NEW KFC -- "Kerajaan Fried Chickens"

KERAJAAN FRIED CHICKEN ...

we turn our univesity students into chickens ... bonsai-ing their minds .. to ensure they stay under the glass coconut shell so that we may further kill their critical sensibility and idealism, denying their rights to understand what a Platonic Republic may mean and what kind of "philosopher-ruler" ought to rule citizens ...

shame on you rogue regime out to rob the imagination of our nation's greatest asset: our youth.

we take in and consume junk american ideology such as Mcdonald's and B-Grade Hollywood movies .. but not the way Americans promote thinking in the classrooms and the in the corridors of academia ...

our students need to continue to question and challenge authority and not be frightened like "Kerajaan Fried Chickens" but it must begin with this fundamental rule: read and use the power of reason to reconstruct society.

let us help our youth develop ethics, creativity, and sensibility through the development of thinking that should also go hand in hand with humility and commitment to trancultural ethics and social justice, so that when they grow older and become leaders, they will not become many of the leaders we have now -- arrogant, threatening, scheming, fraudulizing, and anti-learning ... -- ar

 

READ THIS BOOK for MORE WRITINGS on MALAYSIAN HYPER MODERNITY:

 

http://gbgerakbudaya.com/2013/05/the-allah-controversy-and-other-essays-on-malaysian-hypermodernity/

 

 

 

 

DECLARE YOUR ASSETS, Malaysian politicians! Here's why ...please share widely

WHY MALAYSIAN ELECTED OFFICIALS MUST DECLARE ASSETS ... 

 because Barack Obama and Joe Biden did for all Americans to view.

Please share this with all Malaysians: http://www.barackobama.com/tax-returns

A MILLION MALAYSIAN MARCH? THINK ABOUT IT ...

this was the number that brought the Shah of Iran down in 1979 ...
a truly Malaysian Spring after a Dark one engulfing?

I don't know ... what would do if you have a rage against the machine?

 this is a complex question we have come to ask ... when the end of Malaysian history, borrowing Francis Fukuyama's famus thesis, is near -- that the death of despotism is nea...r and that the people's political maturity has fiinally been greatly acquired.

to be or not to be ... in a massive street rally ... is a Shakespearean question we are asking ... a fraud is a fraud by any other name .. when something is really rotten in the State of Delirium ...

still ... we will see a violent response to a million Malaysian march, if we follow the prediction of Machievelli ... power must be maintained at all cost .. even if i means the cost are lives ...

it is no or never, as the rallyist would say .. as Elvis too would sing ... fair statement, very fair ... sometimes constructive engagment can be mere rhetoirc and a play of words, in a game using delaying tactics ...

i don't have an answer to this question ... do you ?
will the unpopular government succumb to a million Malaysian march ?
or .. is our Malaysian Spring finally here ... a Tahrir Square with a leader.. ? -- ar

"Which Malaysian culture is most superior?: A Mother's Day Musing.

By Azly Rahman

Happy Mother’s Day and Happy May Day! May the labors of love reign supreme.

I recall an old Malaysian radio advertisement: “May Day … May Day… I’m itching all over!” I suppose this is the predicament we all are in when we speak of the “mother of all issues”: culture!

Mothers give birth to babies. Babies do not know what racism means until they learn from adults. And then they become defined through institutionalized racism produced by the Ideological State Apparatus. The child, is the father of Man, said a sage.

Where are we at on Mother's Day and May Day?

Are we more race-conscious now than ever before? Are we really in the postmodern era in which politics of identity is taking its linguistic and semiotic turn – in which the ugliness and the beauty of race and ethnicity is surfacing and rearing their heads? Do we need a better understanding of the word “culture”?

Cultural wars
By the growing number of race-related news-stories, letters to the editors, column writings, and opinions published by Malaysiakini, we seem to be arguing more intensely on the issue of race and social dominance.

We argue on which language is more superior, whose civilization originated first, to who this and that land belong to, or if God actually has a chosen people. We even go on a crusade and jihad based on the superiority of this and that culture and civilization. We then hear of suicide bombings in the name of this and that culture.

