I WEEP FOR YOU, POOR DR M (revisited)

[It's been nearly 20 years since I sent this impassioned email to Dr M, at the height of Anwar Ibrahim's mock trial at Augustine Paul's kangaroo court. Guess I was emotionally distraught at the time, despairing at the evil I saw permeating every one of our institutions and seeing so many true patriots arrested under the accursed ISA. My feelings haven't changed, though these days I would probably be a wee bit less self-righteous and a little kinder, having realized that Dr M is, after all, just my own autocratic aspect on a permanent bad hair day.]

Subject: I weep for you, poor Dr M
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 18:36:53 +0800
From: Antares
To: The Prime Minister of Malaysia


I WEEP FOR YOU, POOR DR M
[Delivered in lieu of a tight slap]


I weep for you, poor Dr M
For the terror you must feel
As you gaze upon your final days
From the dizzy heights you've climbed
And you begin to realize
There's nowhere else for you to go
But down, down, down.

The evil you have brought to bear
Upon the spirit of our nation fair
Will never be forgotten -
Not in a hundred years;
And though you cry a thousand tears,
For you there can be no atonement.

You have forfeit your right to a fair trial
By your denial of the basic rights of those
Who oppose your ugly creed;
Your thoughts and deeds have become so vile
As to be almost unspeakable -
I feel the utmost loathing when I think of you
And yet I am driven to feelings of pity.

How will you plead when your soul is weighed
Against all the principles you have betrayed
In your ruthless ambition to succeed
By toying with the forces of fear and greed?

I know you couldn't have done it all alone;
You had to corrupt everyone
Who came into contact with you -
All the men in black and all the boys in blue,
Even the men in white, and your own children too.

Courtesy of Lulu's blog

You could say it was Siti Hasmah who made you do it -
You may curse her with your dying breath
For turning you into another Macbeth.
Both of you sought power and glory
Yet no one knows her sad, sad story:
She wanted her husband to be Mr Big
To make up for the fact that she wears a wig!

I weep for you, Augustine Paul and Abdul Gani Patail:
One fine day you'll be brought to trial
Before the Court of True Justice
And all the innocent ones whose lives you have defiled.
And as for you, Mohtar Abdullah, who knows no shame:
I believe all your children will have to change their names.

I weep for you, poor little rich henchmen (and women)
Who have signed a blood pact with Dr Mephistopheles:
All you corrupt and cynical backers and backbenchers
Of the Barisan Nazional who ought to have quit
While you still had a chance to go down in history
Untainted.

But it's too late now, you've blown your chance!
Your bank balances you had hoped to advance,
Regardless of how low you had to go
To keep up a show, to save your own face,
And protect yourselves from utter disgrace.

I weep for your benighted souls
And your hearts that have turned so cold;
I shed a tear for the decency and humanity
You have mortgaged in utter vanity.

I do not weep for those who have died
Or have been arrested, tortured, and tried
For merely voicing aloud their minds
In hopes of fairer, freer times.
Those who have suffered at the hands of villainy
Have already won a permanent place
In the gallery of national heroes.
Excuse me now as I chant a litany
To rid this land of noxious tyranny:

Hidup Keadilan!
Hidup Kebebasan!
Hidup Kebenaran!
Hidup Rakyat Malaysia!
Hidup Semangat Demokrasi!

=====================
BEBASKAN WARTAWAN KITA!
BEBASKAN KEHAKIMAN!
=====================


Dr M, I invite you to come and have a heart-to-heart chat with me. I'll even serve you tea and cakes. But please arrive without your heavily armed goons. True communication is only possible between equals. Perhaps you're not really interested in true communication - only obtaining PR mileage from being photographed with the likes of Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro (if only they knew what damage they have done to their own credibility and stature as world leaders!)

Well, even at this late hour, it's still possible to redeem yourself and facilitate a genuine reconciliation across the nation. I would be the first to shake your hand if you would only concede that you have allowed your personal whims to override the national interest: that you have grossly overreacted in seeking vengeance against your erstwhile heir apparent, Anwar Ibrahim, and have in the process effectively privatized the Royal Malaysian Police and made it your personal terrorist squad; that you have been barking up the wrong developmental tree, promoting physical growth at the expense of mental and spiritual - and thereby putting the integrity of our ecosystem in grave jeopardy. Merely concede that serious misjudgments have brought about the current political divide and economic malaise - and we can begin again together to heal and restore this beautiful and prosperous country to its true destiny, not as a nation of criminally-inclined and egomaniacal fools, but as courageous, compassionate, enlightened men and women worthy of planetary - nay, galactic - citizenship.

