What every Malaysian needs to know about ‘race’ (Part 3): Distorted reasoning — or thinking ‘bamboozled’ by language

By
Clive Kessler
 | February 25, 2012

The Malaysian Insider

FEB 25 — The word bangsa in modern Malaysian usage is semantically overworked. It serves to convey a number of related but different meanings.

Whatever advantages of economy and compression of thought and expression this “semantic condensation” may provide, it carries with it enormous dangers.

In its preceding parts, this extended discussion has explored the “folding” of those various meanings into that overworked, overburdened, and hence multiply ambiguous idea, or concept, of bangsa.

That disaggregation and “deconstruction” was offered for a most serious purpose: to serve as a warning of the great risks of confusion — of the distorted understanding and communication — that lie in wait whenever the term bangsa is less than thoughtfully used.

Let us now consider three examples of that kind of confusion: how it arises, how it can mislead us, and how it may distort public thinking and debate on some centrally important national issues in contemporary Malaysia.

“Antarabangsa”: what it now means, and doesn’t

The different meanings, senses and uses of bangsa entail some important distinctions.

These distinctions need to be understood, scrupulously recognised and clearly drawn.

Why?

What happens if they are not?

First case in point.

In principle the Malay word “antarabangsa” might with equal plausibility and appropriateness signify “intercommunal” or “interspecies” or “intercultural”, among a number of meanings.

But it means — it has come to mean — “international”, pertaining to relations between nation-states.

It is used to refer to relations between the constituent member units of the international community: of the network of nation-states that these days are linked and “framed” within the structure of the United Nations as the focal institution of global “international society”.

That is what, by common usage and with official endorsement, antarabangsa has come to mean.

But there was no inevitability or necessity about that outcome. Things might have been different.

The term antarabangsa might easily have come to mean something quite different. It might, for example, have come to address the relations between different interdependent and interacting species within the global ecosystem. It might in that way have become a technical “term of art” or specialised “disciplinary concept” in the area of environmental studies.

But it did not.

And it now means what it does.

And, with the meaning that it now has, it “folds” people’s thinking about the idea of modern nations and “nation-states” into a certain, and historically quite atypical, idea of what “nations” and national identity are.

That has become the linguistic or semantic status quo or “current default position” in Malaysian usage. And that situation, in turn, has certain consequences not just for everyday language use and but for popular political understanding.

In popular understanding, and hence popular experience too, all sorts of problems arise when one tries to discuss global issues and politics with people who operate — and whose thinking is framed and therefore also confined — within these terms of conventional understanding: within the Malay-language-based “thought-world” and “mindset”.

We have all had these experiences. Many of us go away from them frustrated, confused and fearful for the future.

We try to discuss some issue of world politics with people — often very intelligent if not highly educated people — who operate with the standard, all-purpose “default mode” version of the notion of bangsa: within the familiar conceptual and moral universe where all the different aspects of bangsa are really just parts, or “refractions”, of one and the same thing — usually of bangsa as Malay “national descent” identity.

What become confused, and inextricably and hopelessly entangled, in these discussions are notions, and the phenomena, of “race” as biological descent (whatever that may be taken to mean by those involved in the discussion); of national identity, of the rights and standing of different sovereign nation-states; and questions of cultural differences — at the local, national and global levels — and of intercultural accommodation, negotiation and reconciliation.

Getting these things all tangled together, jumbled up in one confused and confusing package, is no great help to anyone.

The world’s problems are tough enough, and hard enough to sort out, without our being hobbled by these semantic impediments; without our being forever handicapped in our attempts to address and overcome them by the burden of all this added, semantically-generated confusion.

It is simply too heavy an extra handicap for human hope, the human future, to have to bear.

Another example: Vision 2020 and “Bangsa Malaysia”

Similarly, as a second example, let us take Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 and it nine key challenges.

The first of those national challenges, he noted, was that of “establishing a united Malaysian nation with a sense of common and shared destiny … a nation at peace with itself, territorially and ethnically integrated, living in harmony and full and fair partnership, made up of one ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ with political loyalty and dedication to the nation.”

This, he added, was in many ways, the primary or central challenge, the one upon which all else would either hang or fall.

“It would be surprising,” he accordingly remarked at the outset, if that first strategic challenge of establishing a united Malaysian nation, did not prove to be “the most fundamental, the most basic”.

So far, so good.

But what exactly did he intend and envision with that term “Bangsa Malaysia”?

Did the author of Vision 2020 mean by the term “a Malaysian nation” or “nation-defining people”? Perhaps, and fair enough.

But if so, what kind of nation had he in mind and on what basis, and principles, was it to be created?

Was it a nation of presumed common descent that he had in mind, a nation embodying and identifying with a Malay past that, for all that nation’s citizens, was personally their own?

If so, how was this to be achieved in the case of Malaysians of non-Malay backgrounds?

Where do people of non-Malay sociocultural backgrounds get into and become part of the picture? How might they become fully integrated into his “Bangsa Malaysia”?

Or was the term intended to mean a new nation of “Malaysians”: a nation equally of all its citizens as primarily Malaysians, all displaying and sharing an overarching and transcending Malaysian identity?

Would this be a “mosaic pattern” Malaysian nation whose citizens would still acknowledge and maintain their diverse cultural origins — origins of various Malay and Chinese and Indian and Bornean and indigenous peninsular kinds among others?

Or was the rather different idea here one of some kind of demographic and cultural “melting pot” in which all elements would be blended together to produce some genuinely “hybrid variety” of ideal-typical Malaysian?

Or, yet again, within and at the end of that process of blending, was the Malay cultural component and element somehow to remain nationally definitive and characteristic? Was it to be the form to which all, including all others, must approximate and then ultimately adhere and conform?

Was Dr Mahathir perhaps suggesting — even indicating an official hope and intention — that there would eventually be a great “coming together”: not simply a “blending” of the “ancestral cultures” of Malaysians of various kinds and origins within one rich, diverse and complex “Malaysian culture”; but also — via extensive and sustained intermarriage between the members of the various Malaysian component communities, and the resulting procreation of children of “mixed” backgrounds — the generation of a single, blended “Malaysian people”?

If this was what was envisaged, how might that objective be achieved in the face of all the pressures — including both official policies and ever more powerful institutional forces and obstacles — that now keep various Malaysians apart; and especially those insulating and isolating Malays as Muslims from close and intimate association with Malaysians of other backgrounds?

Or, as some people facilely like to say, was the idea here not one of a “melting pot” but that of a “salad bowl”, a rojak nation?

Perhaps in such a national rojak salad, it was hoped, all the different cultural and demographic elements would be mixed together, in mutually enhancing interaction — without giving up their own ancestral characteristics, without losing their own identity — but not blended, homogenised?

Fair enough. But if so, how was this to be accomplished?

How might this conceivably be achieved upon a political terrain that also assumed Malay primacy and ascendancy, that upheld Malay culture as the sacrosanct core of the definitive national culture?

How, in particular, might this be done where “culture” did not simply denote different optional, perhaps trivial, “lifestyle choices” but had built within it various psychologically powerful ideas about who might interact — cleanly and safely, decently and without risk of religious pollution or profaning contamination — with whom?

Fundamental though they were to the Vision 2020 idea of a “Bangsa Malaysia”, none of these complexities were addressed.

All these issues were left unreconciled.

Politically it was perhaps easier to let things remain vague, and to hope to derive whatever benefit that kind of vagueness and ambiguity might permit.

Bangsa: Conceptual “Room to manoeuvre” — and wriggle?

A noted New York colleague of mine four decades ago — a political scientist with a keen interest in public policy and its enabling budgetary mechanisms — always referred to this kind of thing as the pervasive “fudge factor”.

In this aspect, at least, the Vision 2020 approach was characterised, and perhaps vitiated, by a very generous conceptual “fudge factor”, an indispensable imprecision without which the idea — being less than fully coherent — could never have been proposed.

Imprecision of this kind may create politically valuable “room to manoeuvre” and to wriggle.

For the practical politician, the value of “wriggle room” is never to be underestimated.

We may criticise them for their readiness to resort to such “fudges”. But they, in the real world, face problems and pressures that few others among us know.

Even so, there is a cost, a potentially punishing cost, here.

The temptation of, and recourse to, the available “wriggle” or “fudge” may also cause great, and damaging, confusion.

The Vision 2020 aspiration of creating a strong and self-reliant “Bangsa Malaysia”, it may be persuasively argued, was fundamentally vitiated by the same conceptual vagueness, the same intellectual imprecision, the same fatal ambiguity deriving from the same source — what we may call “the bangsa confusion” or “fudge”.

Trustingly vague yet sadly underprepared, the “Bangsa Malaysia” idea has foundered upon the official failure to make clear what different senses of the term bangsa were put “in play” in its rationale — followed by the further failure to explain which of them was here being chosen ahead, and to the exclusion, of the others; or else how these differences were now, in the new Malaysian case, to be reconciled.

