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What UMNO REPS NEED TO TALK ABOUT

by Azly Rahman

As a child growing up in the birthplace of Umno in the 60s, who saw his beloved grandfather a devoted member of this party of the 50s cry like a child in a corner by his radiogram when Abdul Razak Hussein died in the 70s, and one who has studied how this party stopped progressing by the early 80s, degenerating from a party of pride and dignity to pariah and dying with diseases of greed and gluttony by late 90s, I would like to suggest the following be discussed in order to lend the benefits of a life-support system to it.

I am also suggesting a poem be read out by the members. The following should be my humble suggestions for Umno, a party my ancestors, too, were members of, to undertake:

• Coming up with strategies to create a better understanding between the races, since we’ve been together for centuries?
• Designing our education system to be inclusive of all Malaysians with each race treated on equal terms,
• Helping any group progress, regardless of race, religion or political affiliation, since we are all lawful citizens and we are not going back to “where we belong”,
• Dismantling all systems that will perpetuate hatred amongst us and redesign our lives around celebrating our strength in diversity,
• Find ways to unify all races as one dignified race of Malaysians united against any threats from outside (if there are any real or imagined),
• Coming together as Malaysians to redesign our education system that will truly enhance children’s understanding of concepts, skills, attitude to become good learners, global and transcultural in outlook, and will grow up to see each other as a human race with a common humane destiny, rather than see more divisions and destructions,
• Collaborating with all races to see how best we can help those who are marginalised regardless of race and religion, and how best we can design an economic system that will promote cooperation, collaboration, and the enculturalisation of conscience and conscientiousness amongst us, rather that perpetually create competitions that lead to hatred and warmongering,
• Mediating the differences between Muslims of different interpretive practices, schools of thoughts, ways of leading their ‘Islamic life’ rather than create bogeymen and bogey-women for the purpose of witch-hunting and persecuting each other of the things we cannot fully understand,
• Stopping the total closing of the Malay mind by constantly instilling fear of themselves since time immemorial, since feudal times, so that the Malays can be spared of being called stupid, weak, lazy, and dependent on Umno as savior - all these a perfect model of a Master-Slave Narrative,
• Asking all members and members of your race-based component parties to read Thomas Kuhn’s ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ and to be prepared to exist merely as world-class culture clubs rather than hay-wired political parties, due to the nature of changing times, paradigm shifts, and the realisation of the true meaning of ‘social contract’.

How about those suggestions above for a change and for better speeches in future?

Umno leaders and delegates can read this poem, maybe... instead of those hate-filled speeches clenching fists of fury awkwardly.

‘ode to folks of kuala lumpur city’

even if in your lifetime you will taste poverty
aplenty
live a life corrupt-free
and with highest dignity
... there is beauty in deep reverie
when others are living a life obsessed with money
i have seen friends and family fall flat on their face
for a life of greed and gluttony
never take a single cent you do not deserve out of your hard work
and reward you wait patiently
that was the constant advice given by our ancestors remembered so lovingly
how much must one accumulate in life to prepare for one's life
in the uncertainties of eternity
the daily papers tell me how corrupt this malaysian society has chosen to be
millions and billions changing hands with people refusing to work hard like the coolie with the deepest sense of honesty
dig not your million-dollar-grave, friends and family
people these days are getting crazy
over money money money
offer me not a million a billion a trillion maybe
these have no meaning for me who prefers a life of simplicity
where i could ride the, bus, meditate on the train, or watch ships sail the seven seas
i could do these without any worry, where my next million going to crawl to me
how many souls i will need to destroy - him as utility and his entire family
in my path towards achieving the highest glory in life based on money aplenty
no, i shall not sacrifice my cave, my poetry, my love for philosophy, the arts and humanities, my love for humanity, my freedom

to take my midnight walks along highways taking me to the the sea and its serenity
a free spirit i am
blessed will be i hope all - whose life in this kuala lumpur city
is about destroying each other as taught by machiavelli

A FRIEND'S TRIBUTE TO HIS BAND OF BROTHERS !

An Interstellar view of ‘Malay-ness’

by Azly Rahman

 

Of late there have been intensifying debates on ‘Malay-ness’ and that political parties will continue to engage in this, conducted within the framework Malaysia’s ‘commanding heights’ (read Vladimir Lenin’s essay) or the economic and ideological basis of this country as a hypermodern state.

Reading some seminal work on evolutionary biology, eugenics, social Darwinism, and the ‘mitochondrial Eve’ as the first human, questions came to be demanding perspectives on what actually is ‘Malay-ness’ and whether the ‘Malay’ exists and what does it have to do with culture, consciousness, and human progress in a multicultural society such as Malaysia.

