The BN’s doublespeak in Manik Urai
By Zedeck Siew, The Nut Graph
IN George Orwell's seminal work of dystopian fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian Ingsoc government employs, among its slogans, the phrase "Freedom is Slavery". Orwell, who wrote at length about how "language can corrupt thought", is credited with popularising the concept of "doublespeak": language deliberately constructed to distort its actual meaning.
The Barisan Nasional (BN) campaign in Manik Urai, if its ceramah in Laloh on the evening of 6 July 2009 is any indication, appears ready to embrace such distortion.
The night's last speaker, former Kelantan Umno chief Tan Sri Annuar Musa, admitted that Umno was weak. "Malay politics are threatened. Some non-Malay [Malaysians] support PAS, not because they love Islam, but because they want to weaken Malay political interests," he said.
"Because of such racial politics, we lost in 2008. The result is that Kelantan suffers."
As rhetoric, Annuar's message is quite subtle. During the March 2008 general election, campaigns of the then embryonic Pakatan Rakyat (PR) parties seemed to embrace a platform of racial equality. For example, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) adviser Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim consistently promised to replace the New Economic Policy (NEP)'s paradigm of ethnicity with need- and class-based policies.
Since then, the PR's component parties, PKR, DAP and PAS, have distanced themselves from the BN coalition's racially divided modus operandi by giving weight to racially blind principles. PAS, embracing Islamic ideals, seem poised to open up party membership to non-Malay PAS Supporter's Club members.
It appears then that what Annuar was trying to do was to equate efforts at eroding the BN's communal status quo with "racial politics" — which contradicts what the phrase conventionally means.
In short: being colour blind is racist. That is a classic example of doublespeak.