Third example: “Bangsa” and the Malaysian nation

A third example may be briefly noted here. It involves a complex matter whose basis was explained earlier as part of the clarification of the notions of “people” and “nation” in relation to “bangsa”.

The issue here is not simple.

So it will not be discussed here at length. (Perhaps it will become the subject of a more extended commentary at some later time.)

The matter is simply stated.

Some, but not all, nations took shape and see themselves as nations of “common descent”.

Nations of this kind are built upon various forms of “blood, homeland and belonging” kinds of nationalism.

As we saw, they define and uphold the nation as a single historically unified and culturally homogeneous community of common fate and destiny.

There is also another kind of nationalism. It is one that is not only common but also generally more apposite to the analysis of most of the world’s nations today.

This is an idea of nation and nationalism that does not assume or “privilege” any ideas of the common historic origins, and hence “origins-based destiny”, of all those long “grounded” in, and born upon, the soil of the national homeland.

It does not assume or preferentially “inscribe” any notion of national cultural homogeneity or “indigenous” cultural primacy and political ascendancy.

In contrast to the “common descent” or “blood and homeland” or “sociocultural homogeneity” type, this kind of nationalism and resulting nation is usually termed “civic”.

The standard writings contrast these two types as “folk” and “civic” nationalism.

But by “folk” what is meant here is not “folk” as in “folklore” or in amiably “folksy” popular peasant culture.

Here “folk” is the English rendition of what de Gobineau and Chamberlain and Hitler and their kind meant by the German word “Volk”: the nation as a human community of biological destiny, the “blood-sharing” nation as one of the principal actors in world history viewed as a “struggle of races” driven by an irresistible “biological imperative”.

The “civic” nation, by contrast, is linked not by “sacralised” notions of blood and descent but by consent and contract.

The notion of “civic nationalism” suggests a nation bound together by the imputed contractual undertaking of mutual recognition between the citizen and the state.

Significantly, the formation of Malay nationalism and the Malaysian nation and state occurred on the intellectual terrain and conceptual foundations of “bangsa” — of a form of so-called “common descent” or “folk nationalism” that took its own nature and presuppositions for granted and saw them as universally true and “normative”, or obligatory, for everybody, for all people, everywhere.

The implications of this historical fact remain crucially important.

Why?

Because Malaysian national identity and nationhood were founded, and are now placed, on a grounding that presumes the normality or “naturalness” of “descent nationalism”.

That is a view that sees “civic nationalism” and its underlying basis as somehow abnormal, improper, and defective.

This is one half of the problem here.

The other half is that the fundamental notion, or basis, upon which that idea of civic nationalism rests — namely, that of an implied or imputed “contract” of mutual recognition and fair, even-handed dealing between the state and each of its citizens — has in Malaysia been appropriated, ever since the mid-1980s, by a different political ideology, for a different project and other purposes.

It has been adopted and adapted in Malaysia since about 1986 to suggest that the “Merdeka agreements” which were to become enshrined in the original Federal Constitution of Malaya represented some sort — but an entirely different kind — of “bargain” or “social contract”.

This was not one not between the ideal-typical, abstractly conceived citizen and the state but — to make possible and establish the Malayan state — one, via their own sectional leaders, between the major ethnic components or constitutive “communal” blocs of the  terminating “colonial plural society”.

The “Merdeka Constitution” did exactly that. Of that there can be no historical doubt or quarrel (but, of course, without containing at the time any notion of “Ketuanan Melayu”, of Malay supremacy. That “extra” was “retrofitted” later, after 1986).

But those who take this view also go on to uphold the idea that that intergroup “social contact” solemnised by the various communal bloc leaders — it alone and no other — is the only kind of social contract that applies and has any political relevance in Malaysia.

The original idea from which that special Malaysian notion has been derived — the idea that every modern form of political society is based upon a foundational “social contract”, actual or imputed, between the state and each of its individual citizens as a stakeholder of full standing — is here largely ignored and forgotten. It is not relevant, or so it is held, to Malaysia.

Virtually all of those who vehemently debate the idea of an intercommunal Malaysian “social contract”, and who contribute to the often acrimonious polemics that sustain that idea, remain totally “innocent” — which is to say ignorant — of the older idea which they have plundered and appropriated as the source of their own new coinage.

It is one which they have now set up to serve their own purposes.

In this strangely modified form, the idea of a nationally foundational “social contract” has evolved into, or so it has now become for many, a national and powerfully protected “sacred cow”.

This is not simply an intellectual pity and a scholarly embarrassment.

It is also a national disaster, or potentially bears the seeds of one.

The Malaysian nation’s most urgent task today

In the Nine Challenges of Vision 2020 and more generally, the basic requirement — the task and necessity of sorting out the different meanings and uses of bangsa — was not faced.

Instead, the preference was to leave things vague.

It was easier to license and so play upon the inherent ambiguities in the denotation and use of the word bangsa: to allow its different, even discrepant, understandings to remain “in play” and, in that way, to let different people — different audiences and interests — hear in those words what they might prefer to hear.

“Bangsa Malaysia”: A nation? Or just a population? A new “blended” combination of people of diverse backgrounds?

A Malay-identified population, or a blended, mixed and fused populace as the “definitive form” of the national collective, the “people”? Or a continuing Malay-defined bangsa as nation, or national core, at the head of a Malay-centred but more than exclusively or solely Malay population, nation and state? Or a bit of everything?

Probably that last is closest to the truth, to what those who drafted Vision 2020 had in mind.

But if so, it was hardly a clear, and certainly a less than really helpful, idea.

And whatever Dr Mahathir may, in detail, have had in mind and intended by it, he did not really say or ever make clear. Not at the launching of the Vision 2020 concept, nor ever on any available occasion after that.

Probably he did not care or see the need to do so, to provide any such clarification. The practical politician is not a scholarly pedant or academic hair-splitter, and cannot be.

More than that, to explain clearly what was officially meant by Vision 2020’s “Bangsa Malaysia” idea, he would have had to have understood clearly — after the manner patiently outlined in the preceding parts of this commentary — “what every Malaysian now needs to know about race”.

Clearly he, and those around him, did not.

That was just not part of the official thinking of the time.

To say this is not to indulge in personal criticism.

The matter goes far beyond the personal.

It has to do not with individuals but with a national form and style of thinking and the inherent defects in its verbal, or “lexical”, equipment, a culturally pervasive and politically disabling “semantic confusion”.

A “false identification”, sealed by loose language, of quite different things.

Official thinking simply did not concern itself with, and was not concerned about, how all these related and overlapping, yet distinct and divergent, ideas and concepts — and the human realities to which they properly refer — are related to one another. Sorting all these complexities out anywhere, under any historical conditions, is never easy.

It is an especially difficult challenge in Malaysia.

It is remarkably difficult in Malaysia not because of the unique cultural complexity and “ethnic” diversity of Malaysia’s population. Again, one must beware here of tempting ideas of “Race and Malaysian ‘Exceptionalism’”.

It is so painfully difficult and politically fraught in Malaysia because — in the Malay, and national, language in which these various, subtly different matters have to be distinguished from one another, if they are to be constructively discussed — all these different meanings “travel” in the one semantic suitcase.

Here they habitually “travel” simply as an undifferentiated and rarely considered “bangsa”. They all are included under the one word, and as aspects of that one same thing.

We are dealing here with what was characterised above as a dangerous “slipping and sliding” — often unrecognised by the people involved themselves — between the various, and at times even discrepant and divergent, meanings of the term bangsa.

Our discussion, and the future of the entire “Malaysian project”, requires a far more secure footing than is provided by the conceptually shifting ground or “slippery slope” of “bangsa-based” thinking.

Yet, fatefully, the core of the Malaysian state and nation’s problems at this time lie here.

They lie, and lurk dangerously, in just those places where the most urgently necessary requirement these days is the proper and effective deployment of precise terms denoting those distinct matters that in Malaysia present themselves in everyday language (and hence in majority popular consciousness) as simply different aspects of “bangsa”.

They lie, and lie ominously in wait, precisely where the clear drawing of those conceptual distinctions is required.

There is no national task more urgent these days than the “disaggregation” and “deconstruction” of that key word, and of that core idea, bangsa.

*
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

                This entry was posted on Saturday, 25 February 2012, 1:27 pm and is filed under
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DAP calls for PSC on Lynas plant

by Nigel Aw

Malaysiakini

Feb 26, 2012

DAP has called on the federal government to form a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to probe the safety of the RM700 million Lynas Advanced Material Plant (Lamp) in Gebeng, Kuantan.

Party vice-chief Tan Seng Giaw (right) said the federal government should do so as it had called for a PSC on electoral reforms immediately after the Bersih 2.0 rally on July 9 last year.

