Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Mahathir 'mudah lupa' about why Malays are poor By P Gunasegaram
Thursday, March 09, 2023
Malaysiakini : The only way you get many billionaires in a poor country is when you
give away the country’s precious resources in return for your own
well-being and the well-being of your party and politicians from your
party who got kickbacks aplenty from these businesses and businessmen.
You
cultivated a coterie of billionaires by giving them things such as
independent power generation, mobile telephone licences, toll roads,
construction contracts, gaming licences, water concessions, monopolies
and oligopolies through your much-abused privatisation and other means.
The
list of billionaires came not only from Malays but from other races and
included the likes of Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary, Francis Yeoh, Vincent
Tan, Ting Pek Khing, Eric Chia, Ananda Krishnan and many more.
You
appointed as your economic czar to distribute the largesse, your crony
Daim Zainuddin, who had unfettered power and who cultivated his own
coterie of billionaires who were often high-spending and lived a lavish
lifestyle, way beyond what most Malays could even imagine.
Whereas the person who helped you most to get to the top, the second
prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein, traipsed the countryside with his
walking stick to see rural development for himself, you ignored this,
and in the process a large part of the Malay population - you turned
your back on them.
Dr Mahathir Mohamad recently joined Putra
Farming
got a very low priority and our food production is rather low compared
to, say Thailand, which is more or less self-sufficient in food and has a
substantial food processing industry. But, you were too busy promoting
heavy industries and low-end manufacturing which required cheap labour.
So
ingrained was an industry in your mind that you allowed cheap
Indonesian labour in, starting with the plantation sector, where hordes
of Indians moved from their green ghettos to the urban ones, with
spillovers to all sectors of the economy as cheap labour spread
everywhere.
You skewed entry of migrant labour to alter the
religious and racial composition of the country but neglected to or
could not care two sen that many Malays were stuck in a rut of poor
wages for manual labour. You impoverished them, I will say that again:
You impoverished the Malays, Mahathir. You made them poor.
You and
your economic czar ensured industrial competitiveness by depressing the
wages of Malaysians, at least 60 percent of whom are Malay and now you
have the temerity to say you are saddened by their poverty when you
caused it.
Everyone saw through you
The
Malays saw through your deviousness, when your party Bersatu, was dealt a
blow in the Malay heartland in the 2018 election. Bersatu contested 52
parliamentary seats and won only 13 - a clear indication that you were
not responsible for the Pakatan Harapan victory.
With 13 seats you
still became PM on the promise that you would hand over power to Anwar
Ibrahim. You blatantly broke your word. The non-Malays supported you for
a while, perhaps partly because of DAP’s undue adulation of you and the
hopeless hope that they could control you.
But eventually, everyone saw through you. If any more evidence of
your lack of support base is needed, you and every one of your Pejuang
candidates lost their deposits in the latest elections. This left you
like a drowning man, clutching at weeds and straws to keep afloat.
After
the second round of dalliance with the disreputable Perkasa, you are
now disgracefully courting PAS while your son Mukhriz seems infatuated
with Bersatu.
Neither Abdul Hadi Awang nor Muhyiddin Yassin will
give you or your son the time of day although they may not be averse to
using you - they know you better than that. Were they not the ones who
got rid of you?
You might as well accept that your days are over -
you can’t fool people all the time. Nobody believes anymore that you
acted in the interest of the rakyat but for your own selfish ends - not
for the Malays, not for the Malaysians.
So, Mahathir, in your last
days, stay out - you have done more harm to this country than any other
single person, even Najib Abdul Razak, for he was only following the
path you set for every PM who succeeded you - using patronage and
corruption to the hilt to benefit yourself, your cronies and your party
in that order.
What is worse, you did it in the name of the Malays
- that you were developing Malay entrepreneurship when what you needed
to do was to educate them, giving them a means of getting better jobs.
You destroyed what was a decent education system.
Ringgit vs SGD
One
last thing. When you became PM in 1981, 24 years after our independence
in 1957, the ringgit was trading about on par with the Singapore
dollar. By the time you left in 2003, 22 years later, one Malaysian
ringgit was worth just 45 Singapore cents.
Following
the lead you set, it has declined more - one ringgit is worth about 30
Singapore cents now. How badly you have done when compared with a
neighbouring country which was about as developed or undeveloped as we
were then!
That should give you an indication of how bad your
management of the country was and how you were more responsible than
anyone else for poverty among Malaysians, of which 60 percent are
Malays.
You should spend your time in deep reflection and even
deeper regret over the enormity of the damage you have done to this
country and live in the knowledge that you were more responsible than
any other person alive or dead for the ills facing us.
Also,
realise that it will be next to impossible for anyone to equal your
infamous record with respect to this. And know this: Despite his
shortcomings, the man you despise so much and the one who suffered so
much under your stained hands, Anwar, will go down in history as a far
better PM than you have ever been, which is justice personified through
the hands of fate.
I shall stop writing about you anymore and let
you slide - not into obscurity but into infamy - an example of
everything a leader should not be and the hypocrisy, lies and sheer,
unbridled deviousness and crookedness you used to control this country
and its people.
That includes the Malays.
No one will be taken in by you anymore. You have had your time, and now it's over.
