‘From High Hopes To Shattered Dreams: The Second Mahathirist Revolution A Year After’ – Review
by Murray Hunter
Dr. Azly Rahman,
born in Singapore and brought up in Johor Baharu has seen Malaysia since early
post-independence days to the present. Azly has also experienced the Malaysian
education system both as a student and lecturer. He can relate those
experiences to the time he has spent as both a learner and educator with a
number of other education systems around the world. Being a thinker and writer
over a number of years on Malaysian society, education, and politics, Azly is
in a unique position to reflect upon Malaysia today, once again clearly under
the influence of Mahathirism, and once again within an education tragedy
unfolding. This is not my opinion alone, Academic and intellectual activist Dr
Sharifah Munirah Alatas recently mentioned Azly in one of her Free
Malaysia Today columns as a Malaysian academic who should be listened to much
more.
Azly has put together a series of focused musings guided by an
ingrained moral and philosophical conscience about what is now sadly happening
in contemporary education, society and politics within Malaysia. A national
mental derangement as Azly puts it, is suppressing the country’s ability to move
forward and take its place in the world. Malaysia’s ingrained racism, religious
narrowmindedness, neo-feudalism and institutionalized-cronyism is inhibiting
the country’s ability to place itself on the global arena where it matters
today.
Throughout the book he has woven international issues with what
is happening inside Malaysia, making this collection of vital importance to
every Malaysian concerned with the fate of the nation. The Pakatan Harapan’s
actions on human rights, education, justice, equity and inactions on diverse
issues like institutionalized apartheid and global warming are preventing the
nation to grow in a balanced and sustainable way with the virtues of truth,
justice, equality and equal opportunity that were promised before GE14.
We can
sense these disappointments in the passion of Azly’s writing. The great
betrayal is that Pakatan Rakyat sought office on the narratives of reform and
spun hope with the Rakyat for change, only to revert to the old racist and
Salafi-Wahabi tendencies that preserved BN rule for the last generation. This
is why Azly’s work is titled ‘high hopes, shattered dreams’, as the central
focus of this analysis is grand betrayal.
The continuation of the quota system for Matriculation and the
failure to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) were some of the first indications of the
emergence of Ketuanan Melayu 2.0, an ideology that will continue to ensure
blindness to envisioning a multicultural Malaysia.
Azly begins his collection of essays with a stark warning that
Malaysia is not immune from urban terror attacks due to the rampant freedom
extremist preachers are given to roam freely to extol their poison to the
community. He then presents 43 essays.
Part one entitled the Dilemma of Critical
Consciousness, focuses on contemporary issues that are skewing Malaysia away
from being a sustainable state where the Rakyat is supposed to evolve into
critical, creative, ethical and futuristic citizens. I will touch on just some
of his messages that I found profoundly important. Azly’s commences part one
with an allusion to Plato’s cave, the metaphor of the psychic prison. Through
this lens, Azly argues that Malay feudalism is a social construct borne out of
historical accident. This has been turned into a source of power by the elite
to control the Rakyat. Race, religion and class continues to be used by today’s
leaders to divide and conquer, just as the British once did in colonial times.
This is the nature of neo-colonialism in post-colonial Malaya, if one sees the development
of ideology from the perspective of a continuation of the logic of late
colonialism in an Asian despotic state.
In his essay Musings on a nation gone mad, Azly challenges Malays to
question authority, albeit intellectually. Royal myth and repressive twists to
Islam perpetuated by the power elite is suppressing clear perceptions of the
reality of truly free Malaysia. This is going to be a battle of perception and
cognition to create a metamorphosis that may truly free the Malay psych.
Revolutions and the institutionalization of meaningful change, he believes can
only be effective if there is a sustainable transformation of the
consciousness. This hypocrisy of using religion as controlling ideology is what
Azly points out; a country ruled by Muslim monarchs that one would not find in
true Islam and Ketuanan Melayu as a license to rape and plunder Nature and to
subjugate the mind of the powerless.
Islam, feudalism and a narrow view of the world has caused the
Rakyat to live under a veil of authoritarianism. Malays have been
misrepresented as buffoons, Ali Babas, gangsters and chronically dependent on
hand-outs by the ruling class to keep them subservient. The leaders show Malay
chauvinism while the Malay youth is caught up with drugs and girls become
single mothers.
Azly is calling for this moment in history time to restore Malay
dignity. Hegemony is the hidden enemy that needs to be unmasked,
psychologically. In Long live the Rome statute! Long live idiocy? Azly
shows his disappointment along with the Rakyat who put Pakatan in power.
Everyone has been sold out. His frustration on the failure of Malaysians to see
the importance of the internationally-agreed-upon statute could be read in his
tone. Why are there still many of the leaders ignorant of the universal values
and proposal for implementation? That was Azly’s anguish on the intellectual
poverty of those who failed to understand a simple logic of human rights.
Reformasi cannot happen within a bumi agenda
and the hopes of a truly Malaysian agenda are fading. Azly asks where is the
difference between the old and the new regime? The ideas and actions of the new
regime are exactly the same bankrupt concepts. Azly talks of reform that isn’t
on any political platform. That is the reform of the skewed Malaysian
institutionalized reality and the recreation of an egalitarian common truth for
all. This requires creating a culture of critical consciousness, which can
challenge and eventually dissolve all the myths perpetuated by the psychic
prisons of intolerance, racism, criminalizing of criticism and an
institutionalized version of truth to suit the needs of the elite to cling on
to power.