“Like the Bersih 2.0 rally,  the government set up a parliamentary select committee so this should be the case (for Himpunan Hijau 2.0), a parliamentary select committee should look into Lynas,” he said.

Tan said the government must take heed of the people’s concerns and review decision to allow Lynas to operate in Malaysia, by taking into consideration of the effects caused by the now defunct Bukit Merah rare-earth refinery in Perak.

The Lamp, he said, similarly involves similar thorium waste and in the Bukit Merah case, an element believed to be responsible for the high level of leukemia cases among those living within the vicinity.

Kit Siang: Is Lamp really worth it?

Meanwhile, DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang warned that if the government continues to ignore the people’s voice, it will cost them at the ballot box.

“BN has said it is confident in retaining all its seats in Pahang but today is a warning that they may lose more seats as people are concerned about the environment and good governance,” he said during a post-Himpunan Hijau 2.0 rally  DAP luncheon in Kuantan this afternoon.

This, he attributed to the increasing political maturity of Malaysians which compared to Bukit Merah, are much more active in voicing out their rights.

Lim said that while the economic benefits of Lamp cannot be denied, he questioned whether it was worth the risk.

“Countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan prosper without rare earth, there are plenty of other opportunities… There is no need to tale such risks for development,” he said.

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Mat Zain: ‘No doubt’ Shahrizat’s husband, children committed multiple CBT

By Clara Chooi

The Malaysian Insider

Feb 26, 2012

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 26 — Former senior police officer Datuk Mat Zain Ibrahim asserted today that the National Feedlot Corporation’s (NFCorp) controversial condominium purchases are clear examples of CBT (criminal breach of trust), adding the Attorney-General should have “no doubt” of this when deciding whether to press charges.

Mat Zain said that based on provisions in Section 409 of the Penal Code, the husband and children of minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, who run the NFCorp, should each be slapped with numerous counts of CBT.

If convicted, the former KL CID chief said they would be liable to a jail term of between two and 20 years, whipping and a fine.

“After having sighted the NFC (National Feedlot Centre) loan agreement that was made available yesterday, coupled with the public statement by the Commercial Crimes Investigations Director (CCID), I would say that the Attorney General’s Chambers should not have any doubts in their mind now, that these are clear cut case of CBTs by agent as defined under Section 409 (of the) Penal Code.

“There’s no two ways about it. This is not like a breach of an agreement,” he said in an emailed statement to The Malaysian Insider today.

In an in intriguing twist to the ongoing NFC saga, CCID Director Datuk Syed Ismail Syed Azizan confirmed yesterday that the police would recommend CBT charges against all NFCorp directors to the Attorney-General’s Chambers.

Mat Zain noted that under the law, every disbursement of public funds in the NFC that was considered in violation of the loan agreement would be considered as one office.

He singled out NFCorp’s controversial condominium purchases, saying every payment for the property, whether for downpayment or instalment, would be viewed as one CBT charge.

“For example the purchase of Condo A: If the purchase of Condo A involved 10 instalments at different times, using the same fund then, they are answerable to 10 counts of CBT charges. That’s how it works.

“So it looks like Shahrizat’s husband and children have committed multiple CBTs by agents in the NFC fiasco,” he said.

NFCorp, which operates the NFC, a RM250 million federally-funded cattle-farming project, is chaired by federal minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil’s husband, Datuk Seri Mohamad Salleh Ismail. Their three children also hold executive posts in the company.

The NFC hit the headlines after it made it into the Auditor-General’s Report last year, and has continued to hog the limelight after it was linked to Shahrizat and her family.

Since then, PKR has revealed numerous startling exposes over the scandal-ridden project, including allegations that millions of ringgit have been siphoned off for land, property and personal expenses unrelated to cattle farming.

But recently, in response to claims that NFCorp had purchased two luxury condominiums worth RM34 million in Singapore’s posh Marina Bay Suites, Shahrizat’s son Wan Shahinur Izmir had explained that the company had decided that it would make better use of the money by investing in property during a break in business operations.

The break, said Wan Shahinur Izmir, was caused by the government’s decision to suspend the construction of an abattoir that would have been rented to NFCorp. According to Pua, however, the Finance Ministry had told a parliamentary committee last November that there was no provision that permits the NFCorp to use its federal loan to purchase property.

Since the scandal exploded in the media, Shahrizat (picture) has been faced with repeated calls for her resignation, even from her colleagues in Umno. But she has insisted that the project had nothing to do with her.

The Wanita Umno chief applied for three weeks’ leave from her ministerial duties last month when new allegations of bribery surfaced. She has since resumed her duties.

Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin announced last month Putrajaya would appoint an auditor to scrutinise NFCorp’s books in light of accusations made against the company, but dismissed calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the NFC.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 26 February 2012, 11:13 pm and is filed under
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The shameless lot

– Spencer Gan

The Malaysian Insider

Feb 26, 2012

FEB 26 – When exactly did Malaysia reach this point: where those sullied by wrongdoing (NFC) and the mother of all wrongdoing (PKFZ) speak without shame, even with arrogance.

There is no remorse or humility. Aren’t those who are wrong or who have misused public funds supposed to show some sorrow or at least keep silent?

Not so the people at the National Feedlot Corporation (NFCorp) or the political party whose politicians fleeced Malaysians of billions of ringgit, the MCA.

A day after the police said that it was recommending that the directors of the NFCorp be charged with criminal breach of trust, the NFCorp hit back and cast aspersions on the motives of the police. It then went on to accuse the police of not understanding key ingredients of the offence.

Imagine the chaps who used your money and mine to buy condos not in the name of NFCorp here and in Singapore; to purchase umrah packages, to pay their credit card bills, etc and doing as they wished with a government soft loan having the temerity to slam the police for improper motives!!!

Till today, we have not had a sorry or any remorse from the people at NFCorp. All we have had is aggression and excuses and ridiculous explanations.

And how about Chua Soi Lek and the MCA. Not a day goes by without them making some accusation against Pakatan Rakyat (the latest one is that Malaysia  will become bankrupt within two years if Pakatan takes control).

This warning is coming from the political party that gave us a RM12 billion hole thanks to the corrupt and conniving ways of its politicians who ran the PKFZ. I have not heard Soi Lek or any MCA politician put up their hands and say sorry for fleecing the Malaysian taxpayer.

But I suppose asking these people to act with a modicum of decency is too much. Anyway, while we are on the subject of bankruptcy, wasn’t it Idris Jala who warned that Malaysia was on the road to bankruptcy given the profilgacy of the government.

And correct me but isn’t this the government which has “borrowed” ideas of Pakatan Rakyat’s Buku Jingga and abolished toll charges on some stretches of highways.

But what is astounding is that we have in Malaysia a situation where those accused/guilty of wrongdoing are lecturing the rest of us.

                This entry was posted on Sunday, 26 February 2012, 10:36 pm and is filed under
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Alangkah leganya jika terlepas dari cengkaman ‘bapa-bapa ayam’ ini

By
Aspan Alias
 | February 27, 2012

The Malaysian Insider

27 FEB — Selepas arahan dari Putrajaya, kini rakyat sedang berhadapan dengan isu berapa kah “settlement figure” yang sebenarnya yang telah ditetapkan untuk penyelesaian diluar mahkamah diantara Tajudin Ramli dengan MAS. Rakyat ingin tahu kerana semua wang yang terlibat dalam kes ini adalah wang rakyat. Tidak perlu menyalahkan sesiapa termasuk parti-parti pembangkang kerana apa yang berlaku dalam kes ini adalah di sebabkan oleh kelemahan dasar dan perlaksanaan kerajaan.

Semasa Tajudin mengambil alih MAS dalam proses perlaksanaan dasar “pengswastaan” kerajaan dahulu, banyak pihak telah membuat kritikan terhadap kerajaan pimpinan Dr Mahathir tetapi maklum sajalah Dr Mahathir tidak peduli dengan pandangan ramai kerana beliau berkata pengswastaan MAS itu adalah satu perkara yang “necessity”’ untuk dilakukan.

Pandangan pihak lain tidak perlu diambil kira. Entah apa sebabnya MAS yang begitu berjaya semasa itu hendak diswastakan sedangkan syarikat penerbangan kepunyaan kerajaan itu sangat maju dan MAS adalah diantara syarikat penerbangan yang “premium” dipesada antarabangsa. Hanya Dr Mahathir sahaja yang tahu kenapa ianya dilakukan.

Kita semua tidak boleh ambil tahu dan lagi pun bekas PM itu sangat kuat sokongan terutamanya dari Umno semasa itu. Sokongan kuat orang Melayu semasa itu di ambil sebagai kelemahan Melayu dan beliau boleh melakukan apa sahaja walaupun ia bakal merosakkan sebuah syarikat penerbangan yang begitu maju. Tugas orang Melayu khususnya dalam Umno hanyalah untuk mengangguk sahaja. Apabila datang kerugian besar beliau juga mahukan kita semua mengangguk dan pertahankan kesalahan yang sengaja dilakukannya sendiri.