We let ourselves be shaped by theories of race and ethnicity. These theories were developed by those who think that human beings are material beings primarily and that race and ethnicity are constructs that must be made real. These theories might have originated from racists themselves.

We design systems of social dominance. We build our politics, schools, cultural institutions, organizations, youth movements, and all kinds of imaginary prisons based on notions of racial superiority. We design economic policies around these notions. We distribute justice based on them. We define citizenship based on these notions. We create imagined communities out of them. We then get trapped by the attempt to redefine what race, ethnicity, and culture means.

We include or exclude human beings using languages that gatekeep. We protect our economic interest using sophisticated language of institutionalized racism. The result: we see a manifestation of poverty based on the identification of race.

We then tried to correct the imbalances using the culture of Classical/Rostowian/Friedmanian economics and developmental/pluralistic politics. We used statistics to measure people and to argue of this and that distribution of the economic pie. We developed the culture of communalism based on the numbers we crunch.

As decades go by, we then see race and class emerging. We did not realize that the seeds of destruction were planted in the very house we inhabit based on the notions of race, ethnicity, and culture we understand – our understanding based on old colonial theories. We charted our future ruins. When the incorruptible becomes corrupt, we saw how some of us design oppositional politics based on these constructs. In the end, we are still trapped.

This is a double jeopardy in our conceptualization of humanity, as we embrace and offer ourselves the deadly kiss of the Machiavellian notion of race, ethnicity, and culture.

At the root of these shackles of social dominance, I think lies in how we imagine ourselves as cultural beings. This is the cultural problematique that goes beyond merely the clever notion of the “clash of civilizations”, as many a Huntington scholar might have us believe.

Is tculture the culprit?
We continue to debate about culture and religion in our public schools. We might be debating on faulty premises. We might have to look at the issue of culture, race, and ethnicity from a radically different perspective. Let us see what this may mean based on the propositions I will be making which fundamentally begin like this: culture is in the imagination and is not real.

There is no such a concept as 'original culture'. Cultures are systems of construction of realities that is influenced by the historical-materialistic march of technology and capital, that then develops conditions of existence and formulate human consciousness. Culture is fluid and amorphous and is a construct rather than a constant. Culture is not static. Cultural construction can be conveniently used and abused to lend legitimacy to power and its concentrated self.

It is more than just the tools we use and play but also the house that we inhabit. Its definition is problematic; the numbers of definitions are many. The word Malay, Chinese, Indian, American, Indonesian --- all these are cultural constructs that are useful in some ways but useless in others.

Unfortunately it is the uselessness of culture that is often most attractive and get translated into sophisticated racist policies. As racist policies become further institutionalized and as economic interests that go with these need to be protected even more, racial tensions and consequently violence erupts. As these further mounts, we have war and ethnic cleansing -- in the name of cultural superiority.

We are endowed by the Creator these variations in skin color and appearances to have use solve problems of humanity; to understand what needs and wants are, and to discern what is Good and what is Evil.

Cultures can enable human thinking and it can also disable it. It can be shaped, structured, and symbolized based on the influence of class structure of the people/peoples.

This will translate into "high", "low", "mass", "popular", and "sub-culture". With all these subdefinitions of culture comes the status symbols of the object of display, affection, work, leisure, etc, that shape and that are shaped by the economic condition.

Hence, a goblet used in a sultan' s palace might be worth a thousand goblets used by the sultan's hamba sahayas. Or a Rolls Royce used by a royal family signifies a symbol of "high culture" as opposed to a "[Proton] Rusa,” a symbol of "popular culture" used by a family in a remote kampong.

There is a new dimension of culture emerging. There are classes of culture and culture of classes. Classes of culture are post-industrial tribes that are victims of producers whereas culture of classes are the internal logic of cultures that have been eroded by the forces of globalization and late capitalism.


Classes of culture
Cultures have eroded, been deconstructed, synthesized, and been redefined as capitalism continue to march in its own cultural logic. As capitalism becomes a culture unto itself and appropriates, robs, and raped Nature, human beings become workers and slaves to the system of cultural production.

Workers become human machines under the system of indoctrination of bureaucratization, and next, Taylorism and next Fordism, and now Total Quality Management. Those who design these gentle systems of modern servitude can exploit the worker better; in a sublime, scientific, and systematic way.