Azly offers a solution. That solution is to restore the truth of a
common heritage that the nation is made up of descendants of immigrants, share
that memory and move on in diversity. His stand is simple: embrace
multiculturalism to the fullest until the essence of humanity and empathy is
illuminated. We cannot settle for less in a country that offers the challenges
and opportunities of a vibrant concept of nationhood.
The essential question is now how to build a Malaysian Malaysia? A
Bangsa Malaysia, which requires a common history and common destiny, drawing
from the strength of diversity. Indonesians had a rebirth from the Sukarno era.
Malaysians need to do the same. Malaysia needs to move to the next level where
people do not think of themselves along strict communal lines: not
ethnocentrically as Malays, Indians or Chinese but as Malaysians with a pride
in their unique personal history.
Under the Pakatan Harapan there is no pursuit of a Malaysian
Malaysia. There seems to be no interest to forge that much-needed version of
nationhood. There is no political will. It is still about profiting from
divisive politics and to ensure that society is reproduced that way through
schooling. And therefore, we still have politicians eyeing for the top post
speaking with so much confusion of what it means to be Malaysian. The biggest
crisis in Malaysia is the crisis of identity and it’s been partially
manufactured. This hegemony comes from the education system.
In Part Two The Construction of Educational Confusion,
Azly looks closely at the education system. His arguments in all of the essays
point to one proposal: that there is no soul nor holism nor clear framework
guiding change expected out of the new regime. There is only rebranding of
projects. There is no exciting innovation that collectively would usher the
much needed educational system into newer frontiers, breaking new grounds in
the design of a new Malaysia in a globalized world in need of a new
understanding and implementation of a new citizenry. His fear is the
ever-creeping radical Islamism and the expression of Arabism as Malay culture.
Azly takes up the sources of one-dimensionality within the education system.
Institutionalized discrimination through quotas, showtime
paradigms like flying cars that have no substance except syok
sendiri, inciteful preachers being allowed to pollute the minds of the
country’s youth and using schools as medan dakwah to
destroy the pride of Malay culture through Arabism has colonized the Malay
mind. Indeed, Arabism has been pushed as a substitute for intellectual and
spiritual enlightenment, all at the cost of critical thinking, creativity and
moral reasoning. The system needs urgent reform.
Azly talks of returning to the year zero in a new education
revolution.
This revolution must topple the straightjacket of the
institutionalized apartheid system which clings onto the idea that only
Malay-Bumiputeras have special rights. This false sense of superiority is a
Malaysian tragedy, holding back both the individual’s potential and the
potential of the nation
as a whole.
as a whole.
No longer should the education system be allowed to produce the
lowest common denominator good and obedient worker for an industrial system
making the elite richer. It should be replaced with one that promotes a
critical consciousness, dignity, self-respect and independence.
Azly’s vision of Malayism is not Arabism. His vision is about a
renaissance of a recreated contemporary Nusantarian culture where Malays
perform sembahyang and not solat.
There are three essays making up Part Three. In the first essay,
the Third Force After Mahathirism is perhaps the centerpiece of
the whole book. There is an air of respect for Mahathir by Azly who sees under
the Machiavellian armor a person who wants the same aspirations for Malaysia as
himself.
However, there is a paradox here. Mahathir’s pre-occupation with
liberating the mind of Malays from the shackles of neo-colonialist domination
have led to a guided kleptocracy ruled by one man. In the innerworkings of
Pakatan Harapan, this has been a new Malaysian political dilemma. One man wants
to still govern in his own way, creating inner confusion.
Mahathirism is an ideology in itself, a product of the 80s, based
upon institutions which are repressive. This political mantra is now bankrupt.
Even if it not entirely so, it has mutated in newer forms. Malaysia’s hope for
a healthy and transformative democracy is stunted, bonsai-ed by the legacy of
one-man authoritarianism. Herein lies the hope for change and the ruptures that
are happening in the new coalition. Azly argues that a Trishakti third force is
required to restore Malaysia from the malaise it is in. For this a new leader
is important, and this new leader has to be found.
In this book Azly reveals himself to us. He goes back to the peace
in his early village life. He is an intellectual, a scholar in the classic
literature of freedom from repression, a patriot of a new Malaysia, a reformist
(if not a romanticist) when it comes to returning to core Malay values, a
believer in an inclusive Malaysia and not an exclusive Ketuanan Melayu
arrogance.
Perhaps
Azly’s guiding principle is the quotation he took from Tunku Abdul Rahman’s
1957 Merdeka speech,
‘….
but while we think of the past, we look forward in faith and hope to the
future: From henceforth we are masters of our own destiny, and the welfare of
this beloved land is our own
responsibility.
responsibility.
LINK TO BOOK : https://www.gerakbudaya.com/from-high-hopes-to-shattered-dreams--the-second-mahathirist-revolution
Murray
Hunter
1 comment:
Thank you for posting. This summary is wonderful.
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