Begitulah yang berlaku dalam banyak hal pelaksanaan dasar yang tidak menentu itu. Begitu jugalah dengan isu NFC sekarang. Muhyiddin dan ramai pemimpin Umno menyalahkan pembangkang sedangkan isu ini timbul setalah membaca lapuran Ketua Audit Negara bukannya ditimbulkan oleh pembangkang. Seperti juga dalam kes MAS ini, isu NFC ini bakal membawa padah kepada negara dan rakyat dalam bentuk kerugian wang rakyat.

Sekarang banyak suara yang kita dengar supaya Dr Mahathir memberitahu segala-galanya secara terperinci tentang isu MAS ini. Pertamanya kenapa perlu MAS di swastakan dan kenapa diberikan pengswastaan itu kepada Tajudin. Kenapa berikan pengswastaan ini kepada Tajudin yang tidak ada rekod dan pengalaman didalam pengurusan syarikat penerbangan?

Apabila MAS menghadapi kerugian besar maka kerajaan mengambil tindakan untuk melakukan “bailout” terhadap syarikat ini dan mengambil balik MAS dengan membeli sahamnya yang harga yang sama iaitu RM8 sesaham. Lagi sekali rakyat terpaksa membayar segala kerugian ini.

Kerajaan mengambil tindakan mahkamah terhadap Tajudin dan Tajudin telah diarah untuk membayar kembali kepada kerajaan sebayak RM580 juta tetapi Tajudin telah bertindak dengan membuat “counter sueing” terhadap kerajaan sebanyak RM13 billion. Di sinilah persoalan besar timbul. Kenapa Putrajaya mengarahkan supaya isu inidiselesaikan diluar mahkamah. Ini persoalan besar dan pertanyaan banyak pihak ini merupakan satu soalan cupu mas yang bernilai berbillion-billion ringgit.

Adakah kerajaan sudah sedar yang pihaknya akan kalah didalam kes ini dan rakyat akan tahu cerita sebenarnya? Kenapa hendak diselesaikan diluar mahkamah? Kalau hendak selesaikan diluar mahkamah berapakah jumlah yang terlibat, dan siapa yang akan membayar siapa? Adakah tindakan ini semata-mata untuk melindungi nama-nama individu pemimpin yang terlibat mengambil kesempatan dalam proses pengswastaan ini?

Bermula dari pengswastaan inilah MAS sudah menjadi syarikat penerbangan yang begitu kerdil dari pandangan industri penerbangan antarabangsa. Kini MAS hanyalah menjadi ulam dan makan kepada mereka yang sedang mengambil kesempatan ke atas kelemahannya. Kalau tidak masakan syarikat Air Asia yang hanya sedang menunggu untuk “bungkus” boleh mengambil alih pegangan sahamnya yang terbesar didalamnya?

Siapa yang pandai sangat dalam Khazanah Nasional yang boleh merelakan keadaan ini berlaku? MAS ibarat seorang perempuan yang lemah yang boleh diperlakukan oleh “bapa-bapa ayam” untuk dijadikan pelacur bagi kepentingan “bapa-bapa ayam” yang sedang mencari makan dengan apa sahaja cara ini waimma melampaui batas-batas moral dan agama anutannya.

Sekarang Dr Mahathir tidak mahu bertanggungjawa apabila diminta berbuat demikian. Dia menyatakan yang beliau bukan mengetuai MAS dan tidak ada sebab untuk berbuat demikian. Ini merupakan kenyataan yang tidak bertanggungjawab sedangkan keputusan pengswastaan itu telah melalui persetujuan kabinet yang beliau menjadi pengerusinya. Betullah beliau tidak bertanggungjawab tetapi beliau mesti mengambil “accountability” terhadap kes ini.

Saya telah menyebut isu “accountability” ini banyak kali. Dr Mahathir perlu belajar untuk mengambil “accountability” dari kepimpinannya. Lagi pun beliau akhir-akhir ini terlalu banyak membuat komen terhadap pihak lain maka elok Dr Mahathir menjawab persoalan terhadap kredibiliti kepimpinan beliau sendiri.

Di Korea apabila lima orang banduan lepas lari dari penjara, maka yang bertanggungjawab ke atas kelemahan itu adalah ketua pengarah penjara negara itu. Tetapi menteri dalam negerinya meletakkan jawatan kerana mengambil “accountability” terhadap kejadian itu. Begitulah tinnginya nilai etika kepimpinan negara tersebut. Tetapi disini dalam sibuk mengaku yang kita sebuah negara yang akan masuk ke dalam kumpulan negara maju tidak lama lagi, sikap tidak mengambil “accountability” ini masih menjadi budaya kepimpinan negara kita.

Bagi saya, isu penyelesaian isu MAS diluar mahkamah ini perlu dilakukan secara terbuka. Rakyat sudah jemu dengan perlakuan pimpinan BN sejak dua tiga dekad dahulu. Lepas satu isu besar, akan timbul lagi isu yang lain yang tidak henti-henti.

Sampai bila pimpinan kita bersikap seperti “bapa ayam” yang melacurkan rakyat untuk kepentingan wang ringgit dan harta benda untuk keluarga mereka. Kalaulah Utusan sanggup membantu rakyat untuk membetulkan keadaan ini, alangkah baiknya. Tetapi akhbar itu sedaya upaya menutupnya dari pengetahuan rakyat yang ramai.

Sekarang ini terpulanglah kepada rakyat samada mahu terus menjadi mangsa “bapa-bapa ayam” ini atau melakukan sesuatu dari “hegemony” dan cengkaman “bapa-bapa ayam” ini.

Satu lagi isu yang nyata, Umno tidak mungkin kembali kepada parti perjuangan. Parti ini hanya merupakan parti sebagai modal peniagaan bagi sekumpulan kecil pemimpin-pemimpinnya. —
aspanaliasnet.blogspot.com

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 1:16 pm and is filed under
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Decision to strike out Tajudin-MAS suits on March 5

The Malaysian Insider

Feb 27, 2012

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 27 — The High Court here will decide on March 5 whether to strike out both Malaysia Airlines’ (MAS) claim against Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli as well as his counter-claim against the government and the national carrier.

Tajudin, who was the executive chairman of the airline from 1994 to 2001, is applying to cancel MAS’s suit over losses due to the relocation of its cargo operations in Amsterdam and Frankfurt to a single hub in Hahn, Germany.

Putrajaya is also seeking to strike out Tajudin’s RM500 million counterclaim, in which he alleges the government and MAS defamed him with a civil suit for abuse of power while heading the flag carrier.

Lawyers for all parties declined to comment after meeting trial judge Rosilah Yop in chambers for just under two hours.

“The decisions will be on March 5. I’m sorry I can’t comment because it will be subjudice,” Tajudin’s counsel Lim Kian Leong told reporters.

But Tajudin and MAS are also expected to finalise an “out-of-court” settlement by May 10 after the Court of Appeal decided on February 16 to allow both parties to “settle negotiations.”

MAS has said it was forced to enter into a disadvantageous aircraft lease contract with a company, which was later linked to Tajudin’s family, causing it to lose RM10 million to RM16 million a month before the project was terminated when Tajudin left the company.

The termination resulted in a RM300 million arbitration claim against MAS by the company.

Tajudin has in turn claimed that a separate suit, by MAS and its two subsidiaries, MAS Golden Holidays Sdn Bhd dan MAS Hotels & Boutiques Sdn Bhd, contained bare allegations with no basis and was an abuse of the court system.

MAS and its subsidiaries charged that Tajudin and his four companies — Naluri Corporation Bhd, Promet (Langkawi) Resorts Sdn Bhd, Kauthar Venture Capital Sdn Bhd and Pakatan Permai Sdn Bhd — had intentionally breached his obligations and trust to win certain contracts that benefitted him, using MAS.

The Kedah-born businessman claimed that MAS had acted with malice and in bad faith in taking legal action against him to embarrass and tarnish his reputation.

The suit by MAS and its two subsidiaries against Tajudin is due to be heard by Rosilah on March 12.

Earlier this month, Tajudin settled out-of-court his debt owed to Pengurusan Danaharta Bhd (Danaharta) and several other government-linked companies (GLCs) for an undisclosed sum of money.

This was despite a High Court decision in December 2009 ordering the ex-MAS chief to pay the state asset management manager RM589.14 million plus two per cent interest per year, backdated to January 1, 2006.

Tajudin has been entangled in a complicated series of expensive suits, countersuits and appeals with various parties arising from his failure to service a billion ringgit loan he took to purchase a major stake in MAS in 1994.

He has claimed that his purchase was a forced “national service”, disguised as an arm’s length commercial deal, because the government wanted to appease the investment community and the public.

Dr Mahathir, however, denied in his autobiography published last March that he and Daim had forced Tajudin to bail out MAS in 1994 for RM1.8 billion.