Workers are asked to adopt the culture of work of the Japanese and to look East; not realizing that the Japanese continue to further their East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in a post-modern way.

Our government tells the world that we have excellent workers that can be exported globally. These workers, like Mercedes Benz, Jaguars, Bentleys, and Audis, are good brands that can be exported. We take pride in producing good workers at a cheaper rate. The Malaysian people are now embalmed as machines that have culture; not cultural beings that can control the machines.

We are however, afraid to tell the world that we need good citizens that can think critically and to become agents of cultural change; workers that understand who owns the means of production and the process of mental servitude. We are afraid the “brand name workers” might become “brand name thinkers” and create “brand name social changes” in a nation of “other people’s” blue chip industries.

Culture of dominance and hegemony evolved into a new name called ideology, carrying with it the definitions of race and ethnicity.

We create classes of people in the technological sector; those digerati we house in Cyberjaya and who we continue to socially reproduce through an education system that is increasingly training human beings into machines.

This is the new culture we are cultivating; one that is “heteroglosially” global and technological; one whose members are increasingly hypermodernised, hypertextualized, and hyperactive consumer of wants more than needs.

We have evolved into cyber-Malays, cyber-Indians, cyber-Chinese, cyber-Kadazans, cyber-Muruts, and cyber-Senois and cyber-Jakuns’ true to the cultural mold of cybernetic capitalism.

This is the new phenomenon in global cultural construction – the emergence of, no longer linguistic or cultural stocks of people, but personality types shaped by the advancement of economic conditions.


Culture or Human Nature?

If cultures are imaginary concepts we carry as our own personal realities, what then is human nature?

Man is a universal being that exist in its particularity. Man is one and many all at once. The purpose of the existence of Man is to de-evolve into Nature and to free itself from the shackle called “culture”. The “cultured Man” has stolen Nature and has forgotten its own Nature.

Man is a being constructed out of DNA which is color-blind, culturally insignificant, and racially blind.

Man’s evolution is determined by the economic condition first and foremost and by the systems of belief that condition him/her ideologically. The rise of private property and the emergence of the concept of family is the precursor of the rise of the system of monopoly of resources. As human knowledge advances in the hands and in the imagination of those who owns the means of production, Man creates theories of racial superiority that are attractive and useful to the cause of colonialism and next, imperialism.

Better technologies and better systems of educating for colonial dependency create more sophisticated means to define people racially and ethnically. Nationalism, or the sense of “nationhood” became a phenomena to rally people of the same color, the same geographical origin, the same language into fighting for the cause of a the same imagined community that could then be turned into the nineteenth-century concept of nation-state.

Nation-states pose problems to cultural differences within.

What has emerged is a global class of owners, producers, managers, technocrats, laborers, consumers, and pariahs and hamba sahayas of the Information Age – speaking Geek.

We need to embrace the new global definition of culture if we are to step outside of the circle of fire we have build using the language of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Or -- we might have built a wrong house fifty years ago!

On a more positive note:

Happy Mother’s Day. Let us raise our children in Peace, Love, and Tolerance. Into transcultural citizens, preferably. We must go back to Mother Nature.

ONLY P. RAMLLEE CAN HELP WITH MALAYSIAN UNITY

Malay politics and Ramleeology

 

“Alif-Mim-Nun-Wau... sarkis!” - said a character in P Ramlee’s movie Pendekar Bujang Lapok.
Of late I have been hit by nostalgia, reminiscing and even romanticising the 60s, 70s and the early 80s before Mahathirism took root.

My last column on Malaysia in the 70s was an enjoyable piece of journaling and from the numerous comments I read from all the blogs that carry it - my own blog Between Cybernetics and Existentialism, my Facebook page, Malaysia Today, etc - I feel that there was a time when a good Malaysian spirit was about to be forged.

This was that sense of a historical block, until May 13, 1969 came, of course; whether it was orchestrated or a victory campaign that went wrong we are beginning to find out, as alternative accounts of it continue to be written.

After languishing in sweet memories of the 70s, I next thought of the 60s; the time when I was growing up in Johor Baru and how the kampong and the city and the school I went to became my “global classrooms”.

