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."
PAS and not spooking non-Muslims By Commander S THAYAPARAN (Retired) Royal Malaysian Navy
Monday, October 23, 2023
Malaysiakini : You can see this play out in the incident between that young student and the prime minister.
PM Anwar Ibrahim
Partisanship
makes it easy to overlook such things. When a PAS political operative
like Kedah Menteri Besar Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor decides that his
obligations to his faith mean that he needs to disrupt the economic
spheres of the non-Muslims by closing down Sports Toto stores, this spooks the non-Muslims.
With
other PAS-controlled states attempting to do the same thing, is it any
wonder that non-Muslims lose the nuances of the political terrain and
reject PAS outright?
Baseline democratic aspirations
Here are three issues (and there are more of course) in no particular order that I think spook the non-Muslims.
Unilateral
conversion. Will the mainstream political establishment ever ban
unilateral conversion and will the state security apparatus treat such
cases as a form of kidnapping?
Equal educational
opportunities. Will the mainstream political establishment ever allow
for a system where Malaysians are not ghettoised by a quota system?
Equal
access to entitlement programmes. Will the mainstream political
establishment ever allow needs-based entitlement programmes, so every
Malaysian can benefit from our tax ringgit?
These are
merely baseline democratic aspirations. But here in this country, they
are viewed as some sort of existential threat to the majority polity or
at least we are told by the political apparatus that these are red lines
that nobody should cross.
Sharing political power in a multiracial society is tricky, especially when it comes to the majority, but it can be done.
Folk
like to dismiss the American experience with all its flaws but at its
best, what the people have demonstrated is that they are willing to
consider leaders who embrace that path to a more perfect union.
Equal Malaysians
However,
in Malaysia, in this supposed multi-racial paradise, the non-Malays
have never had a leader from the majority who embraced them as equal
participants. Who even believed they were equal participants in this
Malaysian project? To be fair, non-Malays have never pressed a majority
leader to treat them as equals. As Malaysians.
More importantly we
never really had to fight for our civil rights because what Umno/BN did
extremely well was provide an ecosystem where the growing majority was
narcotised by religion and entitlements programmes and where minorities
more or less were left to their own devices to pursue their economic
interest which funded the gravy train.
But the world's
geopolitical terrain is constantly in flux. The ascendancy of far-right
political structures the world over which undermines traditional Western
democratic norms is normalising the kind of agendas put forward by PAS
and ethnocratic regimes all over the world.
Soon the distinction for non-Muslims between the lesser of two evils will be non-existent.
