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."
Anwar's Malaysia Madani skeleton needs fleshing out By P Gunasegaram
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Malaysiakini : Najib Abdul Razak came up with the self-explanatory “1Malaysia” -
Malaysia for all. He set up 1MDB and promptly syphoned billions of
ringgit of borrowed money out of the self-styled national strategic
development company. He now languishes in jail.
Mahathir,
in his second term - older and even wilier - dispensed with slogans
altogether and attempted to make himself effectively a dictator,
absolutely refusing to keep his promise to pass the baton to Anwar and
plunging the nation into crisis yet again.
I had to look up emergency abah Muhyiddin Yassin’s tagline “Kerajaan Prihatin”
(Caring Government). Caring indeed - he had to resort to an emergency
to avoid facing Parliament to stay in power as his razor-thin majority
was under constant threat of being challenged.
And he engineered a
Sabah state election in the middle of Covid-19, spreading the virus far
and wide. That’s how much he cared. Which leads us to his successor who
most people had not heard of before that, Umno vice-president Ismail
Sabri Yaakob.
Hardly tight-knit
Ismail Sabri, who has the dubious distinction of being the shortest-serving PM in Malaysia, proudly referred to us all as “Keluarga Malaysia” (Malaysian family).
Former premier Ismail Sabri Yaakob during one of his Keluarga Malaysia events
He,
unfortunately, succumbed to pressure from Umno, especially its bigoted
president then and now Ahmad Zahid Hamidi who, encouraged by results
from state elections, thought that Umno would win an early general
election. Thus, GE15 - the election nobody was prepared for - was
prematurely delivered by caesarean section with disastrous consequences.
What
followed was the most fractious, racist, religiously charged and
divisive election ever held in Malaysia - hardly family-like. Umno got
the shock of its life, winning just 26 parliamentary seats - its worst
ever showing by far, less than half its already abject showing at GE14
where it won 54 seats, still then the party with the largest number of
seats.
But by an incredible unanticipated twist of fate arising
from this strange, perplexing new phenomenon called coalition politics
in Malaysia, Zahid became one of two deputy prime ministers in Anwar’s
cabinet in a fragile grouping of parties partly decreed by royalty and
partly by a coincidence of circumstances. Ismail Sabri fell by the
wayside, not even a minister in the so-called unity government.
Madani break down
With
such a lack of success in sloganeering in Malaysia, Anwar would have
been well-advised to stay clear of it but it has been done and the
slogan “Malaysia Madani” is out there. So let’s look at it, break it
down - and well, yes, give it a chance to succeed even as all previous
ones in the last few decades have failed miserably.
While “Madani”
conjures up visions of Medina and of Islamic civilisation much like
Islam Hadhari, it is actually a rather awkward and contrived Malay
acronym for six core words which seem to have been adopted as the basis
of policy-making - sustainability, prosperity, innovation, respect,
trust and compassion (see below).
Frankly, this is the first time I have seen an acronym taken from
letters or sounds other than the first one in the word. It is downright
confusing and does nothing to help the memorisation of the keywords and
identifying it with the acronym.
Clearly, it is contrived to get the word “Madani” in and its links to Islamic precepts.
In
any case, this is not genius - such things have to be taken into
account in any civilised society anywhere and are universal values
anyway. There is no need to insert an artificial Islamic construct into
the whole to just score some political points, especially when the
process has to be as contrived as this.
For slogans to become
alive and not stay as nice sound bites to broad policy-making, they have
to be acted upon in practice by a programme of implementation with
specific measurable targets and deadlines for implementation. Without
that, no slogan is worth even the paper that it is printed on.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim
A
couple of examples will help: When public pieces of land intended as
green areas are being de-gazetted for greedy companies and individuals,
even by Pakatan Harapan-controlled states like Selangor, isn’t the talk
of sustainability (kemampanan) empty and hollow?
And what
will the government do to ensure that the resources of the country such
as oil and gas and the revenue from it are utilised for future
generations as the concept of sustainability requires us to do? Where’s
our oil fund?
Is it compassionate (ihsan) to continue to
have laws which permit detention without trial and detention during an
investigation, and turn a blind eye to deaths and torture in lock-ups
throughout the country? What about labour trafficking and the atrocious
conditions migrant labour have to work under, a sore point with our
Indonesian friends and others?
Slogans are easy. Making them work
in the true spirit of them actually being a cornerstone of policy-making
is another matter altogether. And we wait eagerly for this unity
government to tell us how they are going to do that.
Anwar’s Malaysia Madani skeleton badly needs fleshing out.