My fond memories always go back to a “multicultural Malaysia I knew - especially how I owed my interest in learning and insatiable urge to acquire knowledge through the selfless work of my teachers - Malay, Chinese, Indians, Sikhs, and even my Peace Corps American teachers.

Without them, I would not have been able to write honestly about the need not just to “tolerate” other cultures but to learn from each one of them, embrace the dynamics of each, and to bring out the universality of the values, and next to design good learning systems and environments that will nurture these differences into commonalities and to hybridise the wisdom we will acquire.

This is what has been lacking in our education system - critical sensibility and the embracing of the idea of “cultural action for freedom”, as the Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire would say.

A P Ramlee movie
Of late, too, I have been watching P Ramlee movies - reminiscing my childhood days as well with my memory of the black and white television, that “machine to call upon far away vision” (tele + vision), or on a more theoretical basis, anthropologists of technology would call “a fantasy-machine in the garden” and in this case, a “TV in a peaceful kampong”.

I watched and “read closely” Malaysia’s great humanist-social-philosopher P Ramlee’s, classic of the 60s Pendekar Bujang Lapok.

I found something interesting in there worthy, in fact, of a full-blown dissertation on the anthropology of the Malays. Here is what I discovered about the first 17 minutes of it:

There is an intellectual framework in “reading” this movie; one that could be a hybrid of political-economy of development and underdevelopment (see the work of the Dependenistas/Dependency Theorists of the 70s), World-Systems Theory, Marx’s idea of “technological determinism”, i.e. technology as the shaper of social relations of production (see my dissertation Thesis on Cyberjaya, on the origin of Cyberjaya and the concluding discussion on Marx and technology and culture), semiotics of power, as in the notion of “habitus” (see Pierre Bourdieu’s work on “symbolic power”) and a study of post-colonialism emblematic in the work of Albert Memmi’s Colonizer and the Colonized, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, and others in the genre of psychological studies of oppression.

Ramleeology as method

Syed Hussein Al Attas’s work is also instructive of a framework in looking at the idea of how the image of the native is constructed, as lazy, obedient, and imbued with “bebalism” and “tolol-ism “ (feudalistic Malay idiocy and moronism); constructed by the rich and land-owning class that drew inspiration from “divide and rule” - from the British colonials.

Indeed there is a lot to “read” in this movie; provided we deconstruct it to its minute detail (dialogue, characterisation, symbolism, plot, discourse of power, language play, irony, metaphor, etc.). Herein lies the rejuvenation of my interest in developing “Ramleeology” as a “method of cultural critique based on radical social theory that can be applied to a trajectoric landscape of history such as Malaysia of this ‘hypermodern’ era”.

In just that 17 opening minutes. I saw the entire history of the evolution of the feudal and neo-feudal Malay mentality being displayed; from pre-independence to this day as we count the days to a regime change.

P Ramlee (left in photo) showed me what authoritarianism, stupefication, Malay gangsterism, crude kampongism, corruption, and arrogance mean. These can be seen in today’s display of political idiocy, as a legacy of Mahathirism.

But at the end of that “kampong jetty scene” of Pendekar Bujang Lapok, I saw “counter-hegemony” in the form of a revolt of the Malay masses against the oppressors, as if poetic justice must always be with the alienated and humiliated Malays at different epochs of history.

The last “revolt scene”, like a storming of the Bastille, and the overthrowing of Louis Capet and Marie Antoinette, I saw rallies upon rallies such as those we have been seeing in the last few years beginning from the first Bersih rally.

The Malays these days, the enlightened ones, in collaboration with their brothers and sisters of different race, religion, national origin have all become the new “pendekars” or “warriors” such a the three “pendekars” headed by P Ramlee.

But the final scene is not here yet. The deconstructionism mart is there; Malaysians are able to “read” what has been delusioning them vis-a-viz the dread called “Mahathirism”, the idiocy called “Ketuanan Melayu”, and the rhetoric called “social contract”, framed according to a truncated Malay view and not like a vision suggested by the social philosopher of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I had fun watching that particular P Ramlee movie. I think he is a visionary, somewhat like a modern Malay prophet speaking up truth to power for Malaysians of all races, for the oppressed, for those dehumanised by those who owns the means, methods , machinery, and media technology of oppression.

