Gambling away Malaysia

Instead of helping with the creation of safe schools, safe neighborhoods, and safe streets so that society can rejuvenate from fast deteriorating conditions this regime is responsible for, we are seeing greed take control and the filthy rich licensed to ensure the next generation is left with catastrophe as a legacy.

A REPUBLIC OF VIRTUE 

Azly Rahman

“No servant can serve two masters”, Jesus said. “Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” – Luke 16:13, NIV.

“Who plays with dice and drinks intoxicants, goes to women who are dear unto others as their own lives, associates with the mean and not with elders – he declines just as the moon during the waning half.” – Buddha.

In the name of progress and development, Malaysia hopes to create a nation of gamblers by approving soccer gambling licenses. Schoolchildren can now rationalise illegal betting on their favourite kampung team, housewives can do the same with the many leagues, and of course the filthy rich can continue to gamble on sports big time.

Bravo – we have progressed! A nation of Donald Trumps we shall become.

Tycoons, and trillionaires — instead of using their temporal material gains to make society better, more ethical and safer, seem to continue to fuel the destruction of it. Because sports betting with the advent of The World Cup will bring in billions to the licensee, by all means necessary, will the government grant permission.

Instead of helping with the creation of safe schools, safe neighborhoods, and safe streets so that society can rejuvenate from fast deteriorating conditions this regime is responsible for, we are seeing greed take control and the filthy rich licensed to ensure the next generation is left with catastrophe as a legacy.

Gangster enclaves

Already, illegal gambling is rampant and the culture of gambling, drawn from human nature itself, continues to turn urban centres into gangster enclaves of triads, gangs and secrets societies whose major activities are gambling and hunting down those who owe money they lost through gambling.

Thus we have the “Ah Long” culture that the police, funded by the taxpayers, cannot control. Indeed by legalising sports betting, we will be sending a strong message to the next generation – it’s fine to gamble since the adults do it. It’s fine to use your lunch money to bet and if you lose in this highly addictive enterprise, there are things to steal and sell.

Why not legalise prostitution — another billion ringgit industry? And next, let’s sell guns so that we’ll have the rights to bear arms to protect us against those little gamblers who will grow up to become tycoons and triad members and sleazy politicians patronised by a fine system of Constitutional Monarchy whose members gambled too.

Why have we become corrupt to the bones? What has become of our sense of responsibility to the generation we are leaving behind?

Poker-faced politicians

The rakyat is being bluffed in this marathon 50-year poker game called developmentalism. We have poker-faced politicians who speak about religion and democracy in public, yet by all means necessary find ways immoral they may be, to fuel the desire of their political ill-wills.

We have one-armed-bandit politicians armed with the ideological apparatuses to disarm the rakyat yearning to break free from the shackles of domination. We have a multiracial coalition of robber barons working in sync to ensure that this casino-capitalist economy continues to sustain itself using the blood, sweat, tears and fears of a multiracial mass of people enslaved in this
oriental despotic game called the wheel of misfortune.

We have been seeing more and more display of money openly changing hands in by-elections in a game of political gambling in which the players get to bribe the winner of the game – the rakyat that is – now ever willing to participate in a political betting game called Malaysian-styled democracy.

We continue to see the growth of the most sophisticated and legalised gambling dens in history – the stock market – in which the lives of millions of workers and farmers and modern-slaves nationwide and world-wide are gambled with by “stockholders” playing the game of trading whether openly or secretly.

Poker-faced politicians do not have any loyalty to the nation. Working in concert with poker-faced robber barons they scheme ways to kill the future of this nation. What is important is power to be consolidated, sustained and expanded and money is to be made ceaselessly.

Mental junk

Through the control of the media, the feeding of the masses with a hundred-channel diet of mental junk daily, creating a fantasy Times-Square like Kuala Lumpur red-light district with a Disney-like entity, and all a long-term strategy to kill critical sensibility – robber barons and poker-faced politicians and powerful Mafia-like dynasties orchestrated this dominance of the rakyat fashioned after the Illuminati.

What them must we do?

Let us come back to our senses before this country descends into total chaos. Already Thailand is showing us what massive corruption can turn that rakyat’s anger into.

Let us begin analysing the oppressive institutions we have built over the last fifty years and the disabling aspects of culture that has become part of us and see where we are going as a nation.

We must only support a government that will not gamble Malaysia away.

As for legalised sports betting – it will lead to a new social cancer. No gambling license please.