Democracy = Dissent & Rebellion (Singaporean & Malaysian Attitudes)
By Surind
It's a sad case, when autocratic/fascist governments, like those in Malaysia and Singapore do not allow the democratic process to follow it natural course & "democratize" the nation.
Some of the methods/strategies/tactics employed include:
Indoctrination/brainwashing of the children/youth and masses through the control of the:
- various government/semi-government institutions
- economy & the banking and financial institutions/services/systems (Banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. – Thomas Jefferson)
- public education/schooling system and curriculum
- army/navy/police, through training, the selection and promotion/bureaucratic process (race & racism dominates), systems & quotas
- media & internet (censorship-blocking, lawsuits, threats/intimidations, police reports/raids, 'media self-censorship')
- the 'moral compass/direction': values/principals & culture that these governments expect it's citizens to embrace and of which it uses propaganda (media), along with the police, courts/legal system and people/groups of influence & authority (e.g. monarchy, religious figures/ulamas, politicians, teachers/lectures, so called NGOs/activists, etc.) to spread.
Even Asian/Malay/East-Indian culture & Abrahamic religions (dangerous combination if not properly scrutinized with "doubt") and various other ways of life (e.g. Confucianism) is full of such loyal-peaceful-don't rock the boat-comform-calm-harmony-
"How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" — which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" Australia exists, or fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational." – Johann Hari
Let us "check in" here.
Recently someone & some people (from the government) announced & demonstrated through actions (e.g. lawsuits, detention without trial) that anything that is deemed "illegal, immoral & of harm to the nation's sovereignty and society's interest", is against/bad for democracy. In other words…
"Illegal, immoral & harm to the nation's sovereignty and society's interest" here actually equals/equates, anything that shortens the life/influence of the government, their cronies, supporters, proxies/families (e.g. Temasek Holdings) & allows democratic values and principals to be espoused and practiced.
Well, newsflash….
& here is a compilation of material from around the web to help illustrate this point, but let us have a look at the thesaurus first to help get our bearings and point of reference in alignment.
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/dissent
Main Entry: dissent
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: disagreement, disapproval
Synonyms:
bone of contention, bone to pick, bone, clinker, conflict, contention, denial, difference, disaccord, discord, dissension, dissidence, disunity, far cry, flak, hassle, heresy, heterodoxy, misbelief, nonagreement, nonconcurrence, nonconformism, nonconformity, nope, objection, opposition, poles apart, protest, refusal, resistance, schism, sour note, spat, split, strife, unorthodoxy, variance
Notes: dissent is, literally, 'feel or think differently' and dissident means 'sit apart, disagree'
Antonyms:
agreement, approval, authorization, concurrence, endorsement, ratification, sanction
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/rebellion
Main Entry: rebellion
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: disobedience; revolt
Synonyms:
apostasy, defiance, disobedience, dissent, heresy, insubordination, insurgence, insurgency, insurrection, nonconformity, revolution, rising, schism, uprising
Notes: rebellion is open resistance to a government or authority; revolution is a rebellion that succeeds in overthrowing the government and establishing a new one
Antonyms:
calm, harmony, peace
On Dissent And Democracy
Shiv Visvanathan 25 April 2006, 12:00am IST (The Times of India)
One of the great indicators of any society is the creativity of its radicals and the availability of its eccentrics. Equally critical is the tolerance and understanding that society shows its dissenters.
One needs the notion of human rights not just to emphasise that you are human but recognise that within that humanity, you can be utterly different.
This is easier said than done, especially in a society where time begins accelerating and mobility rather than justice becomes the tuning fork of welfare. One dreams and demands the instant infrastructure of roads, refineries, dams and laboratories.
A society in double quick time may be impatient with those who are slowing it down, rendering viscous its dreams of speed, desire and acceleration. Viewed within such a perspective, one can understand a society's intolerance to the dissenter.
Medha Patkar seems iconoclastic and outdated, hysterical and utterly oblivious to every counter-argument. Why tolerate her? Why not harass her? It seems inevitable but the tragedy begins here.
Let us remember if India as a society can stand with its head high in the world, it is not merely because of IT but because of individuals like Medha.
If IT is the brand name for the kind of development now embodied in the mobile phone and IPod, Medha is the brand name for quality of conscience and the availability of critique in India.