Watch the movie on YouTube - we Malaysians are all in it!

---

Chinese Tsunami: my own little story

I am overwhelmed by the "Chinese-ness" of my own experience ...

having ...

- a beloved Chinese-born aunt ... who grew up with my family since she was a few weeks old ...

- Ah Lan who taught my (late) mother how to sew clothes so that she could make me and my siblings those beautiful traditional clothes ...

- my excellent and caring primary school teachers Miss Chan, Miss Tan, Miss Wong .. who taught me ho to be a better human being ...

- my excellent Math teacher Mr. Wong who also taught me how to write in Jawi!

- my great set of teachers in high school, Miss Yap, Ms. Chew. Mr. Wong. Mr. Ho, Mr. Liew, and of course the great Sir Peter Ng

- my Chinese literature professor, Julia Lin who got me interested in Chinese and Japanese culture and philosophy and got me interested too in finding out what her now famous daughter Maya Lin (American architect) was designing ...

- for the last two decades of my teaching in Malaysian and the United States, possibly a thousand students of Chinese origin whom I see primarily as intelligent and wise learners I too learned from ...

and many more experiences ... including YOU in this forum ...

and most importantly having all these experiences that has tsunami-ed me into believing that we are all of one race: the human race ..

So, Malaysian media and racist politicians behave ... and watch your language ... -- ar

A DARK MALAYSIAN SPRING #1

A DARK MALAYSIAN SPRING #1 ...

by all counts, judging by the strangeness of the process, the years of demand by BERSIH to clean up its act, the admittance by the Elections Commission that its hands are tied, its job description which states that it answers to the Prime Minister's Department, gerrymandering, the presence of millions of immigrants and immigrant workers who became citizen-voters, the multi-duplication of names, sudden black-out at the "Earth Day" moment of vote-counting, the sudden gush of a tsunami of BN winning votes, and all kinds tactics and techniques of fraud, lies, and deceit in the book used in this 13th. elections --- all these point to the reality that massive fraud has possibly helped install a government that did not win

... the country is not sitting still ... whatever that is remaining of "due process" must be used .. whatever peaceful way of potest must be exhausted.

This is possibly an election hijaked, a Malaysian Elections Fraud of the Century, in our way to elect a highest official that might be known in history as "His Fraudulency" when the results of a public inquiry is known. It is not easy to juts "move on" when the democratic culture we have been building since post-2008 is being poisoned by those who wish to hold on the power for as long as they can rob the public coffers clean and dry.

This is not an acceptable brand of democracy Malaysians wish to live by; we deserve better than this. All NGOs, political parties, and every citizen who care for the fate of this country must demand for nothing less than an explanation of every irregularity and what happened to their vote .. even if there are a million complaints lodged .. what then must BERSIH as a growing force of a Malaysian Spring do?

many Malaysians are crying in anger ... and in sadness .. thinking of the fate of their children when what they wish to have through this game called "voting" in a Malaysian democracy is being destroyed right before our very eyes .... -- ar




AN AMERICAN PRECEDENCE: http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/Overview-1.htm

READ THIS AS BACKGROUND TO THE MALAYSIAN DILEMMA:

A BRAND NEW MALAYSIA

words on the new dollar bill of a newly-minted  malaysia:

"IN FRAUD WE TRUST"  - ar

VICTORY SPEECH TONIGHT at 11 ? BUT STAY HOME PLEASE ... READ THIS GE-13 VICTORY SPEECH, May 6 2013 by Azly Rahman

At the great gathering of thousands, the new leaders emerging from the elections of 2013 speak.


Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, Just God of Humanity, Universal God of Humankind that knows even what is whispered in our hearts. Praise be to Lord of the Day of Judgment; one that made possible the change and transformation we are seeing now and we will continue to see in future.

Allow me to talk about our victory, our vision of a "Constitutional State" and our vehicle of social, cultural, and economic progress beyond the NEP: of a new economic agenda.

I stand here by His Grace, with humility, thanking you Malaysians who have come to celebrate and to give us the strength, the resolve, and the will to continue to march towards victory.