Last August, Putrajaya intervened and commenced action to put an end to the controversial legal battle by ordering all suits against Tajudin to be dropped.

The move has been described as an attempt by the government to cover-up details found in Tajudin’s affidavit in support of his counter-claim where the embattled tycoon purportedly revealed much of the inner workings behind the purchase of MAS.

According to media reports, Tajudin had also claimed of an over-riding agreement protecting him from liabilities.

The 65-year-old was a poster boy of former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin’s now-discredited policy of nurturing a class of Malay corporate captains on government largesse during the Mahathir administration.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 1:26 pm and is filed under
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Mahathir past cascading into the Najib present – powerful reasons for full accounting for the RM100 billion “black hole” caused by Mahathir’s financial scandals

Recently, the past has fast cascaded into the present – or to be more specific, the Mahathir past cascading into the Najib present.

Today the High Court in Kuala Lumpur fixed March 5 to decide whether to end the multi-billion ringgit legal battle between Malaysian Airlines (MAS) and Tan Sri Tajudin Ramli, by striking out MAS’ mega claims against Tajudin as well as his RM500 million counter-claim against the government and the national carrier.

Tajudin has been entangled in a complicated series of expensive suits, countersuits and appeals with various parties arising from his failure to service a billion ringgit loan he took to purchase a major stake in MAS in 1994.

Tajudin was the executive chairman of the airline from 1994 to 2001.

In 2002, MAS lodged its first police report against Tajuddin, accusing him of allegedly causing the flag carrier to suffer losses in excess of RM8 billion.

According to a report to the  Anti-Corruption Agency, a major contributor to the record losses under Tajudin was the relocation of MAS’s cargo operation in Amsterdam and Frankfurt to a single hub in Hahn, Germany, where the airline was forced to enter into a disadvantageous aircraft lease contract with a company, which was later linked to Tajudin’s family.

The new cargo hub operation had caused MAS to suffer losses of between RM10 million and RM16 million a month before the project was terminated after the government regained control of MAS in 2001.

The termination resulted in a RM300 million arbitration claim against MAS by the company.

MAS has had a turbulent past decade after the government bought back the airline from the former corporate high-flyer at RM8 per share or about double the market price at the time. The airline was at the time saddled with a debt reported to be RM9.5 billion.

In 2009, Danaharta and two of its subsidiaries won a RM589.143 million suit against Tajudin. The case arose after the tycoon borrowed RM1.792 billion from a group of syndicated lenders in1994 to purchase a 32 per cent stake in MAS.

However, from 1994 to 1998 he failed to service the original loan, causing it to become a non-performing loan (NPL).

In 1998, Danaharta acquired the NPL from the lenders but Tajudin also failed to settle his debts to Danaharta until it was in default of RM1.41 billion as at October 8, 2001.

As part of a settlement agreement, Tajudin was to pay RM942 million in four instalments over three years and that he was permitted to redeem his charged shares at a minimum price per share.

Tajudin, however, defaulted in the payment of the quarterly interest payable under the settlement agreement and on April 27, 2002, the plaintiffs terminated the settlement agreement and demanded RM1.61 billion from him.

On April 29, 2002, Danaharta, together with its subsidiaries Danaharta Urus Sdn Bhd and Danaharta Managers Sdn Bhd, sold part of the charged shares consisting entirely of Technology Resources Industries (TRI) shares at RM2.75 per share, resulting in total proceeds of RM717.39 million.

As at December 31, 2005, the amount outstanding was RM589.14 million and on May 11, 2006, Danaharta and the subsidiaries commenced action to recover the money. The national asset management company won its case against Tajudin in 2009.

But the ex-MAS chief filed a counter suit claiming RM13.46 billion from some 22 parties and individuals.

Tajudin alleged, in his affidavit, that he was directed by former Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and former Finance Minister Tun Daim Zainudin in 1994 to buy a controlling stake in MAS to bail out the government.

Tajudin had claimed that former premier Mahathir had made him buy MAS to help bail out Bank Negara after the central bank suffered massive foreign exchange losses due partly to speculation in foreign currency markets as a “national service” with an “Overriding Agreement” to indemnify him against any losses suffered.

Although Tajudin’s claim has been denied by Mahathir, the former Prime Minister’s rebuttal has little credibility.

Last August, Putrajaya intervened and commenced action to put an end to the controversial legal battle by ordering all suits against Tajudin to be dropped.

On February 14, Danaharta and Tajudin reached “out-of-court settlement”,  the terms of which remain confidential between the two parties, where all suits pertaining to the RM589.14 million that Tajudin was ordered to pay to the firm in 2009, would be dropped and Tajudin agreed to withdraw a total of 27 appeals, 11 against Danaharta.

The question, whether the RM580 million out-of-court “renunciation”  of Tajudin’s debts is proof that Malaysians today are still paying for the RM100 billion financial scandals perpetrated in the 22 years of Mahathir premiership, has been asked but not answered.

There is now the seccond question –  whether a settlement of the multi-billion ringgit litigation  between MAS and Tajudin, with  the striking out of their mutual claims against each other, would also be in consequence of the same factors and forces resulting in the government “surrender” of the RM580 million court judgment against Tajudin?

It is indeed time to revisit the RM100 billion “black hole” created by Mahathir’s financial scandals in his 22 years of premiership, especially if the present generation of Malaysians are to pay for the sins of Mahathir’s past premiership.

There can be no better start to revisit Mahathir’s financial scandals in his  22 year as Prime Minister  than to refer to Chapter 6
“Scandal, What Scandal?”
 of Barry Wain’s
“Malaysian Maverick – Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times”
, which started with the following two paragraphs:

“Dr. Mahathir’s administration took office in 1981 with the slogan bersih, cekap amanah – clean, efficient, trustworthy. Almost immediately, however, it became embroiled in financial scandals that exploded with startling regularity, some of them truly spectacular.  A few were of an order of magnitude that could have bankrupted most developing countries. But tropical Malaysia was generously endowed with natural resources, notably offshore hydrocarbon deposits, and commanded by a leader committed to rapid development. The expanding economy absorbed the shock of much of the dissipated wealth, and where necessary, the gaps left by the missing billions were plugged with the proceeds of oil and gas exports.

 “Almost all the scandals involved the government directly, or senior officials and businessmen closely connected to UMNO. In some cases, impropriety – whether illegal or merely ill-advised – was officially authorized or condoned for an allegedly higher purpose.  Public funds were stolen in various ways, or simply poured into a big black hole in the name of ventures that bordered on the reckless, improbable or criminal.  The extent of the losses – and in some cases the way the money disappeared – was never fully documented.  Dr. Mahathir’s administration generally did not hold Malaysians accountable for the financial disasters, and often laid the blame on others. By the early 1990s cynics remarked that it had been a good decade for bad behavior, or a bad decade for good behavior.”

In this chapter, Barry Wain estimated that Mahathir’s financial scandals would have created ”a big black hole” of RM100 billion.

With the Mahathir past fast cascading into the Najib present whether because of the MAS  “double bail-outs”  triggered by the 1992/3 RM30 billion Bank Negara forex scandal, they are all powerful reasons demanding full accounting for the RM100 billion “black hole” caused by Mahathir’s financial scandals of 22 years.

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 4:40 pm and is filed under
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Raking in the Bounty of FELDA’s IPO

By
M. Bakri Musa

In the run-up to the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of FELDA Global Ventures Holdings (FGH), there is little, in fact no discussion on how the exercise would benefit FELDA settlers. Surely that should be the foremost consideration. The only criterion upon which to judge the wisdom or success of any FELDA initiative, including this proposed IPO, would be to assess its impact on the settlers.

            Instead the focus has been on bragging rights, as with trumpeting FGH to be the biggest IPO for the year, among the top 20 on the KLSE, and the world’s biggest plantation company. Such milestones are meaningful only if achieved as a consequence of the usual business activities and not through fancy paper-shuffling exercises. Apple recently surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, but that was the consequence of Apple’s much superior products like iPads, iPods, and iPhones. Contrast that with earlier achievements of such now-defunct financial giants as AIG and Lehman Brothers that were based on fancy “financial engineering” instead of solid products and services.

            Instead of delineating the potential benefits that would accrue on the settlers from this IPO, its proponents are content with dismissing the critics and imputing evil motives on their part. There are legitimate concerns that this exercise would prove to be nothing more than yet another fancy scheme for the politically powerful to cash out on a lucrative but under-priced government asset. We already have many ready examples of such greed.

            Consider the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) “cowgate” mess involving considerably much smaller sum of money. Despite the presence of high government officials on NFC’s board to safeguard the government’s interest, NFC’s senior managers still managed to subvert those publicly-subsidized loans to purchase luxury condominiums totally unrelated to the company’s activities. This oversight failure reflects both the incompetence of the government’s representatives in discharging their fiduciary responsibility, as well as the lack of integrity on the part of NFC’s management.