Wherever people talk of costs of development, her name springs up automatically. In a deep and fundamental way, if India celebrates a Ratan Tata, a Narayana Murthy or an Ambani, we have to be equally grateful to a Vandana Shiva, an Aruna Roy and a Medha.
These three individuals have deeply contoured our perception of science, our sense of democracy and our responsibility to the victims of development. Let us be clear that recognition of their charisma or their moral and political status does not demand a complete agreement with their ideas.
I might want the dam and still realise that Medha provides a furiously different, ethical and cognitive understanding of it. I can love my fan in summer and love/hate her for reminding me of what that fan means to the life, livelihood and life chances of other people.
Medha connects. She connects us to the moral and the ethical dimensions of the dam. She demands answers. It is time to realise that silencing her is not the answer. She is reminding us of the genocidal consequences of our lifestyle.
Ask yourself what is your genocidal quotient? Don't be so innocent. How many people are you ready to kill or displace to get your electricity? Ten? Hundred? Ten thousand? One hundred thousand? A million? Medha threatens and irritates.
But to ostracise her because she differs, to brutalise her because she objects, and to humiliate her because she refuses to go away is unacceptable. A society that harasses Medha is a closed society.
To condemn her as anti-national, anti-social and anti-scientific is silly. Of course she is cantankerous, repetitive, even screechy. But why should Cassandras come in comfort packs?
All she demands is that you care, that you can't be indifferent to the moral and democratic dimensions of the dam. Of course, she is repetitive but what can you do when an elite is knowledge proof?
Of course, she is noisy but noise, as communication theorists repeat, is but unwelcome music. Every time the Supreme Court raises the height of the dam, she raises the quality of the protest. Politics has a beauty of its own.
One woman and a small band of protestors have created one of the great morality plays of this century. One can point out that her tactics have not always been correct. She overuses the fast.
But when a milkman protests against a multinational, does our politics end by lathicharging the milkman? Today we owe Medha the right to dignity in protest. To carry her like a cadaver demeans us.
To force-feed her because she finds our arguments indigestible is a kind of torture. If we are a decent society and the PM claims that we are, then the police cannot touch, torture, beat or humiliate her.
It is time we respect and honour her, salute a heroic battle which she insists is not yet over. In any other era, she would have got a peace prize for her battle against development. There is a story that used to fascinate me from a potboiler movie called Zulu.
It was about the last battle between the English and the Zulu nation. Expectedly a large army of Zulus loses to a small group of English soldiers. The latter celebrate as the Zulu retreat and then suddenly the Zulu army returns in full force and regalia.
The English are confused and then stunned when they realise the warriors are saluting them. They keep repeating 'The bastards are saluting us'. At that moment one wonders who was more civilised.
Today when a middle-class Indian confronts Medha one also wonders about the fate of protest and dignity. Do we salute her heroism, ideas, courage or treat her like yesterday's newspaper?
Any democratic society must be grateful to its dissenters for it is the jugalbandi, the competitive reciprocity between mainstream ideas and dissent that helps determine the quality of democracy and democracy in a society.
The writer is a social scientist.
by Sarah Kanouse (Independent Media Center)
At 7:00 on a Saturday morning, I was awakened by an anonymous phone caller excoriating me for advocating a non-violent response to the terrorist attacks in a letter to the editor published in the News-Gazette. She called my letter "appalling," told me "we must stand behind our president," and equated my stand for peace as disregard and inhumanity towards the victims. When I began to respond to her allegations, she hung up.
My personal encounter with an outraged citizen is a minor chapter in a still-unfolding tale of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, assault, and murder against people perceived as 'different' in the wake of the September 11 attacks. As usual, people of color experience the most brutal of these attacks. While writing this, I learned of a Sikh man murdered in front of his gas station in Mesa, Arizona. By the time you read this column, countless people of perceived Middle Eastern descent may have been killed, beaten or harassed. My experience points to a subtler attack on difference, one that jeopardizes the important foundations of a democracy – the respect for minority viewpoints in impassioned debate on the future of the nation.
While I support the right of my early-morning caller to her views, I find her method of expressing them inappropriate. I placed my opinions in the public sphere, and would have welcomed a response within that public sphere. Our country needs intelligent, vigorous, passionate, and public debate about how to respond to the attacks. Waking me at 7 on Saturday morning, however, is personal, disruptive, and vaguely threatening. It conveys the message, "I know where you live." The call suggests a political vigilantism of citizens bullying and intimidating their dissenting neighbors into silence or compliance. Forced unity isn't unity at all, and it has no place in a democracy.
