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."
Malaysia cannot move forward with bumiputera agenda By Commander S THAYAPARAN (Retired) Royal Malaysian Navy
Monday, September 18, 2023
Malaysiakini : Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad wrote a very optimistic piece about this country.
I do not doubt he believes that Malaysia’s best days are ahead of us.
He’s
hopeful for our country and Nik Nazmi is one of those political
operatives; if you read his articles and hear him speak, he manages to
pull it off.
Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad
Nik
Nazmi, a generation of us came from those better days. At a time in
Malaysia, where we truly believed that the future was our best days
ahead of us.
It was a time when “ketuanan” politics and bumiputera rights didn’t have a chokehold on us the way it does now.
Look at the culture of the dominant polity. Look at how it has changed. How everything is “haram” and where the state hunts non-conformists.
For
a brief period, there was a time in the state security apparatus when
we worked together as Malaysians. I swear to you, remembering how the
different ethnic groups worked and played together, you could believe
there was a Bangsa Malaysia.
Those better days became the long Umno watch and the pragmatism of the politics of complicity.
The quote that opens this piece is the key to why this Malaysian project is bound to fail.
I mean fail as a multiracial democracy, that is.
Effective social policy?
First,
there has never been a Malay or non-Malay operative who has been
apologetic about the bumiputera agenda. There has never been a time in
Malaysia where a political coalition has endorsed needs-based
empowerment programmes.
The current prime minister had the
right-ish strategy in his reformasi days when he claimed that
needs-based empowerment programmes would benefit everyone, and the
Malays the most because they were the majority.
For non-Malays, this kind of talk was manna from heaven.
After
decades of the old maverick, this kind of rhetoric reminded the
non-Malays that maybe Malaysia’s best days were ahead of us.
Needs-based programmes and the bumiputera agenda are mutually exclusive.
The
former is a policy that operates on the assumption that the inequality
of a particular society could be remedied by applying state programmes
on the most disenfranchised regardless of ethnicity and based on
economic variables.
Whether this is an effective social policy is open for debate.
You
could ask Bersatu operative Wan Saiful Wan Jan about this but keep in
mind his views have changed - calling affirmative action policies to be
“morally wrong” and unjustifiable, even from the perspective of data and
the Constitution, Wan Saiful was of the opinion that affirmative action
policies, at the root of it, are discriminatory.
Tasek Gelugor MP Wan Saiful Wan Jan
Discrimination,
as it is, is wrong, he claimed. And even if affirmative action is
positive, it cannot be used as a means or a reason to justify
discrimination.
He saw Malaysia, as it is now, as a divided nation, and the line between needs and race for affirmative action becoming increasingly unclear.
And
this is the point. Rational people can have honest discussions about
affirmative action programmes and we can discuss these as “Malaysians”.
The latter is designed to disenfranchise minorities from the political and economic landscape. Nik Nazmi was being delicate.
The
bumiputera agenda is based on the odious foundation of Malay rights and
privileges. Successive prime ministers have attempted to leverage the
bumiputera agenda to remain in power.
Race-basedagenda
What
we are really talking about here are government programmes and
institutions that would carry out this race-based agenda ostensibly to
serve the average Malay rakyat but act as a vehicle for handouts,
employment and cronyism all paid for by taxes from everyone including
the non-Malays.
Anyone who questions the bumiputera agenda is
immediately deemed to be against the social contract, against the
Malays, and demonised by partisans.
We cannot honestly discuss the bumiputera agenda because most people are not rational regarding this issue.
This is not to say that a visionary Malay leader could not have a bumiputera agenda.
This leader could want to change the majority demographic radically and he or she would need a bumiputera agenda to do this.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim
So, what exactly is Anwar Ibrahim’s bumiputera agenda?
I
have argued before that if Anwar defines his bumiputera agenda as a
class-based agenda – “…. (dissonant as it sounds) and reforms the
system, aid goes to the majority, especially the disenfranchised as
opposed to the elites.
“Reforms of state institutions that
minimise corruption and deregulation which minimises cronyism are
structural bumiputera issues that could be a policy that even non-Malay could back.”
Ultimately, no country survives an apartheid-like system where its citizens are ghettoised into racial and religious enclaves.
Locked down
People
like to talk about assimilation but in every functional democracy, the
assimilation is based on shared values where everyone is treated equally
and notions of religious and racial supremacy are the provinces of
racists and charlatans who would destroy a democracy.
Anwar has the non-Malay base locked down tight.
He can do anything he wants and they will comply and even shut down dissent expressed by Malays and non-Malays.
The question that Malay political operatives should ask is this. Who will the defenders of “bangsa” (race) and “agama” (religion) fight when the non-Malay demographic becomes electorally insignificant?
That is the problem with the bumiputera agenda. It pits the Malay polity against each other.