            Such despicable omissions and spectacular failures are not unique only to NFC; they are endemic in government-linked corporations. Thus Malaysians have good reasons to believe that FGH would be no exception once the money starts rolling in.

            It also does not escape the public’s attention that the man helming FGH, and thus whose hands would be at the till once the billions start pouring in from the IPO, is one Isa Samad, a former UMNO Vice-President. Not any VP however, but one who was found guilty by his party of “money politics” and subsequently suspended. UMNO is no paragon of virtue; to be found guilty by it would be akin to being called a slut by hookers. You have to be disgustingly gross.

            It would be easy to blame Isa Samad. The bigger question, and one that has yet to be answered, is why did Prime Minister Najib choose such a shady character to helm this major corporation? That is as much a reflection of Najib as it is on Isa.

            Peruse FGH current corporate structure. It has nearly over a hundred subsidiaries, associated companies, and joint ventures, many with overlapping functions, markets and products. Those units are created less in response to commercial needs, more to create opportunities for senior civil servants to be appointed to the many governing boards, and thus garnering extra income in the form of directors’ fees, in addition to their regular civil service pay. Ever wonder why these GLCs lack effective oversight and our government departments are shoddily run? You would think that their regular government jobs, diligently executed, would keep them fully occupied.

            A more sinister reason for these GLC directorships is that they are an effective trick to trap the loyalty of civil servants. Be too critical of the idiotic ideas of your political superiors and you risk being left out on those lucrative board appointments. With Isa Samad, it is also a case of Najib buying Isa’s silence, for reasons best known only to the pair.

Corrupting A Noble Initiative

FELDA was the crown jewel of Tun Razak’s imaginative rural development scheme. It was to provide land to otherwise landless villagers, the equivalent of land grants homesteading to early American settlers. The other reason was to encourage Malays to undertake an internal migration of sorts by uprooting them from their tradition-bound villages to begin a new life unencumbered by prevailing non-productive cultural practices.

            With the expertise of and financing from the government, those villagers would develop hitherto virgin jungles into productive rubber and palm oil plantations, with those settlers eventually getting title to their holdings. At about 14 acres each, those units were definitely economically viable. To make sure that those lands would survive the next and subsequent generations and not be endlessly subdivided, the settlers had to agree to dispense with their usual Islamic inheritance practices. Meaning, the property would be inherited by only one of the children.

            The surprise was the absence of howling protests from the ulama to this clear departure from Islamic inheritance practices as everybody saw the wisdom of the move; to maintain the economic viability of these holdings.

            If this IPO were to enhance the condition of the settlers, then it should be supported. FELDA is meant to serve the settlers, not the other way around. Isa Samad had it backwards when he dismissed the concerns of the settlers as voiced through their cooperatives.

            In response to the settlers’ concerns, Isa suggested a portion of the proceeds be placed in a “Special Purpose Vehicle” specifically to meet their needs. Unfortunately he did not provide the specifics. Consequently this SPV risks degenerating into yet another honey jar to be passed around among the politically powerful bears.

            In my forthcoming book, Liberating the Malay Mind, I put forth ideas on how to maximize the use of these GLCs in improving the lot of Bumiputras. The focus should be on investing in people – human capital – not companies. Companies are subject to business cycles; they can also be ruined by incompetent and corrupt managers. All you would be left with then are worthless stock certificates. Where is Bank Bumiputra today? Malaysia Airlines is in no great shape either, despite the billions expended through SPVs and other accounting gimmicks.

            Invest in our people instead; the skills and knowledge they acquire would stay with them to benefit society through good and bad times. Thus I suggest selling these GLCs and putting the proceeds into an escrow account for the sole purpose of investing in and developing Bumiputra human capital.

            Bringing the issue specifically to FGH, I would commit a third of the IPO proceeds to a special fund to be used to develop the human capital of the settlers and their children. That money would be used to air-condition their schools, build adequate laboratories and libraries, and to bring qualified teachers especially in English, science and mathematics. If you want the children of those settlers to be other than penorakas (homesteaders), the best route would be to provide them with superior education. That means their schools and teachers should be among the best; today they are among the worst.

            I would use the funds to enrich the curriculum as with providing music classes. I would go further and provide free musical instruments and after-class music lessons, modeled after Venezuela’s highly successful El Sistema initiative. New York is modeling a similar Harmony program with its low-income students, and this week those students had the thrill of their lifetime when their orchestra was conducted by Placido Domingo. Gustavo Dudamel, the young conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, is a product of El Sistema, a tribute to Venezuela’s investment in human capital.

            Similarly I would use the IPO funds to mechanize the operations on these plantations. Today palm nuts are still harvested in the same labor-intensive and back-breaking ways as they were 50 years ago; there is little innovation or mechanization. I fail to see why FELDA engineers could not design harvesting machines and trucks with hydraulic lifts like those used by utility repair workers to fix broken lines. Only through mechanization could the workers’ safety and health could be assured, and their productivity enhanced.

            If through this IPO the lives of those FELDA settlers and their children were to be made better, then the initiative would find many ready supporters. What many fear is that this IPO would prove to be nothing more than a windfall for the likes of Isa Samad so they could acquire their luxury condos, fancy cars, and trophy wives. —
www.bakrimusa.com

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 11:34 am and is filed under
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What every Malaysian needs to know about ‘race’, Part 2 b

By
Clive Kessler
 | February 26, 2012

The Malaysian Insider

Note:
Part 2
 of Clive Kessler’s series on race was not published in full. It comes in three parts and only Part 2a was published previously. All three parts of Part 2 should be read before
Part 3
 which was published yesterday. We apologise for the publishing glitch.

FEB 26 — Part 2b — The many faces of “bangsa”: “Stocks” and “common descent” My step-by-step, or idea by idea, disaggregation or “deconstruction” of the Malay word bangsa continues.

iii. The idea of a “stock”

Sometimes people do not wish or intend to speak — in the ways discussed in Part 2a — about total “racial” groups or “blocs” confronting one another globally in inescapable and unremitting life-and-death struggle.

They want to talk about people, or groups of people, who nevertheless display, are linked by, and have some significant social awareness of “common descent”.

If not a common descent from one and the same “ancestral pair” — a common ultimate “mother and father” — then at least from people of “similar”, meaning culturally and historically related or “cognate”, background.

In English it is usual to speak of people and things that derive from such a common historical background and origins not as a “race” or “nation” (of which more soon), but as a “stock”.

Ideas such as this one, this kind of thinking, are frequently encountered in many places. It is, among other places, both characteristic of and appropriate within the Malay world or Alam Melayu.

Often Minangkabau, Acehnese and Mandailing people, Bugis and Bawean folk, Sulu people and Kelantan people and Kedah people think and talk of themselves in exactly this way. Sometimes, too, Malays in general throughout the peninsula — and at times even people of Malay cultural background throughout the Southeast Asian region and beyond — think and talk of themselves in precisely this way.

They see and understand themselves, and recognize one another, as people broadly “of the same kind”, of the same historical tradition and overall “cultural formation” — and hence also as distinct and different from all the other kinds of people whom they encounter and habitually deal with in their everyday lives.

This kind of thinking comes easily and very naturally to many, perhaps most, peninsular Malays. They have their own very Malay way of expressing that idea: of affirming that kind of mutual recognition of similarity and common basic identity throughout the entire Malay world, across the entire region and even beyond.

They speak (and I suppose also at times think) of themselves as one people. When they do, they have in mind what makes them “at heart” one people: namely, the common basic cultural “template” of their lives and the varying localized “Malay ways of life” giving expression to it.

They express this idea by means of an eloquent natural metaphor: that of the rumpun.

A rumpun is basically a “clump”. (A Malay synonym is perdu, a plant cluster of common roots or stock.) What you see is apparently separate and different local growths or plants. Yet, unseen at a deeper subterranean level, they are not separate but one, all parts of a common, intricately connected network of mutually entwined and even mutually supporting and sustaining growth.

The prime example of this kind of growth — the basic “natural metaphor” or symbol that Malays who speak in this way have in mind at the time — is that which is so common throughout the region, and so closely identified via arts and craftwork with Malay life, namely bamboo.

Buluh serumpun. It pops up everywhere. It takes hold, adapts to and thrives widely, within varying localities and environments.

And it is tenacious. You may try to uproot it but can never really succeed. You tear it out here, eradicate it there, but it reappears, sprouting from and supported by life in other parts of the same rumpun to which it is invisibly connected.

The Alam Melayu, people often observe, and rightly, has the same character. It is an interconnected and interdependent matrix of origin, growth, mutual involvement and fate. TheAlam Melayu is a Rumpun Melayu.

Malay life and society, and Malay “historical personality”, are, for the Malay loyalists and cultural survivalists, just like that.

They are entitled to think so, to act upon that idea, and to employ the notion of the rumpun to convey their meaning.

