Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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."
COMMENT - Invoking royalty, but defying when convenient By Commander S THAYAPARAN (Retired) Royal Malaysian Navy
Monday, April 27, 2026
Malaysiakini : The fact of the matter is that PAS is in no position to make claims
that non-Malay political operatives are treacherous or seditious to the
crown for allegedly defying royal decrees.
Seri Kembangan assemblyperson Wong Siew Ki
PASā
top leadership and various PAS adjacent groups have defied the royal
institutions. This has become even more pronounced of late because
Perikatan Nasional senses how weak Madani is.
Keep in mind that in 2022, when the Selangor sultan rebuked then-religious affairs minister Idris Ahmad and asked him to attend the Bon Odori festival āso that he can understand the difference between religion and cultureā, what did PAS do?
Its ulama wing backed the religious minister, defying the sultan by saying, āThe claim that (Bon Odori) was strictly a cultural event does not have enough merit.ā
The
quote that opens this piece demonstrates how Hadi believes that when it
comes to religion, he knows better than constitutionally mandated
instruments of government.
Paying lip service
The royal institution has been weaponised against the non-Malays by the Malay uber alles crowd.
Non-Malays
genuflect whenever hot-button issues arise, and the royal institution
is dragged into the political arena, normally siding with the very
forces that want to have and have weakened its constitutional powers.
Meanwhile,
so-called āMalay firstā politicians pay lip service to the institutions
but rouse the rabble against the institutions when it suits their
purposes.
Bersatu president Muhyiddin Yassin said, āI take shelter
under the greatness and nobility of the Malay rulers, and my loyalty to
the institution of constitutional monarchy should not be questioned,ā when questioned by the state security apparatus about insulting the former Yang di-Pertuan Agong.
Bersatu president Muhyiddin Yassin
And believe me, there was nothing lost in translation in the speech he gave, decrying that he was sidelined by the royal institution when he had the necessary votes to be in the driverās seat of Putrajaya. But all this is not new.
Remember
when a former prime minister blamed a certain person for Pakatan
Harapanās pulling out of the International Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Icerd)?
Who could forget this juicy tidbit from his press statement: āJadi kita punya keputusan kabinet (our cabinetās decision) this morning is that we will withdraw our ratification of the Statute of Rome kerana (because of) confusion, bukan kerana
(not because) we believe it is going to be bad for us but because of
the confusion created by one particular person who wants to be free to
beat up people and things like that.
āAnd if he beats up people again, I will send the police to arrest him, I donāt care who he is.ā
Keep in mind that Muhyiddin publicly declared that he rejected the Agongās suggestion that his coalition form a unity government with Pakatan Harapan:
āSince
the beginning, we already discussed that we will not cooperate with
Harapan. No matter what the purpose is, we will not agree to it. So when
I was asked to sign the offer letter, I signed ādisagreedā.ā
Royalty and political reality
Where
was PAS during all of this? This horse manure about defending the royal
institution is the kind of political skullduggery that PAS especially
excels in.
The party is playing a deeper, sinister game. Theocrats
around the world do not share power in the conventional sense. They
allow certain legacy institutions to endure so long as those
institutions give credibility and legitimacy to the religious party in
control.
Keep in mind that religious extremists have always
threatened the traditional institutions of power in various
Muslim-majority countries.
PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang
The
legacy institutions of power in this country understand that they are
vulnerable to the political and religious malfeasance of religious
political parties, which is why these institutions are caught between a
rock and a hard place when it comes to their constitutional powers and
theocratic impulses.
Sacred cows need to be slain by religious
politicians because this will demonstrate not only the superiority of
religion but also the faith of religious leaders.
This is not
about whether you support the royal institution or not. This is about
how these defenders of race and religion, in reality, have no respect
for the institutions they claim to champion.
These are the same
people who would use the royal institution as a hammer to whack
recalcitrant Malays, and whack non-Malays whom they claim are
disrespecting the royal institution, the Malays, and Islam.
Has a
non-Malay politician ever done any of this to the royal institution? The
threat to the royal institution has always come from the Malay uber
alles crowd.
Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad used the
royal institution when it suited his purposes, which was to bash the
non-Malays, but then decried how giving too much power to the
institutions resulted in the degradation of the democratic system and
lamented the feudalistic nature of the dynamic in the majoritarian
community.
In 2019, he spelt this out clearly, which is ironic because it is in a similar context to what Muhyiddin is fighting against now:
āAre
we willing for this to continue? The rakyat is afraid of not serving
the rulers, and when the rulers act beyond the Constitution, it is the
rakyat who become the victims.
āThis is the problem we have now.
If we are willing to lose democracy and the parliamentary system, then
letās stop having elections.ā
One could make the argument that
this is exactly what the Seri Kembangan rep is doing. Upholding the
tenets of democracy and the parliamentary system.