Far from bullying me into either agreement or silence, my early-morning caller has redoubled my resolve to oppose the broad-brush 'war on terrorism' with determination, vigor and vision. Rather than stand by as the terms of allowable discourse narrow to no wider than a prison cell in the name of fighting a war to make us 'free', I raise my voice in opposition to the rumblings of war. Despite patriotic myths of a nation standing free and united behind our troops, war has always brought out the worst in America:
* During the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, pro-war mobs threatened citizens into signing enlistment papers and attacked anti-war meetings. Soldiers in the field are known to have broken into Mexican homes, attacked civilians, and raped women.
* In February, 1864, during the Civil War, off-duty black soldiers were attacked in Zainesville, Ohio to cries of "kill the nigger!" Many other racist attacks took place in Northern cities.
* During the Spanish-American War of 1898, New York City officials refused parade permits to antiwar groups while granting them to pro-war groups.
* In the bloody aftermath of the Spanish-American War, as our nation tried to quell rebellion among the populations of former Spanish colonies that were handed over to US rule under the settlement treaty, hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians were killed. According to eyewitness reports, "our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up." One US soldier wrote, "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers'. This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces!"
* During World War I, the Espionage Act of 1917 declared anti-war activism to be a crime, and provided prison terms of up to 20 years for violators. Nine hundred people went to prison under the Espionage Act, which is still on the books.
* Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt ordered that all men, women, and children of Japanese nationality or descent be arrested without warrant, indictment, or hearing and taken to internment camps, where they lived for the duration of the war. 110,000 people were removed from their homes to live in prison-like camps. Three-quarters of them were US citizens.
* At No Gun Ri, South Korea, in July 1950, American soldiers machine-gunned hundreds of civilians beneath a bridge. The US government dismissed the allegations until last year, when ex-GIs came forward with their stories.
* On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the Vietnamese village of My Lai, systematically rounded up all the inhabitants, forced them into a ditch, and shot them. The Army investigators who arrived 17 months later found that 450-500 people, mostly old men, women and children, had been murdered. My Lai is not an isolated incident; earlier this year former Senator Bob Kerrey revealed that he had been involved in a massacre of about 17 people in the village of Thanh Phong. Colonel Oran Henderson, investigator of the My Lai massacre, admitted, "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."
* During the Gulf War, Arab-Americans experienced intense hostility and outright hate crimes. Mosques, Islamic community centers, and Arab Anti-Discrimination Leagues received bomb threats while businesses were vandalized and Arab Americans were threatened.
* The United States has continued to bomb Iraq regularly in the ten years since the Gulf War, this year averaging three air strikes per month. Many of these attacks kill people. The US has been the most vociferous and powerful supporter of UN sanctions against Iraq that, according to the UN itself, have been responsible for over 500,000 child deaths from malnutrition and disease brought about by deteriorating infrastructure.
This history of atrocity, repression, and racism includes only acts committed in military actions that are popularly understood as 'war', and omits the myriad acts of mass violence and sponsorship of terrorism that have been more the norm than the exception in US military history. I could easily have cited war crimes committed against Native Americans, military aid supplied to known torturers and human rights violators, and assassination attempts – both failed and successful – against national leaders with whom we disagree. This history of brutality is but one reason why I stand against US military retaliation for the events of September 11. Millions stand with me. But we do not have the eye or ear of the media, which seems intent on presenting a picture of uniform compliance with Bush's war agenda that further marginalizes dissent and depicts us as "un-American."
As our country prepares for war, we will doubtless see attacks on those who respectfully disagree. How can we fight to defend our freedoms if we attack those who are different and censure those who evaluate, criticize, and speak? In place of a rhetoric of 'patriotism' and 'unity', I seek global justice for and solidarity with the victims, their loved ones, and oppressed people in our country and throughout the world who have been scarred by violence, whether committed by the hands of terrorists, soldiers, or politicians, bankers, and corporate executives. As I told my early-morning caller before she hung up, it is not disrespectful to evaluate and possibly dissent from the policies of our government; indeed, the exercise of democracy demands it.
