London is almost always, almost everywhere under surveillance. But the authority misses a spot here. This is at the Seven Dials.
Category: Liberty
When Najib Razak first became the prime minister, he introduced us to his transformation programs in 2010. It was the Government and the Economic Transformation Programs, easier called the GTP and the ETP if anybody cares to remember anymore. On the eve of the 2011 Malaysia Day, the prime minister announced another one and called it the Political Transformation Program, the PTP, though it really appeared as an afterthought, probably included only because the speechwriter thought it sounded grand.
On that September night, the prime minister proposed to remove all emergency declarations made during the fight against the communist insurgents, relax laws against public assemblies and repeal the much-abused Internal Security Act. There were several other promises too. Notwithstanding the ominous caveats, he fulfilled his promise. Later in July 2012 and probably encouraged by the progress he made, Najib proposed to replace the Sedition Act with something else, giving the idea that more liberalization was on the way.
Enter 2013. As the general election approached, Barisan Nasional ran on the slogan ”Janji Ditepati”, meaning promises fulfilled. It was not long before the counter-slogan ”Janji Dicapati”, a humorous wordplay meaning broken promises, made its way to popular usage.
The 2013 BN under Najib did worse than Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in 2008. Stung by the electoral results, the conservatives within his party questioned whether Najib’s liberalization was working for UMNO. Their opinion was firmly in the negative.
Najib, losing his resolve and political capital while fretful of losing power the way his predecessor did, gave way and made multiple about faces. Among those U-turns was the direction of the political transformation program. And so, instead of liberalization, there was a noticeable reversal and a steady increase in political persecution.
The promise to repeal the Sedition Act remains a promise and in fact, it is being used more religiously now it seems with the latest case involving the arrest of several journalists from The Malaysian Insider.
New harsh laws are being introduced at Parliament that made the earlier repeal of the ISA a farce. Meanwhile, government critics are sent to lock-up as the police mete out some kind of extra-judiciary punishment while at the same time, UMNO politicians get special treatment and are free from the same ill-treatment others have received. The double standard says a lot about the ongoing political persecution however much the government denies it while hiding behind race, religion and the monarchy.
Regardless whether we agree on its efficacy, all the transformation programs have one intention in mind or at least they promised to do one thing: To push Malaysia into the wondrous modern First World from the tired old middle income grouping.
Unfortunately, the political part is subverting it. The so-called Political Transformation Program is transforming Malaysia from the verge of First World to the Third World.
We have to remember that being developed — First World, high-income nation and whatever the preferred jargons are — should be more than merely about income. Development has to be holistic and includes the sociopolitical front. Else, what we have is another old forgotten: First World infrastructure, Third World mentality.
Hearing voices announcing something over the loudspeakers in public spaces makes me uncomfortable. It gives me the feeling that somebody is watching me and worse, the unknown person is giving me an order. The automatic reaction by the libertarian in me is to question and resist, even if the announcement makes sense.
Most announcements in KL Sentral, Kuala Lumpur’s Grand Union Station with its wide atrium, are harmless. Please let the passengers on-board get off the train first. Please watch your belongings. Please watch your step.
Judging by how some people refuse to wait for others to get out of the train before getting in, it feels like I am not the only trying to resist the announcement…
But from time to time it gets a little suspicious. Come join us for the F1 racing this weekend in Sepang! Drink this coffee.
No, I do not want to watch the F1 under the tropical sun. No, I do not like your coffee.
Yes, they are advertorials telling you to buy something that you do not need.
One time in a train car, a “refresher” would spray a scent of a particular brand of quick canned coffee into the enclosed air. There was no way for me to run, except getting out of the train. The advertisement campaign assaulted not only my eardrums but my olfactory organ too.
I learned to identify which train cars were installed with the horrible refresher and refused to ride on it, preferring to wait for better smelling train sets. It was not hard to know which was which. Oh, that is the car with the horrible smell of coffee. Oh, that is the coffee Wonda train car! I will let the train go for a better smelling one.
The PA system does have it uses. Sometimes, when the trains break down, the announcement helps. But at other times, all the gentle reminders — in London, I think it is “Mind the gap” in New York, “Stand clear of the closing door, please” or was it in California with its BART? I do not remember. In Paris, well, the Parisian Metro is unique with its chime ”na-na-na-na” — are definitely a hint of paternalism. It is a kind of soft paternalism that almost everybody ignores but at its heart is that suffocating authoritarian worldview.
The cavernous badly lit KL Sentral exacerbates, as with any cavernous building would, the sensation with that slight echo that follows the initial sound wave.
Growing up Malaysia, I quickly associate loudspeakers and echoes with Islam. The calls to prayer, the azan, are familiar and with so many mosques around, it can be maddeningly incomprehensible and downright annoying. In this country, expressing dissatisfaction against the competition between mosques for the loudest azan prize can bring trouble as the overly sensitive conservatives ignore comprehension of the azan recital in favor of noise. The louder the azans, the sermons, speeches and readings, the louder will the echoes be.
