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."
Sympathy for our Malaysian devils by Commander (Rtd) S THAYAPARAN, formerly of the Royal Malaysian Navy
Sunday, August 26, 2012
"Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world
there was only one of him." - David Wong (John Dies at the End)
COMMENT Ex-prime
minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's latest tirade against his former
protégé, Anwar Ibrahim, continues the greatest Malaysian show on earth. "Better the devil you know than the angel you don't" may not be as Nurul Izzah Anwar (right) seems to think,
a back-handed compliment to PM Najib Razak, but rather the wily former
autocrat may be referring to the grand racial designs he imposed on
Malaysia (which the majority of the Malaysian public willingly voted
for) and the continuing influence he has within Umno.
Take this
section 114A nonsense. The fact that the ‘public outcry' in the form of
the Internet Blackout Day had the effect of making Najib have apossible rethink,
but in the end proved ineffectual in actually changing anything proves
that the so-called flip-flopping of the Najib regime is in actuality the
dramatic evidence that the internal power struggles of Umno have
reduced the Prime Minister's Office to merely a window-dressing role. The
public has never voted in a prime minister, only the party that chooses
the prime minister from within its own ranks; hence we can judge how
influential any given "prime minister" is by observing the internal
power struggles within Umno. You can bet that during Mahathir's tenure
if he didn't want such a law; there would be no question of its
continued existence.
Ironically even with the flawed "election
process" of PKR and the nature of the give and take of Pakatan Rakyat
coalition partners, which is basically the same model of BN - that is,
if the component party was doing its job instead of kowtowing to Umno -
for the first time, Malaysians could be voting in a prime minister of
their choice in the form of Anwar Ibrahim. Nurul should not be
relieved or allude to the fact that Mahathir did not compare any Pakatan
politician to United States presidential candidate Mitt Romney because
any objective or informed Malaysian observer of American politics would
note (with great amusement) that Romney says very often of Barack Obama
policies: "He promises you so much, but in the end who would end up
paying for it? The answer? Your tax dollars". Just sayin'.
But
what the hell (since we are talking about angels and devils), I would
gamble my tax ringgit (in the voting booth) to see that Nurul has a
chance of becoming the highest ranked civil servant in this country. Dr M's accidental honesty
The funny thing is, this has been the most honest Mahathir has ever
been. Well, when I say honest, I mean accidently honest. I don't think
it was a conscious decision on his part.
But he got it right.
What he means is that, everyone knows the system is corrupt but please
don't vote for anyone else to control the corrupt system because Umno
has been doing it so well since independence. And he knows the
partisan game well, too. He understands that since the tsunami of 2008,
Pakatan has been playing the race game far better than his cohorts in
BN. Beneath the multiracial visage of Pakatan beats the slow steady
heart of a racialist Malaysia. Just like the Obama presidency did not
herald the dawn of a post-racial America, neither did the 2008 election
make us all Malaysians, regardless of skin colour, as some too loudly
proclaim.
As the leaked PKR documentsreveal,
the racial game is still being played behind the supposed multiracial
doors of Pakatan. Of course, this being Malaysia it would seem that
ethnic relations is solely defined by Chinese/Malay interactions. And why not? Penang under Lim Guan Eng is the model of how an efficient
Malaysia could be run and no doubt this stokes the fires of inferiority
that Umno continues to fan in a certain segment of the Malay polity. In
other words, Mahathir and Umno have made it very clear that Malay
supremacy instead of any non-racial ideology is what legitimises BN's
power and has brought "success" to this country. But what happens when a
member of another community, a minority community, demonstrates that a
non-sycophantic model of leadership proves objectively more successful
than the race-based politics of patronage that have been peddled for
years?
The leaked documents may, according to Penang Deputy
Chief Minister Mansor Othman, highlight the genuine concerns of his
party members - or should that be Chinese PKR members - but the reality
is that the squabbles between a Chinese-dominated party and interlopers
from a supposed multiracial party, which is in reality a Malay-dominated
party, is just business as usual in the political landscape of
Malaysia. For Pakatan, still a racial game
The accusation of arrogance by Mansor of Lim hardly surprises me. I
couldn't care less if Lim is arrogant and for me at least, it's a
non-issue. If you can't stand up to those in power, you have no business
claiming to represent those who voted for you to speak on their behalf.
