Republic of virtue 5/09

Our real father of independence PDF Print
Posted by admin
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 11:31

virtue

The French thinker Voltaire once said: “There is no history, only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.”

Azly Rahman
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/2009/05/notes-research-strategies.html

And so, who is the father of Malaysia’s independence? This seems to be the impetus of our national debate. Intellectually I see this topic as highly stimulating for younger generations of Malaysians who are beginning to get the feel of, and exposure to, the postmodern sensibility.

If we desensitise sensitive issues, we will open up newer frontiers of thinking and understanding.We cannot keep on lodging police reports of 'sedition' every time somebody brings up questions we cannot answer. This only reflects our mental weakness in dealing with emerging issues. We must think like scientists and philosophers in order to seek better political alternatives. Scientific breakthroughs are based on the constant revision of theories and that create ‘Kuhnian Revolutions’.

Similarly, as a thinking nation constantly trying to understand history as a mirror of our existence, we must create spaces of dialogue on these issues so that our minds may become sharper and less prone to the attacks of unseen waves of mental colonisation that will eventually lead to physical, moral, and material colonisation.

Real issue

We must come to terms with the issue of ‘who is the real father of independence’ and explore perspectives to this question. I am sure we will arrive at an answer. I will offer an answer at the end of this essay. I am however more interested in the question of what makes us reach the decision to honour Tunku Abdul Rahman. He is already honoured. I am more interested in the archeology of the ideology and the process, rather than the product of this thinking itself. Why him instead of others? What institutional arrangement of political-economic relations decreed that he would be the one to be remembered/named as the grand Malaysian hero of independence?

There should be no controversy over the issue of deciding who must continue to be honoured as the father of Malaysian independence. We already have a whole city called Putrajaya as a continuing legacy - a testament of the rule of a ‘prince’ in the Malaysian cybernetic world recreated as utopia.

Those who write history has already decided on how to inscribe the name on this new Malaysian landscape. We should now instead argue about paradigms and perspectives and the theories of knowledge at how we arrive at such a ‘historical fact’, instead of demanding this and that person to apologise for saying this and that. We need to seek the history/genealogy of these questions. We need to revisit the questions instead of finalise the answers. I think historians like Professor Khoo Khay Kim need to also understand what the new thinking about history and historicising now means. Here are my thoughts on this.

Thinking about history

The old paradigm of Structural-Functionalism in thinking about history will honour men, monuments, mishaps and movements. This paradigm looks at history as a system of evolving structures primarily from ‘periodising’ perspectives. Hence we are asked to remember dates, events, names (of mostly men, buildings and monuments,) that will create bodies of knowledge called ‘historical facts’.

Structural-functionalists would be interested in looking at the stability of the system and how to maintain a pareto optimum level of our understanding of history. There are fixed bodies of knowledge that must not be tampered with and there is not much room for creativity and critical sensibility in re-looking at history. Our history textbooks are written by structural-functionalists and the bodies of knowledge produced are canonised as ‘official knowledge’. Hence, we have structural-functionalist historians such as Sri Lanang, Zainal Abidin Wahid, Zainal Kling, Khoo, the Andayas and others from the old school. Their role in society is to preserve official knowledge; in this case historical knowledge derived from and crafted based on selected memories called history.

Then there is the Conflict Paradigm in historicising - one that looks at history as patterns of conflict between peoples, tribes, classes, and nations over resources and the dissemination of ideologies. Conflict theorists look at history as written by the winners and poetry written by the losers. Hence we have the development of ideologies of nationalism and nationalisation of ideologies written by those who won the historical march of progress based on the might of the ideology.

I agree with Michel Foucault’s idea of history as an enterprise that is based on the notion of power/knowledge and that we need to be more interested in the archeology of knowledge that produce documents of history. We need to also investigate the act of writing history. ‘Historical facts’

Do ‘historical facts’ exist?

I think this is an oxymoron or a contradiction. It is a misnomer. We might talk about scientific facts or philosophical musings or religious doctrines, but not with precision talk about historical facts. Facts need to undergo several stages of verification and falsification. History is memory, and memories are recollections of selective perspectives that are formed through sense-perception. If we can forget precisely what happen last Thursday night and we do not have witnesses to tell us what happened, then we might have a poor recollection of the memory as well as inaccurate documentation of the events. That is the issue of knowledge/power in the language of post-structuralism.

Then there is also the philosophical problematique of ‘who gets to write history’. Marx would argue that history of ideas is the history of the ruling class. Many Marxists and Marx’s revisionists have developed further this notion of historicising to its current status as post-structural theories of knowledge in looking at history. The work of George Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Howard Zinn have exemplified this perspective in looking at history.