I recently wrote these on my Facebook page:

“THE TRUTH is ... THE MALAYS

are not the first race/people on planet earth
as will be soon claimed by pop-pseudo-evolutionary biologists
the Mitochondrial Eve from Mother Africa
was the first ... then here is migration and variations
Malay-ness and ‘other-raceness’ is
merely a construct
mere illusion,
mere construction,
merely an idea of social dominance
not to be taken seriously
and to write a history
or a theory of jealousy
race, ethnicity do not exist and has no scientific basis
so you politicians - stop whining
and complaining
and scheming
and fighting till we bleed
read more science and become more human
treat each other like human beings
like what Mother Afrika Mitochondria preaches - ar

Is ‘culture’ 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 words 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 institutionalised 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 colour and appearances to have use of to 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 symbolised 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 globalisation and late capitalism.

I am still thinking. I don’t have the answers. I have only more question on whether the ‘Malay’ actually exist and if one needs to defend the people, through political designs. For too long we have been dwelling upon this problematique. Many have written about it.

Maybe we have been asking the wrong question all this while and fighting the wrong battles and setting up the wrong race-based institutions, based on the wrongest premises of winner-only-crafted history. This question by the way, was inspired by a movie I watched recently - Interstellar.

What, then is the answer? Or rather- what should be the questions?


BELOW IS MY LATEST BOOK 
(IN MALAYSIAN BOOKSTORES in December 2014)

ASIAN DEMOCRACY : DOES IS EXIST?

MY LATEST BOOK ON MALAYSIA'S CULTURE of CONTROLLED CHAOS -- December 2014 release

BOOK EXCERPT 

Excerpt From: 

Controlled Chaos: Essays on Malaysia's 'New Politics' beyond Mahathirism and the Multimedia Super Corridor. Kuala Lumpur: SIRD 2014

" OF MARXIST THEORY AND MH370

... Thinking of the still missing Malaysian airplane MH370, contemplating on a Marxist theory of informational diffusion, I came up with these random notes on media oligopoly I am sharing in this week’s column:

Information wants to be free and wishes to leave the shackle of control and the kingdom of officialdom.

Marx once said that whoever owns the means of production owns/ controls (re: Vladimir Lenin’s classic essay on ‘commanding heights’,) the production of consciousness, and further controls the evolution of the act of knowing and the contents of what is to be known because what is known is produced as artifacts with politics of control structuring them. CNN, the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Time-Warner AOL and media corporations control the production of what is to be known, albeit appearing to be producing ‘objectivity’ hidden under the shibboleth of ‘liberal-democracy’ whilst in essence governed by the hegemony of the tightly-controlled news and informational oligarchic empire of consciousness-production.

This might sound like a (Noam) Chomskyian analysis of the postmodern, post-information age paradigm of media production re: the reporting of the missing MH370. It could as well be a Chomskyian view in need of a further work of deconstructionism.

There are classes of control of knowledge-production and those producing information in the ongoing reporting of MH370.

Level 1:

Those who know the whereabouts of the aircraft, such as leaders of the game, such as presidents and prime ministers playing the role of ‘chief-of-staff of armed forces’, etc. in collaboration with the warrior -commander-Kshatriya class and the most elite of the intelligence unit and working in tandem and alliance with military and supra-intelligence allies, the secret must be kept (from Edward Snowden or Julian Assange) as long as the national and international security is safeguarded - the plot must be kept intact and the show must go on...

Level 2:

Those who know the ‘unsealed part of the story’ and will be playing the role of making sure the world and the public knows what’s happening, in the name of freedom to and funnel in as much as possible issues versus non-issues and speculations and half-truths to feed the four-eyed viewers who are starved for information and drowned in speculations.

That’s the role of the media, whether in America or in Malaysia. The longer one gets glued to the TV, the higher the ratings, the more big advertisers will pour in money.

But the media will only be allowed to view a certain amount of secrecy.

CNN will not talk about speculations that the US government and its media and military ideological apparatuses know what is happening and perhaps instead the focus will be on the incompetency (rightly so...) of the Malaysian government in handling this with her bumbling and fumbling technology and techniques of handling security (again, rightly so... with all these flip-flop, contradictory statements, and true-false vacillation of official reporting, and those elusive and informationalhide- and-seek-and-peekaboo type of reporting we hear since day one of
the mystery unfolding. That’s what the media is good at and will profit from. To report on speculations that the army or the government is perhaps involved in a huge cover-up will not be good - it will mean a media kamikaze of epic instant death proportions.

CNN will report on the human side of the story, bringing in expert after expert, lullabying viewers with a thesis-antithesis-synthesis fiesta of media party and focus on by the minute day-to-day coverage of the search for an object in many vast oceanic haystacks... the rescuers and commanders of the each search and rescue and recovery team do not have access to the ‘sealed information’ on what actually happened and what is still happening.

The sealed information lies with those in Level 1 above. Those searching are committed to their search and doing their job for the country and for the family and in the name of solving a most mind-boggling mystery (although Google Earth can photograph your car’s plate number from outer space).

From the point of view of revenue-generation, the longer the search, the more each team can charge the Malaysian government. As of today the United States has spent an equivalent of perhaps US$5 million to be billed to the Malaysian government sooner or later.

Level 3:

Of the owners of knowledge of what happened to MH370 are the classes of people who had consumed the information produced by those in Level 2.