Upon receipt of this open letter addressed to you, you can choose one of three options:

1) Ignore and delete, dismissing this message as the rantings of yet another lunatic dissident, another "voice in the wilderness." But do so at your own peril. I have never been inspired to address you directly. The fact that I have indicates the gravity of the situation.

2) Order your secret police to investigate and, if necessary, arrest and interrogate me.

3) Call a special press conference and announce three things: (i) you will permit Anwar Ibrahim to receive the medical attention he seeks in Munich and begin legal proceedings to drop all charges against him (hasn't the man and his family suffered enough already at your hands?); (ii) all political detainees will be immediately and unconditionally released with sincere apologies to their families for the anxiety and distress caused; (iii) you will accept Suhakam's recommendations to abolish the ISA, the OSA, the Printing Presses and Publications Act, the Universities Act, and the Illegal Assembly clause in the Police Act.

I'm positive that all Malaysians will receive this news as a veritable miracle (and Heaven knows we're desperately in need of one). No one will actively push to punish you or your family for whatever financial misdemeanors may have been perpetrated in the past. All your best intentions and noblest visions for the nation will be reassessed in a more positive light, and your lifelong dedication to the nation's service will be acknowledged and honored.

For too long you have surrounded yourself with those who are either aligned with your personal agenda or who are in utter fear of your displeasure. Inevitably, you have become disconnected with reality, with how the masses honestly feel about your autocratic management style (which is fast becoming anachronistic as we move into the 21st century).

I neither fear your displeasure nor seek your destruction (truly, I ask only that you re-examine your worldview and make the necessary reattunements before it's too late - believe me, it's NEVER too late!).

Without intending to overdramatize, Dr M, this is definitely your last chance to turn inevitable disaster into the greatest triumph of your political career - to become once again a loved and respected world statesman.

Sincerely,

Antares (the erstwhile Kit Leee)
Mother's Day
13 May 2001

This email was posted TWICE to Dr Mahathir. Once on May 13, using my tmnet SMTP server with a bcc to myself and about 130 others. When the post failed to appear in my inbox I reposted it from my Yahoo! address. Recipients on the second posting have confirmed receipt. A week later, I have received no response from the Incurable Doctor. [May 20, 2001]

[First posted 26 March 2008]

 

A VULTURE NAMED MAHATHIR (revisited)

Statement from Dr Munawar Anees posted on The Might Of The Pen, October 19, 2008...

As a student I knew of the horrors of the Holocaust and other human tragedies, but merely as a distant thunder: the violation of human rights and crimes against humanity were only an abstract notion.

That was all fated to change with my arrest under the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA) of Malaysia, which allows for indefinite detention without trial. My crime? I had known Anwar Ibrahim, the deputy prime minister and finance minister of Malaysia, as a close personal friend for many years. We shared and strove for a vision of life firmly rooted in human dignity. We struggled for building an intellectual and political milieu for free expression. Together, we subscribed to the idea of economic prosperity, gender and racial equality and a civil society.

Alas, the Malaysian dictator, Mahathir, under the growing burden of corruption and cronyism, conspired to halt the march of freedom. In order to build his fraudulent case against Anwar, Mahathir himself ordered my arrest.

My kidnapping and detention by the infamous Malaysian Special Branch taught me how it feels to be forcibly separated from one’s wife and children. How it feels to be searched and seized, disallowed to make phone calls, handcuffed, blindfolded, stripped naked, driven in an animal cage, shaven bald, endlessly interrogated, humiliated, drugged, deprived of sleep, physically abused. What it’s like to be threatened, blackmailed, tormented by police lawyers, brutalized to make a totally false confession, hospitalized for a consequent heart ailment, and treated as a psychiatric patient with symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.

Barely surviving on a meager diet of rancid rice and chicken along with 12 medicines a day, I spent nearly four months handcuffed around the clock to my hospital bed, under the watchful eyes of the prison guards.

Thereafter, my ability to speak, read and write took a considerable time to show signs of recovery. Short-term memory lapses were frequent. I existed in a fluid state in which suicidal tendencies, depression and despair were punctuated by fits of rage and indignation.

Weekly visits of less than an hour by my wife, Nadia, with our young children — Aisha and Omran — were my only contact with the outside world and the only inspiration to live on.