What does this mean to the current debate on who is the ‘father of independence’? It means a lot to the way we perceive what history is meant to teach. Whoever owns the means of producing historical documents owns the means of producing the ideology that will produce the means of producing the consciousness of the people. Sri Lanang wrote history that produced the ideas that shape the formation of the ideology of Malay nationalism. Khoo wrote history textbooks that produced the ideas that produced our thinking of what we think Malaysian history is. We therefore have a perspective in which the authors (Sri Lanang, Khoo) produce the texts (Sejarah Melayu, Buku Teks Sejarah) that produce the consciousness of what Malaysian history means, including who to honour as heroes and who will be branded as villains in history.

In the debates on philosophy and theory of history, there will always be contending views between Structural Functionalists and Conflict Theorists, between The Essentialists (Cultural Preservers) and Progressivists (Revisionists). No apologies needed. We need not apologise to each other on this debate. It is embarrassing to the health of intellectual discourse.

We need not call for a debate in Parliament on who is the real hero of independence. The current culture of parliamentary debates – of booing and yahoo-ing and name-calling – would not be conducive to the pristine-ness of this topic. It will be an unnecessary debate after all. Because we are not equipped with the paradigms canopying the issue. It is akin to saying that Batman is better than Spiderman in our intellectual pursuit for truth in the world of Marvel Comics.

We ought to ask the right questions and elevate the discussions to a higher dimension - one that will focus not on issues versus non-issues but rather on the way of seeing things. I wrote about this in a column on teaching history.

If we still insist on arguing about history, we ought to ask questions such as these instead:

• What makes us decide who is the hero and who isn’t in Malaysian history?
• Who benefits from the honouring of this or that person in history?
• How does our history honour the real makers of history - the farmers, the rubber tappers, the tin miners, the immigrants that built historical monuments
• How many of these unsung heroes perish as statistics in the process of glorifying this or that person? • How else may we look at history?
• Is the history we have been asked to learn credible? • What might a revisionist history of Malaysia look like?
• Who writes history and who pays the historians?
• Where are the ‘mothers’ in history?
• Why do we call history ‘his’ story and not ‘her-story’?
• Why do only some people or classes of people in history get to have their names inscribed onto buildings, monuments, roads signs, institutions of ideology, etc.?
• What happened in history?

I see tremendous value in teaching ourselves to ask these questions in history so that we may better frame issues that come our way at every Independence day. As a nation evolving through ‘historical patterns’ and ‘cycles of interplay between technology and consciousness’ rather than through the memorising of names of ‘peoples, places and events’ that has no real philosophical and therapeutic value, we need fresh new questions such as the ones I mentioned above. If we still insist that we have a parliamentary debate on this, we have actually not understood the history of the history of questions.

I think the real fathers and mother of independence are the free spirits within all of us multi-cultural human beings; those existential spirits within us that refuse to bow down to any sign, symbols, and signification of colonization, be they in human or material form. The real parents of our independence are the spirits that acknowledge the universality of the struggle for independence and who explore the idea that the purpose of studying history is essentially to change it - so that its meaning will evolve closer to those buried and forgotten, under the might, memory and marketed glories of ideologies, inscriptions, institutions, and individuals.

Must we then believe, as the great playwright Oscar Wilde said - that “…the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”?
OUR USUAL REMINDER, FOLKS:
While the opinion in the article is mine,
the comments are yours;
present them rationally and ethically.
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Comments (6)Add Comment
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written by cruzeiro, May 06, 2009 12:08:41
......Yes- We will learn a history of a Nusantara descended purely from Alexander the Great, where everything was world class, and the sophisticated people were living glamorously cosmopolitan lives with space-age science and technology at their disposal, imported straight from the deserts of Arabia.


II

Anyways - we get many proponents of the idea that “Tanah Melayu” was never really colonised – that it was simply a trading post for the British East India Company, and the Sultans were the Rulers who never lost their power during the days of the “White Tuans”.
But hold on a minute – didn't the British East India company dissolve in 1874? If East India Company was dead by 1874, who then ruled Malaya (even if they didn't have it in balck & white)? Can someone tell me that the Sultans were "almighty" and controlled the territories at their disposal?
Of course - you can indulge in technicalities or semantics, and try to redefine the word "colony" - but that doesn't change the fact that the Brits held power (just like what Umno is doing in Perak) and RULED their subjects, who may have been glorified as "Rulers" officially.

Umno was created by the Brits as collaborators, while they snuffed out the Leftist nationalists (of all races) through their Emergency Ordinance- post WW II - so that they can pass the govt to some "cronies".
This was in line with the agreement between Churchill and FDR for a capitalist new world order of nation-states. After all, the real "war for independence" was fought on the beaches of Normandy, and the allies in the "west" shed their blood for it. It was their blood, and they were gonna make sure that it was bloody worth every drop- in terms of power and wealth.


