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."
Teaching history or myths in our schools? By Ranjit Singh Malhi
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Malaysiakini : History taught in our schools should reflect what actually happened,
not what we wish had happened. More fundamentally, history has the power
to unite a nation, but only when it is narrated truthfully and
inclusively.
We would do well to heed the most pertinent reminder
by the late academic Zainal Abidin Abdul Wahid, who warned that
“Unpleasant facts or events must not be brushed aside” and that
“Students in schools must be nurtured and educated with history grounded
in truth.” These words ring with particular urgency today.
Unfortunately,
since 1996, young Malaysians have been primarily learning a form of
“government-sanctioned history” – one largely viewed through the lens of
a single ethnic group and skewed towards promoting an ethnocentric
ideology premised on Malay-Islamic dominance, or the divisive concept of
“ketuanan Melayu” (Malay supremacy).
This
selective narrative has not only distorted the past but has also
undermined the very purpose of history as a disciplined study grounded
in evidence.
The problem of historical distortion extends beyond school textbooks.
It
began with the Form One volume introduced in 2016 and the Form Five
volume in 2020, and has since been compounded by the conduct of several
historians who are arguably guilty of committing what can only be
described as “intellectual crimes” – distorting history and making
baseless claims that contradict clear-cut evidence, including official
statistics.
One striking example concerns Parameswara, the founder
of Malacca. The Form Two school history textbook (2017, page 82)
perpetuates the myth that Parameswara converted to Islam in 1414.
Several ethno-nationalist historians go further by asserting that he
adopted the name Megat Iskandar Shah upon conversion.
This claim
collapses under the weight of historical evidence. As stated by the late
Khoo Kay Kim in his book “Malay Society: Transformation and
Democratisation” (page 8), “It is almost certain that his
[Parameswara’s] son succeeded him in 1414, assuming the title of Megat
Iskandar Shah”.
This conclusion is corroborated by the Ming
Shih-lu, reliable Ming records, which state explicitly that Megat
Iskandar Shah went to Emperor Yung-lo’s court on Oct 5, 1414, and
declared that his father, Parameswara, had died.
Leading
scholars - including OW Wolters, CH Wake, Mary Turnbull, and BW and LY
Andaya, as well as Sejarah Melayu - concur that the first Malacca ruler
to embrace Islam in the 1430s was Seri Maharaja, who assumed the name
Muhammad Shah. Yet these well-established findings are conspicuously
absent from our textbooks.
Development of KL
Equally
troubling is the silencing of the phenomenal role played by Yap Ah Loy
in the development of Kuala Lumpur. Worse still, two historians have
claimed, despite clear-cut and contradictory evidence, that Raja
Abdullah was the founder of Kuala Lumpur and that the town originated
and developed as a Malay settlement.
Contemporary “people on the
spot” – including Frank Swettenham, who later became the resident of
Selangor in 1882, and William Hornaday, an American zoologist who
visited Kuala Lumpur in 1878 – tell a very different story.
Yap Ah Loy
So
do earlier history textbooks, such as the Form Four history textbook
published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in 1979 and the Standard Four
History textbook published in 1981.
Official
records, including the 1879 Police Census of Kuala Lumpur and the 1959
Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council publication, together with the works of
leading authorities on Kuala Lumpur’s early history such as JM Gullick
and SM Middlebrook, all converge on two critical and indisputable facts:
Kuala Lumpur originated and developed primarily as a Chinese township,
and Yap Ah Loy, the third Kapitan Cina (1868–1885), was primarily
responsible for its development.
According to Swettenham, Kuala
Lumpur in 1872 was “a purely Chinese village, consisting of two rows of
adobe-built dwellings thatched with palm leaves”.
In a similar
vein, the 1879 Police Census of Selangor reveals that Kuala Lumpur’s
population stood at 2,330, of whom 82 percent were Chinese.
Raja
Abdullah’s only claim to being the founder of Kuala Lumpur rests on the
minor and incidental fact that he sent 87 Chinese miners in 1857 to
mine tin ore in Ampang – an area that was a different district
altogether from Kuala Lumpur.
