Walls

By Wong Chin Huat (The Nut Graph)

PEOPLE could be forgiven when watching the prime minister's Merdeka address if they thought they had travelled back time to 22 years ago and mistook Datuk Seri Najib Razak for Ronald Reagan. Reagan, the then US President, had urged Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Well done for the call, Najib, never mind the lack of originality.

But who is building these walls? I use the present tense because more walls were being built even as the prime minister spoke. A new one was in fact built two days before his speech, after the globally infamous cow-head protest in Shah Alam.

Construction of the Berlin Wall, 1961 (Public domain; source: Wiki commons)

Walls are highly symbolic in politics. Driven by the fear of threats, walls offer security and protection. They are built to keep some people in and others out. Walls are the concrete expression of boundaries, which are to lay claim of entitlement and protect ownership.

The Berlin Wall was built because the East German Communist rulers wanted to keep their subjects in. They feared that ordinary East Germans would vote with their feet and leave the state of East Germany empty. They feared freedom of movement of citizens. And the Russians backed the wall because they wanted to keep East Germany and the Warsaw Pact states from going their own independent ways.

The Golden Shield Project, more popularly referred to as the Great Firewall of China, has been built for a similar reason: to protect the one-party state from free speech and free information. The ancient Great Wall of China was built to keep Hun nomads from rampaging into Han agrarian society.

Why do Malaysians build walls?

So, why do Malaysians build these divisive walls? You can't tear down a wall unless you first address the need for the wall. The Berlin Wall was eventually torn down because Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union just had to let go of East Germany and larger Eastern Europe.

But contrary to popular belief, Malaysian walls are not built because of the diversity in identities, or competition. Let's just use the analogy of sports for a moment. Sports are characterised by competition, and sporting teams and their fans are passionate about their identity.

For millions of sports fans, support for football clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal is an important identity in their lives. But I doubt many would refuse to live next to, dine with, or date someone supporting another team, let alone someone who likes tennis or classical music more than football.

Of course, the majority of a particular team's supporters won't storm and spit at a mascot of a rival team and threaten bloodshed just to block the rival's entry into the neighbourhood.

The protesters might wave club flags on the field, but they probably wouldn't build walls. In this metaphorical sense, cultural identity is like a sports club flag. It is real, but does not need to be permanent or encompass every aspect of life.

A more valuable characteristic of sports club identity is that diversity and competition are very much at its core. The Arsenal fanatics may fall into depression because of their team's disastrous defeat, but their life mission is not to destroy Man-U or convert all its supporters. In fact, it is only when you can exist alongside your rival teams that a championship can be held, and you have a shot of winning it.

Now, if religions, cultures and languages are supposed to be treasures we want to share with others, and by nature are not zero-sum games, why can't they deal better with competition compared to sports? After all, for some people, sports are merely unsophisticated physical games.

Fear, not diversity

It is quite clear that these "divisive walls" are built by Malaysians because of fear, not a problematic diversity. Malaysians turn to their ethno-religio-linguistic communities not because we don't share common ancestors, the same faith or the same language. We do so because we don't feel secure being individuals. We feel that we would be threatened if we don't have the numbers compared to "others".

Read more at: http://www.thenutgraph.com/walls