Pagar Makan Padi

ARCHIVES 2009

By admin-s On Dec 13, 2009

The Chinese have been dissipated along lines that mark their different dialect groups, social class and religious inclinations. So, except for their supposed cultural affinity, how does a Chinese community threaten any one when there is no community per se?

By Stephen Tan Ban Cheng

If Umno is not racist, why does it maintain an indoctrination agency like the Biro Tata Negara (BTN) which inculcates in young Malay minds the idea of Ketuanan Melayu and wariness of the other races? (For more on the BTN, read Dr Azly Rahman’s chapter On the Problem of Ketuanan Melayu and the Work of the Biro Tata Negara in the book Multiethnic Malaysia.) – Kee Thuan Chye on Oct 18, 2009

The raging public furore over the Biro Tata Negara (BTN) underlines the naked inability of all component parties of the Barisan Nasional (BN or National Front) to restrain and moderate the unhealthy inclinations of a former Prime Minister.

It is now known that since the late 1980s the publicly-funded BTN, also known in the English language as the National Civics Bureau, has been allegedly indoctrinating Ketuanan Melayu or racial supremacy among Malay Malaysians. Worse still, the BTN, funded by our taxes, has also allegedly been instilling hatred against Chinese Malaysians.

In the movie entitled The Power of One: Rainmaker, it was stated very clearly that ‘an ideology that attacks those who least threaten it will not outlast its own generation.’ In this instance, Ketuanan Melayu can only be justified if the Chinese Malaysians are conflated into one identity that it never was, is or will be.

Clearly, the Chinese ? forget for a while about those in Malaysia ? are linguistically divided into various dialect groups, economically divided into various social classes and religiously divided into as many religions as can be found in the world.

In Malaysia, it is an unstated rule for years on end since Merdeka or Independence in 1957 that there was a distinctive division between the Malaysian-born or Peranakans such as the Babas and Nonyas on the one hand and the sin kheks (or new arrivals) on the other, although the sands of time have papered over this cleavage.

Clearly, the Chinese have been dissipated along lines that mark their different dialect groups, social class and religious inclinations. So, except for their supposed cultural affinity, how does a Chinese community threaten any one when there is no community per se?

Nevertheless, according to a recent Malaysian Insider report headlined Inner details of BTN reveal past transgressions bylined Shazwan Mustafa Kamal, the BTN has allegedly been stereotyping the various races as if each is a single entity, demonizing Opposition Pakatan Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) leaders as spies for the Jews, demonizing the Opposition Democratic Action Party as a communist party with close ties to Singapore and demonizing the Opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia (Pas) as Islamic militants.

Here is the classic case of naming, blaming and shaming people as a ‘group’ without any perceived member of the group present and without those named, blamed and shamed having any recourse to respond at all. Where has the idea of upholding the pride and dignity of every Malaysian gone? Awry? And why? And even so, at the very expense of each and every Malaysian tax-payer, oblivious to the fact that has been recurring for perhaps twenty or more years!