This victory is already ours. We cannot underestimate our struggle – the struggle of Malaysians of regardless of race, class, gender, creed, religious background, and national origin. This victory will be a gift for our children. This will be the best gift we can leave the next generation with in a country in which "justice" is put in its proper place. This is the concept of Adil and is what we base out struggle on. This is the concept of bersih, cekap, amanah in the truest sense of the word. We are winning.

We live in an imperfect world. We live in maya, in the shadow of Plato's cave. We constantly need to make changes to our institutions, so that democracy will have its breathing space, will evolve, and will flourish in accordance to the laws of Nature. As the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once said "Everything in good in the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the Hands of Man…"

We have allowed totalitarianism, corruption, repression, and hedonism to take root in our democratic institutions.

In an imperfect world such as Malaysia, in which imperfection has gotten worse and making us slaves to the policies created out of our prejudices and arrogance, out of our greed and lust for power, and out of our ill-conceived idea of human liberation and economic development - this imperfect world needed more than just incremental changes and compromise.

It needed radical changes and no-compromises. We have shown that we through Fate conspiring, through the Will of God, we made that change, sudden yet peaceful and civil, on March 8 2008. It is our Velvet revolution, inspired by our own sense of non-violence, aided by technologies of cybernetics.
The "revolution" - our own Malaysian styled-revolution - that ought to now be studied alongside the nature and structure of revolutions worldwide is not without its causes.

Voices of change

Those hard long years of battling injustices, the sacrifices of those imprisoned without trial, of those humiliated beyond recognition stripped off their dignity, those brutally beaten beyond mercy, those hunted down on the streets of our major cities, those silenced and stupefied in our universities, those sprayed with chemicals, and the voice of the little girl – a child of the Hindraf revolution who brought roses to ask for pity for his father's release - all these violent images of oppression we do not deserve have taught us to be stronger.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome.
We shall overcome the tyranny of an arrogant, ineffective, incompetent, corrupt and lazy government that
does not have any more respect for the rule of law
does not have any shame in showing its greed and lust
does not have any mercy in using brutal force to silent the voices of change
does not have much respect for the principles of human rights
does not have much intelligence when it comes to parliamentary debates
does not have a clue of what good governance means
does not have any regard for the plight of the poor and their livelihood
does not have any respect for the intelligence of the faculty and students in our universities
does not have any shame in overstaying their welcome
does not have any interest in controlling crime
does not have any will to fight corruption
and does not have leaders that are wide awake,
and does not have any idea that spoiled brats and greedy ones are running the country and finally destroying not only the party but also the nation.

That's the price of arrogance. That's the price of corruption. That' s the price of losing touch with reality and a government losing its mind as well. That is what it is paying for – big time!

It has been our remarkable years of living dangerously, swept by the tsunami of a yellow wave, under the moonlight of a blood red sky. It has been remarkable for us and the world to witness battles being fought by the rakyat against the machinery of oppression— a corrupted machine run by corrupted minds of lesser morals.

By God's grace we shall win this war against the unjust. We shall win, by the will of the people.

We shall put justice in its proper place.

Hold on fast to your dreams

A few days before the Malaysian tsunami that swept away the powerful machinery of the ruling regime, sweeping it to the backyard of our national history, we were battling with this feeling that the regime would still be holding power and will continue to use it to oppress, intimidate, and to rob the rakyat – for another fifty years.

The African-American poet of hope, Langston Hughes once said:

"Hold on fast to your dreams. For when dreams die, life is but a broken-wing"

W.S. Rendra the great poet of the Nusantara once said the "world within.. the world outside must unite" in order for meaningful change to happen; in order for leaders to be true to his or her conscience and to answer to God.

We are at an exciting historical juncture. No longer are we being objects of history, but we have become makers of history. Time awaits no man or woman. History marches on; history crafted by those oppressed by their own people intoxicated with power.

No colours or barriers

Who would believe that we could have achieve such victory in a time when skepticism still reigns. Who would believe that we would, in our rage against the machine, overturned it and send those who owned it scrambling in all directions bruised and still unwilling to accept the defeat orchestrated by the rakyat. Yes, the power of the rakyat, or suara keramat rakyat, the sacred voice of the people, that made victory possible. From the silent and scared voices of the rakyat we now have a sacred voice that has spoken loud and clear and will continue to speak louder.

