Fellow Malaysians ... bring yellow flowers to the rally ... give to them.

 

MALAYSIANS: On July 9th. to promote peace and brotherhood/sisterhood and to exercise fundamental rights to freedom of speech, bring yellow flowers and give them to PERKASA and UMNO members ... they will appreciate your peace-loving gesture ... let peace and freedom reign ... we shall overcome .. with yellow flowers of peace ... FLOWER POWER TO ALL ... sing "Lancang Kuning" too if you must -- ar

BERSIH RALLY 2.0 : An essay in its honor

Behind the colour of change
Azly Rahman
Nov 21, 07 11:21am


In Malaysia, are the leaves turning yellow, too?
Are we witnessing the total deconstruction of the race-based political ideology and a breakdown of the economic and social relations of production?

Is the nation being haunted by a ‘yellow wave’ of change demanded by those alienated by the developmentalist agenda that seems to have favoured a privileged segment of society?

At the speed of how things are turning yellow, it seems that we have to content with such signs and symbols of systemic change as a reality.

Around three decades ago, the ‘yellow culture’ carried a negative connotation especially in relation to the invasion of the ‘decadent aspects of the western culture’. Today, we see a deconstruction of this perception; a mental revolution that is taking the colours of the constitutional monarchy as a symbol of war against the colours of the present race-based regime.

It is a war over the definition of ‘democracy’. It includes the question: who has the monopoly over Malaysian democracy? Can we continue to think like dinosaurs in an age of dolphin-think?

One of the nagging questions for our nation as we enter this challenging period for civil rights is this: what is Malaysian democracy and what is its future?

Key spokespersons of the government think that we are doing fine with the system and that we need to only improve the process.

Key spokespersons representing the wave of change and who challenge the ‘system’ think that the system is no longer working, as we face the realities of changing race-relations.

These are contending views of what ‘Malaysian democracy’ is - an interpretation of what the process of development of the people, by the people, for the people means. These are the views of the words ‘demos’ and ‘kratos’ of what a ‘government of the people’ should mean.

Democracy is rooted in economics. Our existence - including that of the king and the pauper, rebels and reformists, the Sultans and the hamba sahaya - as Marx would contend, is defined by the economic condition we are in or have created.

In Malaysia, the condition is defined by the pie baked by those who created the New Economic Policy that is now becoming a system of the New Economic Plutocracy.

Systemic corruption

I think the root of the showdown between the ‘yellow wave’ movement and the ‘red- faced’ power structure is economic in nature - true to the idea that we are all economic beings or of the specie homo economicus
.

We still talk about an economic pie as if it is a constant. The faulty tool is popular with policy makers who are bankrupt of alternative perspectives of looking at systemic change. They continue to defend the indefensible in a time when change is imminent and coming at a very fast pace.

Even newer generation of race-based leaders are ill-equipped with the fundamental character of these radical changes. They use rock logic to meet the demand of a fluid society. Rock logic includes the use of force to prevent demands to these changes.

We must now abandon the metaphor of the pie; one that is increasingly becoming synonymous with the race to meet the gains of material standards at the expense of the real issue - distributive and regulative justice. We ought to adopt a new form of justice that cuts across racial lines and one that looks at the poor in the eye and into their souls.

That form of justice will meet our nation's physical, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The present wave of dissatisfaction is not only an emanation of frustration over the issue of the judiciary and confusion over the line between the Legislature and the Executive; it is an emanation of a class-based issue, of which we are in denial.

Race is merely a sugar-coating of that nagging argument of this and that rights of this and that people; a coating that has become calloused with fossilised viruses that have corrupted the entire system since the British handed Malaya her independence on a silver platter. Race is a convenient basis for argument as it masks the issue of the ownership of power, knowledge and ideology.

Class-based system

The new issue facing us is class-based. We can longer use race and its sentimentality as a perspective to analyse what is gravely wrong with the developmental project we are pursuing.

We have subdivided ourselves into classes of the rich and poor from all the major races and the classes of those who owns the material and cultural capital. Our pattern of consumption, our daily grind, the kind of car we drive, the school our children go to, and how widely travelled we are, all reflect the class we are in.

But our politics is renewed every now and then to re-state the commitment to "correct the imbalances" using econometrics, without engaging in a sustained deep inquiry into the harder reality of living.

We are engaging in another exercise in keris-wielding, to renew of political-economic spirit that wishes to see the creation of more and more multi-million perhaps multi-billionaire Malays, Chinese, Indians, and other pribumi, but fail to inquire into the impact of such continuing policies that will further divide us into classes. No longer do arguments on racial imbalances, to me, seem to be attractive. Classes create antagonism.

Revelations of the issues of the distribution of wealth as in the multitude of unresolved cases of high-level corruption reflect how much public interest is intertwined with personal greed.

It reflects how much those in power invoke the mantras of "economic progress for this or that race" yet create a system that benefits this and that person/s. This is the game of equity we play. Our voters are either ignorant of the nature of interlocking directorate-ship in politics, or are too comfortable playing this game of patronage politics.