As noted by JM Gullick, Kuala Lumpur
grew from the settlement established in 1859 by the first Kapitan Cina
of Kuala Lumpur, Hiu Siew, and his business partner Ah Sze, near the
confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers, formerly Old Market Square
and now Medan Pasar.
Significantly, the Kuala Lumpur Municipal
Council celebrated Kuala Lumpur’s 100th anniversary in 1959, not in 1957
– an official acknowledgement of the city’s true origins.
Orang Asli and produce
Perhaps,
one of the most serious shortcomings of our school history textbooks,
however, is their denial of the historical role and significance of the
Orang Asli. There is no acknowledgement of them as the original
inhabitants or “sons of the soil” of Peninsular Malaysia.
Nor is
there mention of their crucial role in early international trade as
collectors of forest produce, their service as porters and guides, their
appointment as “penghulus” (leaders), their role as the fighting force
during the Malacca sultanate, or the historical fact that Minangkabau
immigrants in Negeri Sembilan married Orang Asli women to establish land
rights.
Our history textbooks must tell the truth, as powerfully
expressed by Abdul Rahman Andak, secretary to Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor
in 1894: “The aborigines were the proprietors of the soil, and we, the
Malays, came there (Malay Peninsula) from a place in the Island of
Sumatra.”
Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor
This
truth is further reinforced by demographic evidence. Malaya’s
Indonesian population – mainly Javanese, Banjarese, Sumatrans, Bugis,
and Boyanese or Baweanese – increased from approximately 30,000 in 1901
to about 240,000 in 1931.
As stated by renowned academic Tunku
Shamsul Bahrin, numerically, “the migration of the Indonesians into
Malaya is a recent phenomenon.”
Yet “government-sanctioned
history” also downplays the profound and enduring impact of
Hindu-Buddhist influence on Malay statecraft, coronation ceremonies of
Malay rulers, language, literature, and customs.
As stated by Ismail Hamid in “Masyarakat dan Budaya Melayu” (1988, page 55), “… kebudayaan Hindu telah meninggalkan beberapa kesan dalam setiap bidang kehidupan orang Melayu hingga dewasa ini (The Hindu culture has left several impacts on every aspect of Malay life to this day).”
The
distortions continue in the economic narrative. Our textbooks have
omitted the pioneering role of the Chinese in the 19th century
commercial agriculture and have minimised their central contribution to
the development of Malaya’s tin mining industry.
More marginalisation
A
glaring and misleading error appears in the Form Three history textbook
(2018, page 140), which states that the British cultivated various
commercial crops, including pepper and gambier. In reality, pepper and
gambier were cultivated largely by the Chinese in Johor in the mid-19th
century.
Equally alarming is the assertion in the Form Three
history textbook (2018, page 212) that Long Jaafar, the territorial
chief of Larut, was primarily responsible for the Federated Malay States
(FMS) becoming the largest tin producer in the world.
The
undeniable truth is that Long Jaafar died in 1857, whereas the FMS
became the world’s largest tin producer only towards the end of the 19th
century, decades after his death.
The marginalisation does not
end there. Our history textbooks have largely sidelined the pivotal role
of South Indian labour in the development of the rubber industry, which
became Malaya’s principal revenue earner from 1916 and remained so for
several decades.
Even more glaring is the total absence of any
acknowledgement of the indispensable contribution of South Indian
workers to the construction of Malaya’s physical infrastructure – its
roads, railways, bridges, ports, airports, and government buildings.
As
noted by the late Kernial Singh Sandhu, a leading authority on Indians
in Malaya, it is estimated that more than 750,000 Indians may have
perished in the process of developing modern Malaya and opening up
treacherous jungle tracts for rubber cultivation.
Kernial Singh Sandhu
In
the poignant words of a former Indian labour leader, “Every railway
sleeper and rubber tree in Malaya marks the remains of an Indian.”
Historical
omissions, distortions, and half-truths are not harmless mistakes; to
my mind, they are ‘intellectual crimes’. Enough is enough. It is time
for all right-thinking Malaysians, regardless of ethnicity or
background, to stand united and demand better.
Our children
deserve an education grounded in truth, evidence, and inclusivity. Only
by teaching an honest and inclusive history can we build a shared
national identity, restore trust in our institutions, and secure a just
and united future for our beloved nation.
