Dah bangkit?
By TAY TIAN YAN
(Translated by DOMINIC LOH/Sin Chew Daily)
The “Melayu Bangkit” rally only managed to draw the participation of about 1,000 people despite the much hoohah created before it was kicked off.
Among those who “rose up” in the rally were Dr Mahathir, Terengganu MB, and some prominent Umno leaders.
It is not hard to imagine that the rest of the audience made up of kampung folks driven in in tour coaches.
No, not the 10,000-odd Gertak (Terengganu’s answer to Perkasa) had vowed to bring in. In its stead, we only saw about 1,000 villagers coming in just to join in the fun.
Dr M was dead disgruntled.
So, he asked peevishly why the event had not taken place on May 13.
Weird! He seems to have a special liking for this particular date.
The organisers said the date had been fixed for Dr M, who seemed to single out the historically significant date for the rally.
Probably the day was particularly inspiring to him.
Even though the rally was later postponed to June 14, Dr M still had May 13 deeply planted in his heart, and in his speech May 13 was fondly mentioned.
This time he said May 13 was actually a clash of classes, where the impoverished Malays ran into the wealthy non-Malays.
In other words, it was the manifestation of the most fundamental belief of Karl Marx, the Father of Communism: a clash between the classless and capitalists.
And because the capitalists had preyed on the classless, the communists had to wage a class war.
Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, the Gang of Four and so on and on. All these people “rose up” by uplifting Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and had themselves influenced every other people to “rise up” against the capitalists, anti-revolutionaries, democrats and intellectuals.
In the end, save for a handful of privileged people, everyone else continued to be classless.
Having discarded the class theories, ironically those who have “risen up” today–from Beijing to Moscow–are, you guess, capitalists.
This set of class theories has been dumped into the trash can of history.
Which Dr M is happily picking up and recycling.
But lacking proper training in political ideologies and having little knowledge of historical common sense, the recycling of discarded philosophies wil not produce any promising outcome.
Race and class are two entirely different concepts which we should not associate with each other.
Many non-Malays here were no capitalists during those turbulent times of 1969. Many Chinese families were either working as rubber tappers or mine coolies, or petty traders who barely made enough to make ends meet.
There were of course big tycoons, but they didn’t make up the majority.
If Chinese were the capitalists, then the Communist Party of Malaya would not have a market here.
And not all Malays were classless back in those years. Many Malays took up civil posts offering assured livelihoods. And with houses inherited from their ancestors, they hardly qualify for the “classless” definition.
In addition, some Malays had already done pretty well in politics, enjoying rather lavish life.
A clash between the impoverished Malays and the loaded non-Malays? Please, stop belittling our wisdom!
