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."
"Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they
decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they
will just have to sit on their blisters." - Abraham Lincoln
COMMENT
Pro-establishment forces in this country pick at the scabs of May 13 in
an effort to warn voters that their choice determines if violence is
the fate that awaits us if we make the wrong choice. As always
this conflict revolves around the Malay/Chinese dynamic with the latter
(pro-opposition Chinese) demonised for abandoning the racial formula
that kept us safe for so long and the former (pro-opposition Malays)
traitors to the cause of their religion and race. The threat of
violence, although very real, is nonetheless a morally bankrupt idea. If
the only reason why you are in power is fear of reprisals then we might
as well make it a law(s) that there will be no opposition parties, no
freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly or whatever else is deemed a
threat to peace and stability but more importantly, there will be no
elections.
Because this is essentially what all these threats of
violence means. Vote for us or else. If you really subscribe to this,
what you should do is skip the "vote" part and get to work on
maintaining the "or else" part. The reality of course is that
there is that, looking at the racial groupings of both alliance and the
underlying themes of their manifestoes, there is very little that
differentiates them for each other. If the only thing keeping
you in power is the threat that the Malay majority would react violently
if their "position" as "master" of this land is endangered, then by all
means establish a set of laws that would bar non-Malays from entering
politics.
If the best you can offer is that the electorate
should be "grateful" for all that has been given to them and that
believing otherwise is a sign of "corrupt" Western thinking, then this
charade of attempting to be "the best democracy in the world" should
end. If the best you can offer is that voting "wisely" means
voting for an entrenched failing system, then what you should do is not
only think for us but also ensure that we never attempt to exercise our
judgement. Shift of power
If
anything the sub-theme in all my articles in an emergence of an
alternative racial formula or a reshuffling of the racial deck. Although
there are numerous issues that have been exploited by the establishment
and the opposition which range from class, race and religious
preoccupations, the only people who would stand to lose if there is a
shift of power, are the ones who have benefitted economically from the
system of cronyism and patronage. In
other words for the average Joe Rakyat, unless Pakatan Rakyat sincerely
carries out its system-wide reforms, there will be very little overt
change from the way of life they are used to. And this is a reasonable
proposition as far as I am concerned.
Then why vote, an extremely intelligent young Malaysiakini
subscriber (who is a registered voter and often spars with me
concerning my partisanship and a range of other issues) asked in an
email. I replied with this quote from the late David Foster Wallace, a writer whose essays I prefer rather than his works of fiction: "If
you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you
are in effect voting for the entrenched establishments of the two major
parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware
that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and
cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing
one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day.
"By all means stay
home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In
reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by
voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of
some Diehard's vote." May 13 narratives The claim is that young people have forgotten all about May 13. Well,
my argument is that most people do not know jack about May 13 with the
exception of the pro-establishment or pro-opposition narratives. Umno
has made it clear that there would be no national debate on the subject
because who knows what skeletons and present-day walking cadavers would
be implicated in such collective soul searching. So besides the
young ignorant people, the Chinese community is also blamed for
enabling the split in the Malay vote. It all goes back to gratitude and
the racial formula. If BN was serious in maintaining the utilitarian
value of this precious formula, they would not have spent the last
decades creating a bureaucratic class which is not only a strain on the
system but also inadvertently exacerbated class tensions within the
Malay community. The
opposition has always been blamed for the violence in street
demonstration but this canard that was obliterated in the Himpunan
Bangkit march earlier this year. What this march demonstrated is that if
the security apparatus did their jobs as opposed to taking orders from
who knows where, a mass gathering of Malaysians who oppose the present
regime could be a peaceful affair.
Take the cow's head protest
for instance. The only problem I had with the protest was the manner in
which the authorities dealt with them. Not only they had an
understanding police escort, they later had the home minister sitting
with these protestors and asking right-thinking Malaysians to "understand" their motives, men who were later charged with sedition.
If anyone from the opposition had done such a provocative display of
discontent, I can assure you the response would be very different. Or
how about the spitting out of the Holy sacrament by reporters who went
undercover in an attempt to expose religious conversions. What ever
happened to them? If we look close enough, we will always discover that
provocations made by people supportive of the agenda of Umno are coddled
as part of the unspoken social contract that non-Malays should always
remember to fall in line. We're not scared anymore
Then we come to the politics of hate. As an Indian or Hindu, why should
I be offended by the comments of Perkasa vice-president Zulkifli
Noordin? I expect such racism as the natural consequence of a
system predicated on separating us along racial/religious lines. People
who should take offence are the Malays who he supposedly represents or
wants to represent and they should make known their disdain for his
statements in the ballot box. By the way, it is brilliant counter programming on the part of Umno fielding a candidate like Zulkifli (right)
against PAS' Khalid Samad in Shah Alam. It would not have made
strategic sense to field another "moderate" candidate against Samad, the
impeccable gentlemen politician and articulate spokesperson for his
cause.
No, the better Hail Mary option would be to field a
character that could stoke the racial and religious insecurities of the
Malay demographic there and hope the so-called silent majority
subscribes to what Umno is offering.
What does offend me are the
comments of my "side", which I will elaborate in a post-election
article when my position would change to that of a pro-establishment
partisan, if my side emerges victorious. So the reality is that
all these "ghost" from our past don't really scare us anymore, not
because we have not learnt from them but because there are more than
enough monsters in our present to give us pause. If we discount
the bravado of those who would make light of these threats of violence
and those who would propagate such threats, what we are left with, is
the certainty that the only option we have is to vote our conscience and
let the chips fall where they may.
Personally, I always take comfort in the motto of one of my favourite American generals, Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe' Stilwell - Illegitimi non carborundum (Don't let the bastards grind you down).
The
opposition has always been blamed for the violence in street
demonstration but this canard that was obliterated in the Himpunan
Bangkit march earlier this year. What this march demonstrated is that if
the security apparatus did their jobs as opposed to taking orders from
who knows where, a mass gathering of Malaysians who oppose the present
regime could be a peaceful affair.
By the way, it is brilliant counter programming on the part of Umno fielding a candidate like Zulkifli (right)
against PAS' Khalid Samad in Shah Alam. It would not have made
strategic sense to field another "moderate" candidate against Samad, the
impeccable gentlemen politician and articulate spokesperson for his
cause.
Read through what you wrote- a tad lengthy - but it did hold my attention right through the end. Gave me food for thought. Thank you.
HH