Onwards to the march of the power of the people that have begun to know no colors and barriers of religion, class, creed, and national origin. You are the reason why I am still standing here and not looking outward from some prison cell in Perak or Selangor – two states tsunamied by the yellow wave.

What next after the revolution? The celebrations are over. We need a GPS – a geo-positioning system – to help us create a better society.

We are all economic beings who need to see a better plan that will promise us a better life after what we have accomplished in this General Election. We do not have faith anymore in the New Economic Policy that has reared its ugly head in its 50 years of implementation.

We cannot have faith in the NEP that is creating robber barons out of the hard work of the poor. We can no longer be fooled by the argument that the NEP protects the rights of the Bumiputeras when only a few "sons and daughters of the soil" are plundering the wealth of this land and gradually but surely selling off our country to other robber barons from outside of this country. Is this the kind of Bumiputera hiding behind the mask of the NEP we want to have running this country?

These are the Bumiputeras who make different races mistrust each other, masking the real issue of oppression and distributive injustices that know no race, ethnicity, color, creed. These are the culprits that were created out of our own lack of understanding of what a "good society" is and what "radical multiculturalism" means and how these can offer us a sound philosophy of human development that prioritizes needs versus wants, virtue over greed, and peaceful solution versus structural violence. It is a matter of time we depose these "traitors" who call themselves defenders of this or that race, hiding behind the crumbling walls of the NEP.

Who is still speaking for the New Economic Policy – one that is used for fifty years first as a programme to help the poor but no has matured as a tool of the powerful to plunder the nation and to rape the environment?. Who would have thought that the NEP once designed as a strategy to alleviate poverty and restructure society has now become an instrument to make the poor poorer and the rich filthier.

A new dawn

You have entrusted us to fight for a better future. You have given us the trust to chart a new Malaysia. We owe you a dawn of a new Malaysia.

Our central economic principle is that "the right opportunities must be made available to every single Malaysian—opportunities to learn, opportunities to make an honest living, and opportunities to achieve our dreams". We will defend the rights of all Malaysians as guaranteed under our constitution.

Let us go forth in the direction of change, with our brand new economic agenda. Let us leave the abused and outdated New Economic Policy behind. How do we do this? You and I must take charge.

Courageous Malaysian who have known truth and justice, to fight for these, and to see how these are becoming a reality,

You continue to be the reason why this revolution is happening. I stand before you, with humility asking you to continue to support our struggles to be free;

You have answered the call to freedom.

You have risked your lives on the streets in order to demand for freedom.

You have not given up.

You will be free from the shackles of domination
Free from being harassed by the government the moment you want to speak up
Free from having to bear the burden of this regime's incompetence and corrupt practices,
Free from the being treated like second and third class citizens even though grandfather and great grandfather arrived here earlier that the fathers and mother of many of the Cabinet Ministers
Free at last we shall be
Free at last by God's Grace
Thank you. Thank you.

We shall work together to make our society better.
Thank God Almighty. We shall march on. We shall be free!

Three days that will shake Malaysia

I have been engulfed with sadness these days and overwhelmed by it yesterday, as I follow closely the developments leading to our “mother of al elections”. I am referring to the alleged flying in of dubious voters via special/chartered flights that might be the factor in deciding the victory of BN come May 6, 2013. On the status page of my Facebook, I wrote these notes:

1) DEEP SADNESS...

My feelings tonight... thinking of the magnitude of fraud and possible degree of destruction to my beloved nation... three days to the important day and major issues are not resolved yet. We are going to have an election and pretend that the winner will still govern our lives carrying a fraudulent mandate... sadness engulfing me - ar

2) GE13... a question.

Dilemma...

should we let Nature take its course

and Fate to dictate Free Will?

or should we tie our camel to the olive tree

and pray that it'll not be stolen while we watch

                                       the elections drama of the century? - ar

How do we understand our shattering hope and at the same time address our rage against the machine?

The latest allegation of the flying in of tens of thousands of dubious voters, whilst being made public and the nation now alarmed, could be a factor to shatter the hopes of Malaysian to taste a free and fair election. It is a serious allegation with far-ranging consequences.

