Yet again, Dr M doffs his cap to Goebbels
COMMENT After a period of quiet - a tell-tale sign he's not sure what to make of the play - Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Monday ended his silence on Bersih 3.0 with comments that show how deep in Josef Goebbels' debt he often is.
The Nazi propaganda minister was an exponent of the "big lie", a tactic that holds that the more brazen the lie you deploy the harder it is for the target to deny it.
Just as the humanist is often baffled by the deliberate will to evil, so are the honest frequently befuddled by the bare-faced mendacity of others.
In remarks made at the launch of the Bahasa Malaysia version of his memoirs ‘A Doctor in the House', Mahathir claimed that Bersih was out to foment revolution.
The former premier has got things the wrong way round.
For the sake of hypothesis, one would have to recap events of 25 years back, inserting Bersih's existence before the pivotal Umno election of April 1987.
If, say, there was a polls reform advocacy group like Bersih well before the Umno election, the party would conceivably have prevented 13 illegal branches from participating in its internal polls that year, a move that led to a court case which saw the late justice Harun Hashim declare Umno illegal.
Historians may well look back on that sequence of events as having led to a revolution whose pivotal trigger was the removal of Salleh Abas in 1988 as the top judge of the country.
As consequence, the era of the imperial prime minister and of Umno as hegemon began, a revolutionary reversion from what was the norm before - the PM as primus inter pares (first among equals) in cabinet and the same status for Umno within the ruling BN.
Collateral damage
A host of debilitating ills stemmed from the imperial premiership and Umno's hegemony: the judiciary was rendered compliant, and the civil service and police force became adjuncts of the Umno president and PM of the country.
Collateral damage in the business sphere from these deviant developments saw the fortification of the politics-business nexus that has directly led to the plutocracy Malaysia has become.
Talk of the changes to the election process that Bersih has for the past five years been espousing, how many must now be wishing that Bersih had existed a long time ago for it conceivably would have prevented the revolution to Malaysia's constitutional mores that issued from the participation of 13 illegal branches in Umno's elective exercise of 1987.
That event was the trigger for a cascade of deviant and corruptive effects on Malaysian politics.
It would take a revolution to remove these effects from the body politic; so deeply have the viruses infected the national political bloodstream that mere transfusions would not suffice to rejuvenate it.
Consider Mahathir's argument, aired while expatiating on the issue of Bersih last Monday, that the fact the Election Commission's chief and deputy are members of Umno do not render their status as impartial interlocutors untenable.
Mahathir argues the point of their membership's dormancy as invalidating the claim that mere membership had rendered them inherently biased.
It is the sort of argument that would get you laughed out off any democratic saloon.
But the argument is to be expected from someone who allowed the most corrosive deviation from judicial norms to occur on his watch as PM.
This was the decision to allow the Chief Judge of Malaya (Hamid Omar) to be on the panel of the impeachment proceedings against the Lord President (Salleh Abas) when an adverse finding against the latter meant that the former would be elevated to take his place in the judicial hierarchy.
Something like that is simply not on in the canons of natural justice.
A Humpty Dumpty situation
It is said of Mahathir that he never encountered a rule he did not like; in the event he did, he simply changed it.
When a predecessor of the current EC chief (also like the present one, a former secretary general of the Home Ministry) suggested to premier Mahathir that some rules of the electoral process that favoured incumbents needed to be altered to become more even handed, he was given what was, knowing Mahathir, a typical reply.
The former EC head was told that just because a rule favoured the incumbents was no reason to change it.
Never mind that a disposition of that sort is inherently autocratic; it is when it claims that the opposite tendency, which when long violated can rise to the protesting proportions that Bersih summoned last Saturday, is called dictatorial and revolutionary, we have arrived at the Humpty Dumpty situation.
Which is: "A word is anything I say it means." It would take a revolution to put right a situation like that.
The Nazi propaganda minister was an exponent of the "big lie", a tactic that holds that the more brazen the lie you deploy the harder it is for the target to deny it.
Just as the humanist is often baffled by the deliberate will to evil, so are the honest frequently befuddled by the bare-faced mendacity of others.
In remarks made at the launch of the Bahasa Malaysia version of his memoirs ‘A Doctor in the House', Mahathir claimed that Bersih was out to foment revolution.The former premier has got things the wrong way round.
For the sake of hypothesis, one would have to recap events of 25 years back, inserting Bersih's existence before the pivotal Umno election of April 1987.
If, say, there was a polls reform advocacy group like Bersih well before the Umno election, the party would conceivably have prevented 13 illegal branches from participating in its internal polls that year, a move that led to a court case which saw the late justice Harun Hashim declare Umno illegal.
Historians may well look back on that sequence of events as having led to a revolution whose pivotal trigger was the removal of Salleh Abas in 1988 as the top judge of the country.
As consequence, the era of the imperial prime minister and of Umno as hegemon began, a revolutionary reversion from what was the norm before - the PM as primus inter pares (first among equals) in cabinet and the same status for Umno within the ruling BN.
Collateral damage
A host of debilitating ills stemmed from the imperial premiership and Umno's hegemony: the judiciary was rendered compliant, and the civil service and police force became adjuncts of the Umno president and PM of the country.
Collateral damage in the business sphere from these deviant developments saw the fortification of the politics-business nexus that has directly led to the plutocracy Malaysia has become.
Talk of the changes to the election process that Bersih has for the past five years been espousing, how many must now be wishing that Bersih had existed a long time ago for it conceivably would have prevented the revolution to Malaysia's constitutional mores that issued from the participation of 13 illegal branches in Umno's elective exercise of 1987.
That event was the trigger for a cascade of deviant and corruptive effects on Malaysian politics.
It would take a revolution to remove these effects from the body politic; so deeply have the viruses infected the national political bloodstream that mere transfusions would not suffice to rejuvenate it.
Consider Mahathir's argument, aired while expatiating on the issue of Bersih last Monday, that the fact the Election Commission's chief and deputy are members of Umno do not render their status as impartial interlocutors untenable.Mahathir argues the point of their membership's dormancy as invalidating the claim that mere membership had rendered them inherently biased.
It is the sort of argument that would get you laughed out off any democratic saloon.
But the argument is to be expected from someone who allowed the most corrosive deviation from judicial norms to occur on his watch as PM.
This was the decision to allow the Chief Judge of Malaya (Hamid Omar) to be on the panel of the impeachment proceedings against the Lord President (Salleh Abas) when an adverse finding against the latter meant that the former would be elevated to take his place in the judicial hierarchy.
Something like that is simply not on in the canons of natural justice.
A Humpty Dumpty situation
It is said of Mahathir that he never encountered a rule he did not like; in the event he did, he simply changed it.
When a predecessor of the current EC chief (also like the present one, a former secretary general of the Home Ministry) suggested to premier Mahathir that some rules of the electoral process that favoured incumbents needed to be altered to become more even handed, he was given what was, knowing Mahathir, a typical reply.
The former EC head was told that just because a rule favoured the incumbents was no reason to change it.
Never mind that a disposition of that sort is inherently autocratic; it is when it claims that the opposite tendency, which when long violated can rise to the protesting proportions that Bersih summoned last Saturday, is called dictatorial and revolutionary, we have arrived at the Humpty Dumpty situation.
Which is: "A word is anything I say it means." It would take a revolution to put right a situation like that.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
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