Who is a whistleblower?
KTemoc Konsiders
The dictionary says a whistleblower is a person who informs on another or makes public disclosure of corruption or wrongdoing. And it’s by this meaning that most Malaysians understand the term – more of this in a while.
Another word or term for whistleblower could be ‘snitch’ or ‘informer’ but these two terms carry slimy sleazy connotations so the famous American civic activist Ralph Nader coined the word ‘whistleblower’, a term he adopted from the soccer game where the referee blows a whistle on observation of any infringement of the rules.
So of late, in the last couple of years or so, we in Malaysia have heard of this term being bandied around freely, flamboyantly but, wakakaka, flimsily just like ‘democracy’, ‘freedom of association’ and ‘freedom of speech’, but with most of its users not knowing what all those four terms really mean.
For example, was Anwar Ibrahim’s 916 attempted coup d’etat scheme a true manifestation and example of ‘democracy’?
Have Lee Lam Thye, Michelle Yeoh and RPK been allowed their rights to ‘freedom of association’, something that their abusive detractors themselves cried out for?
As for ‘freedom of speech (expression)’, it’s preferable we don’t go there where there have been lamentable violations of this much touted, much abused but alas, least respected ‘right’ on both sides of the fence, the last being Nathaniel Tan’s dirty piece of nasty propaganda shit against Lim Guan Eng – see my letter to Malaysiakini titled Nathaniel Tan’s cherry-picking and missing the elephant in the room – in which he exercised and enjoyed his ‘freedom of expression’, and granted, I too did so in my rebuttal of his half-truths, hidden truths and ‘cherry-picked’ truths, wakakaka.