And if you have power and your arrogance lends nothing to your
leadership capabilities and compromises the objectives you seek to
accomplish, then you are of no use to anybody. What is of
greater interest is the racially-tinged bickering of seat allocations
based on ethnic demographic and the perception that the ‘PKR Chinese'
pose a threat to the hegemony of the DAP Chinese.
Mansor has since claimed that the whole issue is being spun to paint a picture of disunity amongst Pakatan. The picture
of Mansor arms linked with "God", or should that be a "god", is perhaps
one of the most uncomfortable pictures of political unity in Malaysia,
which is quite a feat considering what Umno has put out all these years. What
Pakatan should do is embrace this process as part and parcel of
dismantling racial politics in this country - if that is their goal,
that is. Issues like these should be part of the discourse amongst
‘opposition' types instead of trying to gloss over it and painting the
problems of their politics on Umno.
Pakatan supporters here and
elsewhere are tripping over themselves alternating between wringing
their hands that such dirty linen is exposed to the public and chiding
PKR as the weak link filled with frog hoppers used to the supposed old
ways of Umno. Even Sekinchan assemblyperson Ng Suee Lim warns of MCA-type money politicsseeping into the DAP, now that the party has established itself as the Chinese power base of the country. It must have really pissed off the former prime minister and Perkasa
patron that with all the racial politics going on in Pakatan, they can
still maintain their ‘multiracial' facade and here BN is playing the
exact same game but struggling to maintain their centrist position.
Actually
Pakatan is not playing the same race game. It's a variation of the old
race game because there is no centralised racial power base. It's an
alliance built on tenuous compromises (is there any other kind in
politics?) and fuelled by the hate for Umno-BN and let's face reality,
for a certain section of the Malaysian voting public, the former prime
minister himself. And Mahathir is right to be worried that "many
things can be destroyed in five years". He's probably right that BN may
not survive if the "opposition" comes into power.
Mahathir frets
that "officers in the government will be used to threaten whoever tries
to change the government", meaning that what he is really afraid of is
that Pakatan would use the same tricks that Umno-BN did to hamper the
democratic process by using government institutions to abrogate the will
of the people. Choice between blue and red pills
To be honest, I share his fears too. Not that of BN's destruction, but
rather that the system perfected under the Mahathir regime would be
commandeered by a new regime which has shown no real commitment to the
supposed philosophies that separate it from Umno-BN. How do we
begin the process of dismantling a bloated civil service? Will Islam be
practiced differently? Is a welfare state the only option? Will we
forever be a subsidised nation? How are we going to reform institutions
that have suffered decades of abuse?
Now, I am not making the
argument that there is no difference between BN and Pakatan, which is
the popular strawman put out there. However as I have put forward
in many articles we - and by "we" I mean those of us who believe that
the need for a change in government is axiomatic - need to be very clear
as to what these "changes" that we are fighting for mean beyond
changes, which in reality merely reinforce an entrenched system that was
designed (even if administered competently) to meet our racialist
expectations, which in the long run would put an end to any idea of an
egalitarian Malaysian identity, not to mention way of life.
Understand now, we need a two party or more accurately alliance system
but the common refrain from Pakatan supporters is that after 55 years of
corruption, we need a change which I am totally down with, but if we
have two parties that are in substance offering us the same deal only
with one party less corrupt than the other only because they have not
been in power, how exactly is jumping between these two parties every
four years going to make a difference in the long term?
Obama
supporters didn't ask the tough questions about how exactly Obama would
bring about change. They took comfort in the fact that George W Bush and
John McCain (who ran perhaps one of the most boneheaded campaigns in
American presidential elections) would be banished from the land for at
least four years, and are now dejected by the supposed change that never
happened. We should not fall into the same trap as them. Never
has there been a time in Malaysia, as it is now, where political parties
are at the mercy of the voters. It is a pity that so far, we have not
made much use of this opportunity. Or maybe this election is like the
choice between taking the blue pill or the red one in the movie
‘Matrix'.
You take the former, you end back in the prison they
created secure in your self-delusion, whereas you take the latter; you
discover how deep the racial and political rabbit hole goes. Malaysiakini