We somewhat do not get the clearest picture of what 30 years of ‘growth by equity’ policy has taken shape; who benefits? how are the benefits distributed? and why have the benefits of growth not trickle down as they theoretically should?

Price of progress

The human cost of development has taken its toll on the nation - that of those marginalised and lost-in-the-numbers game of the economic policy we design. We are startled by the nature of by-products of developments such as:

• The growing poverty (urban and rural) among Malaysians of all races, and we will also see rising poverty among immigrants who are helping build our economy;
• An increasing percentage of drug addiction among the Malays - especially those marginalised by an uncaring, uncreative, and uninspiring educational system that measures people by numbers and by truncated notion of achievement alone - and I am sure of other races in general;

• An increasing number of persons living with HIV/Aids as a possible result of the nature of the economic developmental paradigm we have constructed and the nature of schooling system that promotes a few and marginalises and alienates many;

• A growing population of our youth disenfranchised in our school system as a result of the slow-paced growth of teaching-skills acquisition - skills that are needed to make the school a very happy place one wherein children do not get bored and translate their boredom into drug addiction or gangsterism;

• A growing breed of our elected representative that cannot articulate logical analysis, prognosis, diagnosis to issues of distributive and regulative justice, but instead choose to continue to verbally clobber each other based on race sentiments;

• A clear continuation of the political paradigm in which our politicians are engaged - one that needs lots of money to keep one's constituency happy and even worse, to keep one's political position stronger;

• A clear picture of how our society has developed - the dangerous growth of classes of the multi-cultural rich and the multi-cultural poor and the relegation of the multi-cultural middle class into a new class of ‘urban poor’ whose life is tied to an increasingly dangerous pattern of hyper-modern consumption;

• A picture of the breaking down of families as a result of the changing patterns of our economy after the implementation of the NEP - there’s too much drive in human beings to earn more to make the first million Ringgit so that they will be ‘on par with the other races’. This has resulted in a dangerous form of psychological breakdown as a consequence of the mental breakdown of modern life. The work ethic imposed on Malaysians by global companies, especially profit-driven ones from the advanced nations, have impacted the way we look at work, juggle family life, pursue leisure and pleasure, and the way we create or break families;

• A dangerous trend of a breakdown of race relations, reflected in the nature and style of arguments we engage in, be they in Parliament or in our public schools - this is a continuing pattern of mistrust of the other race based on the struggle to outwit and out-greed each other in our pursuit of material wealth;

• A continuation of the grooming of political-economic dynasties based on the struggle to protect family interests as well as to create more wealth so that money can further sustain power - the idealism and ethics of the early years of Independence are now in the dustbin of history; we now watch a saga of what looked like a war between the Jacobins and the Girondins during the French Revolution, only this revolution is played silently, not for the future well-being of peoples of all races, but for the purpose of empire-building.

There are possible inroads to the long-term economic solutions we can undertake in order to rekindle the spirit of restructuring society and eliminating poverty.

Our current pursuit is creating the opposite effect. It is still-based on the protection of the interest of each race, ideologically derived form the British legacy of divide and rule.
The current path is creating classes of the extremely wealthy few and a growing population of poor. It is creating classes of the extremely wealthy few and a growing population of poor.
We need to go back to studying human nature and what kind of society we wish to recreate. The wealthy class wants to be ensured of control of economic resources so that the system can be maintained and be fine-tuned.

To meet the challenges of a nation that is beginning to think like a dolphin, we have to reject the notion of using force and violence to promote Dinosaur Age thinking.

I suggest we abandon Dinosaur Age thinkers in our march for real-time progress; one in which dolphins surf the yellow waves - elegantly and intelligently.

An essay on Malaysia's BERSIH Rally

The yellow wave and its durian effect
(written circa the first BERSIH rally)
Azly Rahman
Nov 12, 07 11:25am


"Bersih, Cekap, Amanah" - old political slogan

"Cemerlang, Gemilang, Terbilang" - new political slogan

"B.e.r.s.i.h" - slogan to get from the new slogan to the old.


I quote the first few paragraphs of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence:

"... When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Those are the words penned primarily by Thomas Jefferson, philosopher and statesman; words that became the document of American democracy that is still evolving.

Evolve we must

Evolve we must as a nation of multicultural poor yearning to break free from the shackles of poverty, alienation, massive corruption, and the tiredness of seeing power being abused and absolute power being abused absolutely.

Evolve we must by way of the slogans that have been fed to us religiously. By "we" we mean both the ruler and the ruled, the governor and the governed, the rakyat and the kerajaan (government). Essentially the process of "cleaning up" our act is both the desire of the ruling party and those who are protesting against it. We are a nation in need of therapy. We are one, essentially - our subjectivity and objectivity is being deconstructed and destroyed.

If we are to live with the truth and the power of the slogans we create, we must surrender to the will of the people who put us into power and wishes to see justice being served and a clean, transparent, and trustworthy government being put in place.

