interest groups you can't placate all of them, even part of the time. Malaysiakini
TERENCE
NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the
occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being
under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a
temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
Khrushchev's
1959 threat to the West after Soviet engineers had beaten their Western
counterparts by sending Sputnik into space that "We will bury you" and
Sihanouk's (left) charge that the US engaged in "feminine
seduction" when Jackie Kennedy visited Cambodia in the late 1960s, a
cultural tour to which the once sybaritic monarch played the gracious
host, were examples of both leaders' bent for bellicose posturing on the
diplomatic stage.
He
had managed to do that by destroying the hindering mechanisms to power
centralisation that had resided in the federal constitution.