This way of understanding things, especially their own historic situation and character, is eloquent, poetic, and also very apt. Poetic though it clearly is, the Malay idea of a common rumpun is also analytically useful and informative. It may well be world anthropology’s best analytical metaphor.

By all means its use should be encouraged and supported, not suppressed.

Here, in the present context, one needs to note only one more thing about it.

Whatever it is, this notion of the Rumpun Melayu has nothing to do, as the term is commonly understood, with “race”.

The people of the Alam and Rumpun Melayu may be just that: a “people”. But this does not make them — and they therefore should not be seen as collectively constituting on those grounds — a single political “nation” or a biological “race”.

Yet these three different ideas — of people, nation and race — all lurk and shelter together within that same Malay word bangsa.

So using the term bangsa to think about the Rumpun Melayuand its peoples is inherently ambiguous and confusing, misleading and dangerous.

Yet one of my Dewan Bahasa dictionaries gives, as one meaning of the word rumpun, “segolongan besar bangsa … yang sama”; and for serumpun, “segolongan bangsa .. .. yang sama jenisnya”.

What the idea of a “Malay rumpun” suggests is not a matter of a common biological origin or inheritance or character, of a biologically-driven history and destiny.

It is a metaphor of connectedness, of entwined lives and “life-ways”.

It is about culture, not biology. The Malay “life-worlds” that together constitute that Rumpun or Alam Melayu are “social constructs”, products of human history and cultural creativity.

They are not the residues or expression of underlying and deeply determining biological “realities”.  The yinvolve something quite different and other than “race”.

“Bangsa-thinkers”, beware!

iv.  Type Related to this idea is that of bangsa as a “type”.

I may ask somebody about a certain banana, “Pisang ini, pisang bangsa apa dia? Pisang raja, kah? Pisang rastali?”

When I ask what variety this is, pisang raja or pisang rastali, what is involved here is simply the same idea of a “stock”: of individual items emanating from a common “breeding pool”, by descent from and creation within a given field of common ancestral origins.

But, in response to somebody claiming that they are being, say, patient or sincere — when arguably they are displaying no such forbearance — a person may irritatedly retort, “sabar (or ikhlas) bangsa apa ‘ni?!”

What sort of patience or sincerity is that! When they respond in that way, no idea of any “stock” or common descent is involved.

There is no notion here of any similarity, affinity or closeness by reason of common ancrestry and descent. What are involved here are not actual families of any sort, merely “families of ideas”, or metaphorical similarities.

It is simply a matter of typological identification and classification.

Yet this sense too may be conventionally covered by that same multivocal but much overworked Malay word bangsa.

*
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney.

In this series:-

Part 1 – Words and the world, or ‘bangsa’ in question

Part 2 – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2b – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2c – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 3 – Distorted reasoning — or thinking ‘bamboozled’ by language

Part 4 – Race and history

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 11:17 am and is filed under
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What every Malaysian needs to know about ‘race’, Part 2 c

By
Clive Kessler
 | February 26, 2012

The Malaysian Insider

(
Part 2
 &
Part 2b
)

Feb 26 — The many faces of “bangsa”: “People”, “nation” and “state”

My step-by-step, and idea by idea, disaggregation of the Malay word bangsa now proceeds to, and concludes with, a discussion of modern political developments.

It explores the “folding” of these further new political meanings into the already overworked, semantically overburdened, and hence multiply ambiguous idea, or concept, of bangsa.

This disaggregation and “deconstruction” is intended to serve as a warning of the great risks of confusion — of the distorted understanding and communication — that lie deceivingly, even treacherously, in wait whenever the termbangsa is used casually, lazily and unreflectingly.

v.  People

In English, the usual word for a historic human community joined together by ideas of a common character born of similar typical experiences of life which then take form in some shared or “cognate” language and culture is a “people”.

In that sense we may speak of the English and German, the French and Italian, or the Malay people.

Such historic peoples emerged over time, often gradually. They generally took shape, even in modern times, upon pre-modern historical and cultural foundations.

They generally emerged within the bounds of some of those previously mentioned local or regionally-focused “segments” of one or other of the main recognized sub-divisions of humankind that were once seen — and wrongly known or “misrecognised” — as “races”. Historic peoples of this kind emerged in various regions within Europe, Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Because they took shape under those circumstances, the idea of a “people” often became (literally!) “tinged” and  “coloured” by popular ideas or notions of “race”.

But, again (despite what Hitler and those who inspired him may have believed about the German and similar cases), there was nothing “biological” about the languages and cultures that were the foundations upon which these peoples emerged and recognized themselves.

Again, no immanent, innate and irresistible “biological imperative” is involved.

These communities were not the expression or product of any underlying so-called “biological realities”.

They were “social constructs”, the products of mundane human action that became “sedimented” or embodied in common or cognate “ways of life” — in historically related, language-grounded cultural patterns.

There is nothing biological about “peoples”, their origins, their histories, their political fates and destiny.

However, in practice — because of the strange and careless ways of human thinking and speaking — the matter is not quite that simple.

It ought to be but it is not. It is not that simple because “the waters are muddied” by the careless and improper language habits that so many people adopt.

This notion of a “people” is related to, but different from, the other various notions discussed here. Yet it too, like them, is also routinely denoted and conveyed in a number of languages by the same, or similar and closely related, terms.

In the Malay case, they are confusingly denoted by that one same multi-purpose, over-worked and now inescapably ambiguous Malay word bangsa.

vi.  Nation

These various “peoples” came to see themselves as stemming from common historic origins.

They saw themselves as sharing a common or similar past that was embodied and projected forward in the common, or cognate, languages and cultures through which they lived.

Often more was made of these ideas.

This sense of a common past and a shared or cognate contemporary identity was often taken a step further. Even several.

On what basis?

There was another side to this same coin of common “peoplehood”.

Believing that they had a common past to which they might all now look back, these peoples, or their intellectually inventive leaders, soon came to see themselves as sharing not only a past but also a common existential situation in current reality, in the present.

Once one comes to see things in that way — and it is a fairly obvious step to take — it is only a short further step to conclude that all the members of such a human community or “people” share not only a common past and present but also — grounded within that present reality — common interests, a common political situation.

Once it is felt that those common interests are to be upheld and pursued through political action, the idea of the “people” becomes politicied.

In that way the next step upwards, or “quantum leap”, in political evolution soon follows. With that step into the political, a “people” now becomes in its own eyes a “nation”.

vii.  From “people” and “nation” to “state”

This is not the only path to nationhood, but it is a very common trajectory and experience, both within Europe in the “great age of nationalism” from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and also elsewhere.

It is the basis of the kind of “common descent” or “folk”  nationalism and nation — the kind of “blood, soil and belonging” kind of national ideology and solidarity — that was identified in one of my recent columns.

More, if together they now constitute a nation, then the members of this upwardly-spiralling community have not only a common past and a common present. They must also now have — grounded in that common situation and those common interests — a common prospective future, a common destiny.

Further, to uphold those interests and pursue that destiny, the members of this people and nation — or so they become convinced — now need the right equipment, the appropriate vehicle and framework, to do so.

They will demand for themselves a state, or sovereign and autonomous political structure of their own, as the instrument and vehicle, and also as the arena and iconic symbol, of their sovereign “peoplehood”.

viii. “Nation-state”

When a state becomes identified with, and seen as the legitimate international vehicle of, a recognised nation — whether it be a nation based on so-called “common descent nationalism” or a nation of the other main contemporary type, known as the “civic” nationalism of the “contractual” nation — that state is often seen, and is conventionally described, as a “nation-state”.

Nation-states are in our times regarded as the natural components or constituent member-units within international society or “the international community”, now understood as a global structure or network of such nation-states.

They all gather together in an association or club known as the United Nations.

Whether they are united or not is another matter. But it is entirely apt to describe this organisation as a club of nations, of nation-states.

ix. Ethnicity and ethnic group

Finally, how are the ideas of “ethnicity” and “ethnic groups” related to all this?

Quite simply, really.

Some, in fact most, modern nation-states include as “minority” elements within their populations — even among their citizenry — some loose or “detached” segments of historic human communities that constitute the “paradigmatic” or “definitive” majorities in existing “nation-states” elsewhere.

For example, Lebanese or Greeks or Vietnamese in Australia.

Sometimes, too, one finds such minority components made up of people who do not have, or have not yet achieved, their own recognised nation-state in their own lands but who exist as fragments of certain “nations-in-the-making” and “nation-states-in-waiting” within other member-states of the world order.

Think here, for example, of the Kurds, both in several Middle Eastern countries and also elsewhere throughout the world; or, yet again, Basques, both in their native north-western Spain and also overseas such as in the United States and Australia.

And, of course, these days in many lands, both throughout the Arab world and in the West, the Palestinians.

