Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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."
The Analyser : The Harapan manifesto was nothing more than a last minute vote buying strategy by a group of political misfits desperate for power.
Although it had some merit, that merit was lost because it was not part of an overall plan
For the same reason, Mahathir has been able to undermine and destroy his āpartnersā in Harapan. They had no cohesion, no unity, no direction and no vision
How many political parties are there in Malaysia? At a rough guess, 20.
Maybe a lot more, which is a symptom of the Malaysian inability to cooperate with anyone
Out of all those parties, the only one with any political philosophy is PAS, and even then that is an extremely negative, outdated and repressive philosophy with no place in 20th century Malaysia.
All the other parties are based on nothing, but exercises in self promotion based on words. Read the PKR vision, itās little more than a vote buying exercise like the manifesto. The DAP vision is words, meaningless empty words that even the party cannot maintain. PSM are only amateur socialists, at best.
All the rest ... nothing but personalities which rely on race, religion and dubious personalities for their existence
So, where is the third force? Where out of 32 million people are there 200 persons with principles, ethics, vision and the ability to work together
Because they certainly arenāt in politics, nor I suspect on the fringes of politics.
Malaysiakini : COMMENT | "Whereās your messiah now?" ā Billy Crystal
Ramesh
Rajaratnam in his piece "Cutting off our nose to spite our face?" on
the face of it seems to articulate the despondency some Harapan
supporters feel at the moment and his rejoinder of the calamities that
will befall us if the old devils are voted back in seems like a
reasonable call for political pragmatism.
Like most Harapan
supporters, he likes to use analogies when it comes to the slow pace of
change. A sixtyāone year clogged drain, a sixteen-month-old baby
clumsily walking and spouting gibberish is useful, I suppose, when it
comes to appealing to emotion instead of intellect when justifying
policies, positions and backtracking.