In collusion with the lawyer appointed on my behalf by the police, the Malaysian authorities refused the legal assistance of my choice, coercing me not to mount an appeal against the court verdict and threatening me with greater punishment under new charges if I didn’t co-operate.

Simultaneously, Nadia constantly endured police harassment, wiretapping and disruption of our e-mail and bank accounts. Some of our friends were met with the same fate and were compelled to abandon us when we needed them most.

But, in attempting to scare off and alienate my friends, how terribly mistaken were Malaysian autocrats in aping gross Gestapo tactics. How they underestimated the temper of freedom in so many places around the world, above all among friends in the West.

Floodgates of human compassion were opened when the futurist author Alvin Toffler, who Mahathir asked to advise him on a pet high-technology project, sent a message of protest to the Malaysian leader within 72 hours of my capture. In a major interview with the Western press, Mahathir even felt it necessary to make assurances — unfulfilled, of course — about my well being.

With every passing day, the rising tide of concern for my plight seemed to personify the words of Elie Wiesel:

“Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor. Never the victim. Never the tormented.”

Friends and strangers alike took a stand and support began to mushroom everywhere. Nadia related to me in the hospital how Amnesty International had declared me a “prisoner of conscience,” and how Pen International adopted me as a “writer in prison.” Against all odds, two prominent Malaysian lawyers, Manjeet Singh Dhillon and Balwant Singh Siddhu, offered their services unconditionally. To top it all, an international coalition — Friends of Dr. Anees — came into existence in defence of my rights. The core group of Naseer Ahmad, Baseer Hai, Safir Rammah, Jamal Mubarak, Anees Ahmad and Naeem Siddiqui mounted a media campaign with phenomenal success.

What touched my heart was that the person, Kamal Mubarak, who set up the Web site had never met me in person. From the depths of my confinement, I could see the magic of human compassion had begun to defeat oppression.

The pinnacle was reached after my release in the warm hug laced with watery eyes of an Amnesty friend in Toronto, Margaret John, who witnessed a pledge of solidarity between me and Devan Nair, the former president of Singapore, for we had come to share a similar fate.

My victimization at the hands of Mahathir’s “Asian values” has transformed me in another way. All my adult life, like so many in the Muslim world, I have suspected under every nook and cranny some conspiracy by the West to keep us down. Yet, in this seminal experience of my life, my friends in the West succeeded in saving me, while Mahathir, a Muslim, did everything to destroy me. And he is trying to do the same to Anwar again through his obliging courts on totally fabricated charges.

Mahathir has demonstrated that, though a proclaimed Muslim, his heart is blind to compassion. Tyranny is the hallmark of his bankrupt concept of “Asian values.”

My tragedy, and that of my friend Anwar, ought to make our fellow Muslims think very hard when they ponder the West and its role in the world. As we set out to shape our collective destiny in the 21st century, will the values of Mahathir or Jefferson serve us best? Mahathir himself made that choice for me. Sic semper tyrannis.*

-----
* Sic semper tyrannis is a Latin phrase meaning "thus, ever (or always), to tyrants." It is sometimes mistranslated as "Death to tyrants." The phrase is a shortened version of Sic semper evello mortem Tyrannis, which translated means "Thus always death comes to tyrants." (Wikipedia)

[First published 20 October 2008, reposted 5 April 2013]

Bukit Merah Catastrophe Revisited (a pictorial essay)

Asian Rare Earth Sdn Bhd - a joint venture involving Mitsubishi Chemical Industries Ltd (35%), Beh Minerals (35%), Lembaga Urusan dan Tabung Haji or the state-owned Pilgrims' Management Fund Board (20%) and other bumiputra businessmen (10%) - began operations in 1982 soon after Mahathir Mohamad became prime minister. It took the residents of Bukit Merah more than 10 years of unrelenting struggle to get this lethally hazardous operation shut down. In the process, community leaders at the forefront of the protest against ARE were even arrested and detained under the obnoxious ISA by order of the vindictive home minister, Mahathir Mohamad...

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS 

IN THE ASIAN RARE EARTH DEBACLE

And now, under the nefarious Najib Razak, history is about to repeat itself...

unless we topple this lethally hazardous, ecocidal and utterly corrupt BN regime!

[First posted 3 March 2012]

25 years ago Malaysia entered a New Dark Age. Are we out of it yet?

Find out HERE!

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]