III

Meanwhile in Malaya, we only had boy scouts who were happy eating ikan masin, belacan & tempoyak, who needed the white man to teach them how to fight. The exceptions are of course the leftists and those who took up arms against the Brits after the WW II. Who knows anything about the KMM, PBM, PRM, PSM, Putera, etc etc etc anyways.
The youngsters of today would probably have never heard of the roles of people like Rashid Mydin, Ibrahim Yaacob, Rahim Kajai, Burhanudin Helmi, Othman Kalam, Abdul Karim Rashid, Hassan Manan and Isa Mohd. Mahmud in shaping Malaysia into what it is today. The CPM were all apparently just crooks who took up arms against the Japs for the fun of it. No Indians were heroes in their fight against the Japs or communists. You can just take a wild guess, as to how many of them were detained by the collaborators with the crown, under the Emergency Ordinance.

They will claim that the Malay Leftists were dissatisfied with the presence of foreigners who apparently "displaced" the Malays from the world of trade. They will claim that the leftists sought to deport all "pendatangs" in hatred.
They will however neglect to tell you that the collaborators were the ones who suppressed the Malays and left them with an education restricted to basket weaving and Quran reading - while they enriched themselves. They will conveniently forget that the leftists were up in arms against the apparently "independent aristocracy" who ruled the Malay world with absolute sovereignty. And the Brits couldn't care a damn what these guys did to their own kind, as long as their business wasn't affected.

Umno's "Malaya/Malaysia" never really "fought for independence" as such - they elite/ aristocrats who collaborated with the Brits, & "peacefully" negotiated terms with the colonial powers. This was the "perjuangan they thump their chest every so often about, to the awe of the very "educated" urbanites and the kampung pakcik/makcik. These elite were British educated guys who were "civil servants" of the no less than the British crown. As Farish Noor put it - MCKK produced a number of compliant Malay clerks and peons (of royal birth, no less) to man the middle and lower echelons of the colonial bureaucracy.

A DIY History Lesson ...
http://cruzinthots.********.co...esson.html
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written by ohuat, May 06, 2009 12:27:21
The Real Father of Independent is the one that fighted the Japanese during the war and go against the British after the war. Their resistance made British give us independent. Just a reminder to all that during the Japanese occupation, some of our ketuanan were wearing the Japanese Army uniform making friends with the enemies.
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written by Loh, May 06, 2009 14:27:38
When the leaders of the three communities worked together to gain independence, they wanted success. They agreed at that time that article 153 was to be provided for 15 years and subject to review, to assess whether there was a need for continuation, and if so, for what period. Beyond that people of the various communities are equal. Malaya was for Malayans, and so too Malaysia for Malaysians. History of the country serves to tell the people the past.

The question of who was the father of independence would be interesting in terms of honouring the person who contributed seminally to the success of gaining independence. The outcome should not influence the relative position of the people, or rather the communities, in enjoying equal status in the country.

Unfortunately, over the years UMNO has succeeded in lording over the other communities, and they are looking for an excuse to justify their actions. Thus, they started to distort history, and they would not even accept the fact that people who might have been classified as against the establishment during the colonial days as having contributed obliquely or indirectly to the march for independence of Malaya.

History to Malaysian students will remain a subject for them to memorise dates of events, real or concocted by UMNO politicians. They are to live lives without the benefit of the knowledge of history. They too are to be manipulated by politicians to ensure that they remain elected representatives, and to possess the map to the goldmines.
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written by nanyangren, May 06, 2009 22:57:33
5 Potugese came and we ran away.
4 Dutch Ao came and we developed amnesia.
3 Armed Mo (Brits) came and we raise our hand to 'tabek'
2 Jap came and we shrink in fear and do their bidding
1 Armed No came we and we develope back ache bending over too eagerly.
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written by charcoy feng, May 07, 2009 01:50:41
Dear Dr Azly,

Feel like you are refreshing us with some of your previous writings. You area one of the people who guided me to learn more about our hostory and I've been constantly looking for informations on the happenings from 1930 onwards. It really disgust me to hear anything about Prof Khoo the mythical history text book writer. I've said this before... Dear Dr Azly, can you please rewrite our history? At least on certain important facts which have been twisted? To counter the lies that have been taught for so long.

For those who wants some informations to help answering series of question given by Dr. Azly, please log in to http://matamin.********.com

Kampung Pendamaian Sukhirin..

Regards,

charcoy feng http://djnascimanto.********.com
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written by Apache3, May 10, 2009 06:12:19
PR take note that Dr.Azly Rahman should be the preferred person to head the Min Of Education in the event PR takes over the FED Govt.
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