The echoes give the idea that god the supreme being is speaking to you. This is not just me feeling it and writing crap theory. Switch on the TV or the radio when an Islamic program is up in the air and you can hear how the editors use the echo effect whenever a verse from the Koran is read. In a more adventurous unorthodox Islamic program — I think it was Imam Muda where judges look for the best “Islamic idol” (just like the American Idol!) — an echo would accompany the contestants when he or she read a Koranic verse. So, there is something holy about the echoes.
My travels across Southeast Asia have made me realized the role of echoes in depicting something as holy is not limited just to Islam. I stayed for a week in an alley in Mandalay, Myanmar. At the top of the short alley is the Ein Daw Yar Pagoda. The Buddhist chanting I heard every morning and in the evening through its PA system was, forgive me for the neologism, echorized. It sounded like a prerecorded mantra chanting. I could hear the word amitaba through the artificial echo and among the unrecognizable words. And there was also echo in traditional Christian chanting from the mediaeval times as they sang in their tall cathedrals.
Religion, either god himself (herself for the feminist?) or the institution is an authority, I suppose sociologically, rightly or wrongly. The echo is a signifier of holy authority.
Holy and authority. Those are two of my favorite things.
And so I come back to KL Sentral with its banal announcements along with its echoes.
The libertarian is clenching a fist, but with only four fingers closed.
This is most obvious in the case of Fascism. The Fascists and National Socialists did not expect inferior classes, or races, or individuals to understand or sympathise with their own goals; their inferior was innate, ineradicable, since it was due to blood, or race, or some other irremovable characteristic; any attempt on the part of such creatures to pretend to equality with their masters, or even to comprehension of their ideals, was regarded as arrogant or presumptuous. Caliban was considered incapable of lifting his face to the sky and catching even a glimpse if, let alone sharing, the ideals of Prospero. The business of slaves is to obey; hat gives their masters their right to trample on them is precisely the alleged fact — which Aristotle asserted — that some men are slaves by nature, and have not enough human quality to give orders themselves, or understand why they are being forced to do what they do.
If Fascism is the extreme expression of their attitude, all nationalism is infected by it to some degree. Nationalism is not consciousness of the reality of national character, nor pride in it. It is a belief in the unique mission of a nation, as being intrinsically superior to the goals or attributes of whatever is outside of it; so that if there is a confliction between my nation and other men, I am obliged to fight for my nation no matter at what cost to other men; and if the others resist, that is no more than one would expect from beings brought up in an inferior culture, educated by, or born of, inferior persons, who cannot ex hypothesi understand the ideals that animate my nation and me. My gods are in conflict whit those of others, my values with those of strangers, and there exists no higher authority — certainly no absolute and universal tribunal — by which the claims of these rival divinities can be adjudicated. That is why war, between nations or individuals, must be the only solution.
We think, for the most part, in words. But all words belong to specific languages, the products of specific cultures. As there is no universal human language, so there exists no universal human law or authority, else these laws, his authority, would be sovereign over the earth; but this , for nationalists, is neither possible nor desirable; a universal law is not true law: cosmopolitan culture is a sham and a delusion; international law is only called law by a precarious analogy — a hollow courtesy intended to conceal the violent break with the universalism of the past.
This assumption is less obvious with the cases of Marxism, which in theory, at least, is internationalist. But Marxism is a nineteenth-century ideology, and has not escaped the all-pervasive separatism of its time. Marxism is founded on reason; that is to say, it claims that its propositions are intelligible, and their truth can be ”˜demonstrated’ to any rational being in possession of the relevant facts. It offers salvation to all men; anyone can, in principle, see the light, and denies it at his own peril.
In practice, however, this is not so. Theory of economic base and ideological superstructure of which Marxist sociology is founded teaches that the ideas in men’s heads are conditioned by the position occupied by them, or by their economic class, in the productive system. This fact may be disguised from individual persons by all kinds of self-delusions and rationalisations, but ”˜scientific’ analysis will always reveal that the vast majority of any given class believe only that which favours the interests of that class — interest which the social scientists can determine by objective historical analysis — whatever reasons they may choose, however sincerely, to give for their beliefs; and conversely they disbelieve, reject, misunderstand, distort, try and escape form, ideas belief in which would weaken the position of their class.
