When Will We See The Fall Of These Idiots?

Idiocy still rules, ok

Dean Johns

Former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad has told a gathering of diplomats and other foreigners that, due to scholarships and higher education, “there are hardly any idiots left in Malaysia” and that “this gives the government a headache”.

But from all the symptoms I see, the vast majority of Malaysians are as “slightly less intelligent” as Dr M and his Umno/BN colleagues could possibly wish them to be, and gibbering idiots are as plentiful as ever.

In fact Malaysia’s perennial epidemic of political idiocy continues to rage unchecked, with millions of apparently sentient adults still so intellectually or ideologically-impaired as to be somehow unable or unwilling to register to vote.

And even more Malaysians are so stupid or at least naive as to still swallow the overdoses of lies perpetually prescribed by Dr M and the rest of Umno/BN’s teams of spin-doctors, and forced down their throats day after day by the editors (ediots?) of the mainstream media.

Then there are those political figures who are ever ready to resort to idiocy, whether genuine or cunningly simulated to disguise rat-cunning, in attempts to dupe anyone feeble-minded enough to take them seriously.

Like Hasan Ali in his recent support of the claim by the Selangor Islamic Affairs Department that Christians are proselytising Muslims using “solar-powered hand-held talking bibles”.

Like Deputy Sports Minister Razali Ibrahim in his statement last week that the hostile reception given by Indonesian fans to Malaysian teams at the SEA Games in Jakarta was because “opposition leaders have been making a beeline for Indonesia to bad mouth our country”.

Like that serial offender in the idiocy stakes, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz, who recently outrageously proclaimed that “homosexuality goes against Islam, the religion of the federation of Malaysia, and its practice in the country is therefore unconstitutional”.

Like dimwit Perkasa president Ibrahim Ali, who welcomed the government’s retrograde Peaceful Assembly Bill 2011 as a “positive move”, adding that “after 54 years we have come to this stage. Maybe in the next 25 years people will be educated and can enjoy full freedom, but for the moment Malaysia still needs time to educate its citizens.”

Or like the allegedly educated Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin with his warning the other day to his junior Umno idiots against stupidly hurting their corrupt party’s “more progressive and liberal” image at its annual general assembly.

And the most idiotic performer of all, of course, is Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, who seems to be operating under the delusion that the whole world is full of dummies just dying to be deceived by his lying words and devious deeds.

Witness his promised ‘reforms’. The Printing Presses and Publications Act, for example, the very legislation designed to keep the Malaysian electorate as idiotic and ignorant as possible, will remain utterly unchanged save for the need to apply annually for a government licence.

Then there is the ‘Improvement’ of Malaysia’s grossly unjust, unfair and outright corrupt electoral system to be ‘studied’ by a committee until, if possible, after the next general election.

Malaysia’s detested and disgraceful Internal Security Act is supposed to be ‘abolished’, but in practice seems set to be rendered an Eternal Security Act by new provisions for detention without charge or trial.

Tops and bottoms

And the lifting of current prohibitions against public assembly, only to replace them with a piece of legislation that puts so many fresh obstacles in the way of public expression, and gives so many discretionary powers to the police, that rather than the Peaceful Assembly Bill it should rightly be dubbed the Policeful Assembly Bill.

So many far-from-idiotic and even formerly idiotic Malaysians have vented their outrage at all this chicanery, however, that Najib was recently moved to “implore” his Umno colleagues to “accept reform efforts or face an Arab Spring-style revolt”.

“When you have been in power for such a long uninterrupted period, you have a sense of political invincibility; you may think that whatever happens you will be in power,” he said.

So far so accurate, I guess, but soon he slipped back into tell-Malaysian-idiots-anything mode, claiming that “what has happened in the context of the Arab Spring and many other countries, change is coming from the bottom up. In Malaysia, change is coming from top to bottom.”

Then he proceeded to get his tops and bottoms mixed up, so that he felt the need to explain that he meant “top down in the sense that we are listening to the people. I started by saying that the day of government knows best is over...we must feel the pulse of the people.”

Feeling the pulse of the people would surely be an improvement on Umno’s long-standing practice of stealing from the purse of the people.

But apparently undaunted by the fact that government largesse and outright loot is precisely what attracts so many snouts to the Umno trough, in another speech he attempted to pretend otherwise.

In a brazen bid to win the sympathies of any citizens so idiotic as to have forgotten such Umno/BN thefts as the Scorpene submarine, PKFZ, NFC and countless other daylight robberies by Umno/BN and its cronies, not to mention his own and his wife’s jet-setting lifestyles, he staged a press conference in which he called on Umno members to “put party above self interest”.

But lest such a clarion call for idealism lose him masses of the rent-seekers and commission-hungry contractors planning to attend the then imminent and now ongoing annual Umno general assembly, he quickly explained that “we are not asking them to sacrifice their wealth for the party or take personal risks”.

Of course there will be loads more Umnonsense like this over the next few days as one ass after another addresses the appropriately-named assembly.

And every asinine word will give the lie to Najib’s claim that the programme is “not primed for the general election, but a vehicle to highlight the party’s intellectual value.

Umno? Intellectual?? Unelectable, more like it. Except, of course, by a bunch of utter idiots. Of whom, despite Mahathir’s regrets that there are hardly any left, there are evidently still millions of them either supporting the Umno/BN regime, or too dumb or nit-witted to oppose it.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’ and ‘1Malaysia.con’.