We have arrived at a juncture in our own brand of Civil Rights movement. We now need our own Magna Carta to teach our citizens the inalienable rights we have vis-a-vis the aristocrats; those that transformed themselves from the commoners to power-elites – through the huge machinery of money, media, and mental maneuverings and meanderings of the messages we created as the medium. We are made to live in a world of "managed perception".

Don't Pakistanize ourselves

Let us pray that we shall not have to Pakistanize ourselves in our struggle to exercise free speech and freedom of assembly. Unless we are like a nation at war with itself with us plunged as characters in the epic movie Lord of The Rings in which Humanity battles Humanoids in the war for natural justice set in antiquity.

The events that led to the declaration of emergency in Islamabad may as well foreshadow the nature and shape of things to come by the time campaigning and Election Day arrives.

Will the yellow fever, like the River HuangHe does, bring sorrow to the current regime? Is the nation seeing the seeds of destruction germinating? Will the Krakatau of the Malaysian rumbling and grumbling finally erupt?

I don't know. You and I can only make informed guesses. Man proposes, God disposes.

We can only predict and plan for the translation of theory into practice. That's what praxis is - the marriage of idealism and action to produce "cultural action for freedom", as Latin liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Denis Goulet, and Paulo Freire would say. Or like what the brave heart Che Guevara would embody.

Being a student of social revolutions in which I have closely looked at the anatomy of peaceful and violent revolutions such as those of The American, The French, Cuban, Iranian, Nicaraguan, Indonesian and also the Computer and the Internet, I believe there are interesting elements one can extract from the Nov 10 march.

Unlike the French Revolution, the march did not begin in a tennis court but from many angles but denied the final congregation in front of Freedom/Independence/Merdeka Square. Nor it deposed a grandson of the Sun King, but rather seeks refuge in the Malay Supreme Ruler. Unlike the Cuban Revolution in which a law doctoral graduate Fidel Castro had to use extra-legal means to gain power and return it to the people, the November march began with a legal application that was denied and was preceded by the Lawyer's Walk that sent memorandum to stop a judiciary rot. Unlike the Iranian Revolution in which a million people waited for Imam Khomeini, the Nov 10 march was a freedom march whose leadership is collaborative in nature. Unlike the Nicaraguan Revolution in which Daniel Ortega had to go underground to fight a guerilla war, Nov 10 saw not a single shot being fired nor Mat Rempits being hired. Unlike the American Revolution in which the French was General Washington's ally, Nov 10 was purely a people's protest devoid of outside influence. Unlike the most Indonesian Revolution in which Jakarta was burning, Nov 10 saw instead alleged chemical laced- water being sprayed on a rainy day.

Parallels and non-parallels there are.

But like the Computer Revolution that spread like wildfire and transformed millions into informed citizens Nov 10 was preceded by a good sense of informational war, with Malaysia-Today and a few other blogs hacked - the power of the Internet reigns supreme in spreading the yellow fever.

There is a durian dimension to the Nov 10 march of grievance.

The durian effect

The durian is a yellow fruit - an exquisite and truly "world-class" Malaysian fruit. It has a Marxist contradiction built in. It is pungent, banned in hotels and airplanes, tastes like vomit to some, feels like eating ice-cream in a Malaysian toilet to many, yet is has one of the most heavenly taste that even the most glorious of Malaysian statesmen and Supreme Rulers would not resist it over a pot of thick Malaccan coffee. In the yellowness of it lies heaven and hell. In it lies the joys and sorrow of tasting. It is a bitter fruit of freedom. Like the fruit in the song "Strange Fruit" rendered beautifully by the grand diva of jazz, Nina Simone; a fruit that tells America the story of lynching down South.

The yellowness of the durian is a metaphor of the yellow wave of change.

It's only the beginning of a peaceful revolt against the might of the machine. Indeed the next wave will be met with even more machines from the regime. Like in the movie Lord of the Rings. Like in the movie the Matrix in which things will multiply as Humanity battles with Humanoids conditioned by totalitarianism.

The photos of the rally tell us a lot about the nature of our peaceful marches - thanks to the leaders and the marshals. Thanks to the wisdom of the leaders who are in tune and in syn with the gentleness of the people. But the faces of the protesters read like Chairil Anwar's poems and WS Rendra's plays.

We have evolved into brave souls with brave hearts. But with finesse and patience must we revolt. If we can have the masses to continue to wear yellow (like the Irish with their St. Patrick greens) as a memory of Nov 10, we will continue with the message right till Election Day. Revolutions need martyrs, reformations need signs and symbols and significations - etched in the memory of even the little child near Pasar Seni pepper-sprayed by the Mighty Machine trying with paranoia to crush those voices no longer in the wilderness.

This is why we have the yellow fever. Clean, Efficient, Trustworthy - a good old slogan to arrive at. But clean up we must. With lots of shower. Not with ones with chemically-laced water though.

We must evolve - collectively.