All men are to be found, as it were, on one of two moving stairs; I belong to a class which, owning to its relationship to the forces of production, is either moving upwards towards triumph, or downwards towards ruin. In either case my beliefs and outlook — the legal, moral, social, intellectual, religious, aesthetic ideas — in which I feel at home, will reflect the interests of the class to which I belong. If I belong to a class moving towards victory, I shall hold a realistic set of beliefs, for I am not afraid of what I see; I am moving with the tide, knowledge of the truth can only give me confidence; if I belong to ta doomed class, my inability to gaze upon the fatal facts — for few men are able to recognise that they are destined to perish — will falsify my calculations, and render me deaf and blind to the truths too painful for me to face. It follows that it must be useless for members of the rising class to try to convince members of the falling order that the only way in which they can save themselves is by understanding the necessities of history and therefore transferring themselves, if they can, to the steep stair that is moving upwards, from that which runs so easily to destruction. It is useless, because ex hypothesi members of a doomed class are conditioned to see everything through a falsifying lens: the plainest symptoms of approaching death will seem to them evidence of health and progress; they suffer from optimistic hallucinations, and must systematically misunderstand the warnings that persons who belong to a different economic class, in their charity, may try to give them; such delusions are themselves the inevitable by-product of clinging to an order which history has condemned. It is idle for the progressives to try to save their reactionary brothers from defeat: the doomed men cannot hear them, and their destruction is certain. All men will not be saved: the proletariat, justly intent upon its own salvation, had best ignore the fate of their oppressors; even if they wish to return good for evil, they cannot save their enemies from ”˜liquidation’. They are ”˜expendable’ — their destruction can be neither averted nor regretted by a rational being, for it is the price that mankind must pay for the progress of reason itself: the road to the gates of Paradise is necessarily strewn with corpses. [Isaiah Berlin. European Unity and its Vicissitudes. 1959]
I have a fundamental objection to the Sulu and the Philippine claims of Sabah. Calling it the claim of Sabah is somewhat inaccurate because if the Philippine claim is wholly based on the Sulu claim, then by right the claim only covers roughly the eastern half of Sabah. Nevertheless, the objection that I have is not based on nationalistic sentiment. It is based on democratic and libertarian values.
Know this. The claim by the two parties are undemocratic and certainly unlibertarian. It is both undemoractic and unlibertarian because it completely bypasses the will of the people in Sabah.
The Sulu claim especially is made by a pretender to the throne of the Sulu Sultanate, a monarchy which practically has been extinct for a long time now. The claim by the monarchy highlights how it is undemocratic and unlibertarian.
The term libertarian that I use here is almost democratic and almost committed to a liberal democracy.
Libertarians come from the tradition that the state derives its legitimacy from its people. After all, the most important component of any society is the individuals who form it. Libertarians seek to secure freedom of individuals and the best way to do so within the framework of the state is to make the state answerable to its citizens.
The Sulu claim certainly does not fit into the libertarian framework. If the claim is realized by the Sulu Sultanate, then it will be clear that it is the sultan who will be in power. The Sultan, after all, is running the show, ordering the doomed incursion into Sabah. Any political power will originate from him and that is unacceptable to any libertarian.
Of course, the new Sulu power in Sabah can institute democratic infrastructure to turn the direction of the origin of power more libertarian and that will solve the democratic and libertarian concern. But the fact remains the claim has its origin from a very autocratic nature.
If one compares the Sulu claim to Malaysia’s, it is clear that the Malaysian claim is more libertarian. This is not to mean that Malaysia is a libertarian utopia but relatively, Malaysia is far above the rung compared to the Sulu Sultanate.
The most libertarian argument for Malaysia is that the Malaysian claim is not really a Malaysian claim. It is a Sabahan claim. The people of Sabah decided to be part of the federation of Malaysia and as a federation, all states within Malaysia is responsible toward the security of Sabah. In the face of armed adventure embarked by the Sulu Sultanate, the self-defense action by the Malaysian security forces is legitimate from the libertarian perspective, especially from the libertarian concept of non-aggression axiom. The axiom can be problematic at times by in the case of Sabah, its application is straight forward.
And this brings us to the Philippines, which for all intents and purposes is the successor state to the extinct Sulu Sultanate. What makes the Philippine claim more legitimate from libertarian perspective when compared to the Sulu claim, is that the Philippines, like Malaysia, is a democracy. Both democracies may not be perfect and there are flaws in the system but principally, they are. There are democratic institutions and there are guarantees of individual rights although the guarantees do not go as far enough as a libertarian would like and there are deplorable violations of those rights.
Of course, comparing Malaysian and Philippine democratic institutions to Sulu’s, which do not exist, is unfair because they have not been given a chance to develop it. Nevertheless, the setup highlights the origin of power. For both states, the origin of the power comes from the people, not some autocrats like a sultan.
That however does not make the Philippine claim very much more agreeable from the Sulu claim. The Philippine claim still bypasses the people of Sabah. So, the only libertarian (and democratic) way of solving the claim is by going back to the people. Let us have three options. Malaysia, independence or the Philippines. I have a feeling that the first two options will be more popular to the last one.
And then finally, the Malaysian setup is far more likeable to libertarians than the Philippines. Malaysia is a federation and the Philippines is a unitary state. Sabah has considerable autonomy within Malaysia. Even then, there are accusations that Kuala Lumpur is meddling in the affairs of Sabah. Imagine the Philippines with its unitary state mentality. That would be ugly not just to libertarians, but more so to Sabahans and the Philippines.