In essence, there is both chaos and structure, and complexity and simplicity in the way we understand the kaleidoscopic and fractal nature of informational flow.

And who would Marx pronounce as the winner in this informational war, a Mahabharata of media mayhem of the construction of reality?

Not human beings. But technology. Media technology. Manipulated by the Military-Industrial Complex. The Frankenstein of our Orwellian World of 1984 inhabited by members of the Animal Farm.

Welcome to our global village.

... -- Azly Rahman

INTERSTELLAR II

(as inspired by Dylan Thomas)
"Interstellar II"
  

yes, do not go too gently into the night

its darkness is a calmness that rages
in the singularity of the vastness of the universe
you and I share
and unite will we be
as the sound of the distant waves of a planet yonder gently whispers
calling us into the night
whence no soul except you and I walk
in the innocence of our youth
as if in a garden of the beginning of life
a pasture of Love reigning supreme we reside in
looking at the stars
wondering where we are
uniting
parting
uniting
departing
uniting again
like a story those sages tell
a union of singularities
with Time and Space in-between us
a mere calculation
of coordinates
of men and women in white coats
endlessly figuring out
what governs our union
if not -- Love and only Love
as a first cause of the Universe supreme
-- go now, gently into the night
you and I 

-- azly rahman

Building schools for all Malaysians?

by Azly Rahman

 

I am hoping that either the Barisan Nasional or Pakatan Rakyat will take up the idea of this new brand of schooling to propel to country into a new era of educational reform as we approach 2015.

The initiative should be started by the Selangor government run by Pakatan to showcase what the BN regime has not been able to do in meeting the schooling and human capital needs of the 21st century, as well as for national unity. I have been writing about this model for years and have even proposed to educational leaders from both governmental camps. I call this initiative Akademie Renaissance (AR) Schools and would like to see it come to fruition in my lifetime.

This initiative will propel the state of Selangor into a major phase of educational reform, partnering in its effort to showcase the nation and other countries a model of a truly global school that harmonises technology, culture, and total human development from the level of kindergarten to graduate school.

It will have its mission in preparing children to become global citizens and experts in the fields of study they will choose as a career, through a systematic process of schooling of the highest standards, from kindergarten to high/secondary schools.

The educational objective is to create ‘academies’ that will become ‘feeder schools of choice’ (specialised) to prepare students for entry into top Asian, American, British, and other world universities of high standing in which English is the medium of instruction. The initial project will be the building of secondary/high schools.


They will be modeled after the most innovative of educational philosophies whose vision is to create thinkers, innovators, and life-long learners who will be successful at all phases of learning and will contribute to the betterment of society and to Malaysia in general.

They will be based on a curriculum that is distinct from the governmental school, focusing on English Language as a lingua franca as the medium of instruction so that the students will be prepared for entry into the world’s top ranking colleges/universities whose language if instruction is English. A high level of proficiency in this language is therefore necessary as skills mastery.

Faculty members will consist of those from diverse local and international backgrounds, skilled in the art and science of teaching and committed to the principles of highest academic excellence and global education, and student emotional and cultural growth.

They will be the premier college preparation schools which will give admission priority to the best and the brightest of children of the poor of all races in Malaysia. The aim is to provide the best quality education to children who come from families who are in the worst economic conditions and to give them all the opportunity they will need to be successful enough to give back to their families and community.

A criteria is also to give priority admission to those whose parents have never had a college/university education and to orphans of all ethnic background.

Alleviation of poverty regardless of race

The vision of this new genre of schools is to have a population that reflects the true composition of multi-ethnic Malaysia who will further demonstrate that they will still continue to succeed against all odds and be leaders with a conscience clear enough to contribute to one of Independent Malaysia’s two noble goals of development - the alleviation of poverty regardless of race.

The schools will not only be internationally-linked as ‘university-college-lab-schools of global-experiential learning’ in which the curriculum is based on cutting edge 21st century informational-society driven paradigm of learning and teaching and expected outcomes, but also will be architecturally innovative; one that will harmonise not only the elements of living much needed in the 21st century but also be culturally-intellectually responsive.

In other words, these schools in all states in Malaysia will have a unique design that will harmonise tradition and modernity.

These experimental schools will also be an educational facility for community education and entrepreneurial activities linking local production of cottage-industrial artifacts to the global market, utilising advanced digital, cybernetic, and virtual communication technologies for students to help the local community to participate in the global business.

In the area of community education, it will also house specialised galleries showcasing historical artifacts of from local-historical materials collected and curated by students, with the help of faculty.

They will essentially be ‘research-driven college prep schools’ in which at every level of learning, students will be employing primarily scientific thinking as a means to acquire and produce knowledge and to further create artifacts useful both for the advancement of theoretical knowledge as well as those practically useful for society.

In essence, Akademie Renaissance (AR) will be 21st century schools showcasing best practices in global education and will have the state as a first campus.

I hope there will be an interest in experimenting with this radical-humanistic change. I hope it will come from the Selangor government if it wishes to show commitment to meaningful reform.