A shattering Malaysian hope?
What will another win for BN entail, given its massive control of the media, men, machinery and even the minds of those it has clutched for 55 years in this grand narrative of hypermodernity, oriental despotism, hegemony, and the propping of a façade to disguise a failing state?

How will revenge and retribution look like? How will Malaysians see another period of time and energy wasted to settle scores - time ought to be used for national building and the improvement of the lives, minds, and souls of all Malaysians?

We have unresolved issues which make me wonder if we are actually ready to have an election. Project MyKad or IC in Sabah, the Sulu intrusion, postal voter ballot secrecy, alleged delibility of the indelible ink, and now the mega-issue of all, the “now-every-phantom-voter-can-fly” allegation - all these and what else are making this an election not only plagued with fraud, but one that is shaking the country at its fundamental core.

We are at a beautiful juncture in which we are seeing a genuine and heart-warming display of progressive multiculturalism and religious understanding at the grassroots and the responsive and responsible party-politics levels - something we have not seen much since the days of Mahathirism.

Yet the threat looming is the might of the machine that is pounding us to render us helpless in the face of a potentially fraudulent outcome of a most decisive election. We are seeing a no-shame display of the abuse power of a caretaker government in all aspects of campaigning.

A larger issue is our rage against the machine - one that is a marriage between the ideology, ideological apparatuses, and the corporate institutions whose interest have been to profit from the rakyat and to continue to patron a dying regime. This is an issue of political-economy.

Seriously, it is a structural and systemic political-economic issue of interlocking directorate-ships, controlling interests and a lack of basic ethics.

Knowing that companies which you support and patron for years are involved in aligning themselves with political parties that work against the interest of the people's just and peaceful demand for good governance ...

Knowing that these companies, some huge ones in telecommunications, shipping, infrastructure, entertainment and air transportation, are closely-linked with the political parties that are all out to destroy that nation in a fraudulent election that will destroy the future of our children, what then must one do?

Should these companies be fully-exposed of their link - to educate the people they profit from all these years and a public inquiry be made of the future of their operations?

It is a systemic and structural issue - an ugly aspect of the legacy of ‘Malaysia Inc.’, ‘privatisation’, and also that ‘Look East Policy’. In a country harbouring despotic inter-generational regimes such as Malaysia, for whom do these corporations serve?

What must we do?

How then must they be dismantled? Which pied piper paid for their pathological actions of bulldozing the rights of the people to have a safe and sane election for the sake of the peaceful and ethical evolution of a Malaysian nation - one in which a society is not made of phantom voters, instantly-made-legal illegal immigrants or simply those unfit to be taken in as "Malaysian citizens".

What then must we do to these corporate accomplices to the process of destruction of our beloved nation?

It is time to think of new telecommunications, infrastructural developments, and public transportation providers, etc. after this election.

It is time to seriously explore ownership and the control of companies based on the ‘cooperative system’ rather than leave everything to the ‘magic of the marketplace’ and the bulls and bears in the marketplace. There are actually no bulls nor bears, but beasts in corporate masks run by over-glorified propped-up billionaires created as ‘models of entrepreneurial excellence’.

There are only ‘great CEOs’ as inspiration to each race and religion that need a story of ‘rags-to-riches’ of our own myth of Horatio Alger - a narrative that the rakyat can salivate upon while still locked in the master-slave narrative of a Malaysian economy that is now a sinking bahtera merdeka, the great ship of Malaysian independence.

What then must we do in these remaining "three days that will shake Malaysia"?

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DR AZLY RAHMAN, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Johor Baru, holds a Columbia University (New York) doctorate in International Education Development and Master's degrees in the fields of Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies and Communication. He has taught more than 40 courses in six different departments and has written more than 300 analyses on Malaysia. His teaching experience spans Malaysia and the United States, over a wide range of subjects from elementary to graduate education. He currently resides in the United States. He has edited and written three books on Malaysia:  Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present and Future (2009), Thesis on Cyberjaya: Hegemony and Utopianism in a Southeast Asian State (2012) , and the latest The 'Allah Controversy and Other Essays on Malaysian Hypermodernity (2013)