Historically, the Poles and the Irish as “stateless nations” gave rise in the nineteenth through their overseas emigrants to “ethnic” minority fragments of the latter type; when, after World War 1, the Irish gained modern statehood and the Poles — after over a century of partition of their land between the Prussians, Russiansians Austrians — had their statehood restored, their overseas “offshooots” became ethnic minorities of the former kind.

Put in this way, the matter is clear.

Ethnic groups and their members are often seen, depending upon their specific historical circumstances, simply as manifestations of cultural pluralism and “difference”, or as involving elements of so-called “racial groups” and “racial dynamics and realities”.

But they are neither.

They are nothing of the kind.

Ethnicity, as our examples and many others show, has to do with the processes of incorporation (successful or not) of national and cultural minorities — often, but not always, drawn as migrants from elsewhere — within modern national state structures.

It has to do with minority social access to modern political inclusion, membership and participation.

The relevance of this here, in the context of the present discussion of bangsa, is simple.

Despite appearances, and no matter what the people who are closely involved in its processes may feel or say, “ethnicity” is not a “racial” but an essentially political phenomenon.

It has nothing to do with biological origins, collective biological identities, or supposed group biological destiny.

It has everything to do with the historical dynamics and processes of modern state-formation and social inclusion within them.

It seems “diagnostically significant” fact that the habitual targets of cruel so-called “ethnic jokes” in the modern world — the butts of an abusive contempt that they had not the means or dignified standing to repudiate — have been those peoples who somehow lost, or else never managed to achieve and consolidate, their nationhood: the Irish and Poles in Europe, the Kurds in the Middle East.

In sum, ethnic groups are about politics — they are a symptom and by-product of the age of nationalism and its key beliefs — not about biology, “race” or culture.

“Getting it right” Race, people, nation, state, ethnicity and ethnic group: all these related but subtly different ideas, and others too, are thrown and jumbled together — most unhelpfully and generally quite indiscriminately — within that one, single Malay word and idea of bangsa.

Ideas that have these multiple meanings are, so to speak, semantic “double” and “triple agents”. They are troublemakers. They can be destructive.

If and when they are, how is clear thinking on this most urgent and fateful of matters in Malaysian national life possible?

How can responsible discussion of these matters be calmly and responsibly conducted under this verbal handicap?

One simple thing can be noted.

The ability to understand, draw upon, differentiate among — and then routinely employ — these different ideas and terms that swirl around the now largely discredited notion of “race” is what — in the world’s more credible universities — every introductory social science student (in sociology, anthropology, politics and history in particular) is expected to acquire.

If they do not, they generally fail.

Fail in their studies, certainly, and probably in navigating the complexities of their everyday lives in today’s complex world as well.

To understand, and to understand the subtle, beguiling differences — and then to avoid “slipping and sliding”, even without recognising it — among and across these different senses and meanings within the one extended analysis or commentary is hard enough under any conditions.

If you don’t manage to do so — if the meaning of a key term  continually shifts and slips, unrecognised, in the course of a single analysis — the reasoning that is made with that “treacherous” term, is likely to be misleading.

If you fail, you can soon create great damage: nor just by confusing other people who may listen to and heed you — and that is bad enough — but also by totally “bamboozling” oneself.

One is immediately the first victim here of one’s own intellectual, conceptual and semantic sloppiness.

Cat? Dog? Cow? Horse?

Think of a cat, a dog, a cow and a horse.

True, all are mammals, all have been domesticated by humankind, and there is much to be gained by thinking of them together, for example in a textbook of comparative mammalian anatomy.

But when things get serious — a matter of “life and death” — the veterinary surgeon who has to operate must know exactly what beast they face.

Cat, dog, cow, horse — which?

Sure, they are related, but different.

And, when things need to be clearly understood, that difference makes a difference.

Similarly, in many human historical and political contexts it is no less necessary to be clear.

Race, people, culture, nation — which?

The difference again makes a difference, often a fateful difference.

So we must be careful about how we think, what analyses we suggest, about what we say and mean.

Or, again, exactly the same challenge, and responsibility, but now in a Malay-language and Malay-world context:

Bangsa, bangsa, bangsa or bangsa — which? Which do you mean here?

You see the problem now? Is it now clear what I am talking about?

Tricky ideas: Race, people, nation and state in Malaysia Hard at the best of times, it is especially difficult to “get it all right” in less than favourable circumstances.

It is tremendously difficult — and therefore also tremendously important and necessary — under less than ideal conditions.

Unfortunately, that is the case in Malaysia.

In Malaysia, those who must routinely draw these distinctions, in the interests of their own personal and also national survival, must do so within the “linguistic universe” or “semantic environment” of the national language — and in the “thought-world” of the majority of the nation’s citizens grounded within it. In that language-based “thought-world”, all these different meanings are together captured and subsumed conceptually, as different aspects of the one thing: within the beguiling embrace of that one vague yet powerful word bangsa.

This routinely leads to confusion, and with depressing regularity even imperils civic peace and the foundations of national coherence and state stability.

How?

For a start, please give your continuing attention, as they next appear, to Parts 3 and Part 4.

Thank you for your patience with this protracted and complex discussion of what, after all — once you grasp them clearly, and every Malaysian soon will, I hope — are rather simple matters.

*
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney.

In this series:-

Part 1 – Words and the world, or ‘bangsa’ in question

Part 2 – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2b – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2c – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 3 – Distorted reasoning — or thinking ‘bamboozled’ by language

Part 4 – Race and history

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 11:21 am and is filed under
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What every Malaysian needs to know about ‘race’ (Part 4): Race and history

By
Clive Kessler
 | February 27, 2012

The Malaysian Insider

FEB 27 — It is now nearly over.

We are nearing the end of our long and winding journey across the “landscape” (as people these days like to say, as if they were all architectural gardeners and designers of country-house grounds!) of “bangsa”, “race” and all the various contending, and often mutually incompatible, ideas that are thrown indiscriminately together within the bangsa “suitcase”.

There remain just a few more things to sort out: first about “race” and prejudice; then about “race” and “racism” in the context of worldwide European imperial domination; and finally to address in Part 5 a familiar old question:

“What is to be done?”

My discussion ends with some suggestions about how to proceed towards the kind of “linguistic engineering” and conceptual clarification of which Malaysia, and users of the Malaysian national language, are now greatly in need.

“Colour” and Prejudice

Now that the necessary “ground-clearing” has been completed, we can proceed onwards with the last parts of the discussion of “race” and its conventional “mis-understanding” and confusion — via the all-purpose term “bangsa” — within Malaysia’s Malay “linguistic universe” or “language world”.

Onwards!

Race is not simply a matter of what used to be called “colour prejudice”.

What that kind of “colour” or “race prejudice” involved was the scorning of people of any “different”, usually “darker”, pigmentation than one’s own; and then subjecting them, on account of those unequally valued features of perceived physiognomy (physical appearance), to differential treatment.

Often that has proved a matter even of subjecting those broad categories of people who are classed, on the basis of typified colour and appearance, as “inferior” to abusive, discriminatory and ultimately oppressive treatment.

Such attitudes, habits and practices seem to be almost as old as humankind.

Certainly they are just about as old as the meeting and social mixing of people from different historical “branches” of humankind or identifiable human “stocks” or localised populations.

Consider here some revealing words from what is perhaps the world’s oldest and greatest love poem, the Biblical “Song of Songs” (or “Song of Solomon”).

For some this text is simply a love song to a beautiful dark-skinned lady from the South, perhaps from Africa, who found herself in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon, some hundreds, perhaps almost a thousand, years before the time of Jesus.

A long time ago

For some, the person on whom this poem focuses is the Queen of Sheba, or Puteri Balqis, who came as King Solomon’s guest to Jerusalem.

For others the poem is allegorical, a lyrical song about the God’s love for humankind. That’s the only reason why so erotic and explicit a love song could become part of the holy canon of the Bible. It is not really what it seems to be prosaically about, the pious solemnly declare; it is to be understood metaphorically and figuratively.

That background aside, now to the diagnostically significant words.

The author, the man who is enamoured of this beautiful woman, insists (Chap. 4) that in all manner of wonderful ways this woman is “fair”. Indeed, she is (6:1) the fairest among women, he assures her. Why?

What does the woman herself say at the outset, not to that man but to the other women of the city, perhaps her rivals for royal affection?

Her words (1:5-6) are an appeal and a challenge. I am black and beautiful, she says to them. (“Black is beautiful,” as the Black Pride movement of the 1960s insisted.) So do not look down upon me, you daughters of Jerusalem, simply because my skin is black, because the sun has darkened me, she demands.

So there we have it.

As long ago as then there was a clear tendency, which the beautiful dark-skinned lady was contesting, to look down upon people of her kind and to treat them with less than full and ordinary respect.

Note that my use here of the Biblical text is not doctrinal or theological, not in any way a matter of religious apologetics.

The Biblical text is cited here as historical or contemporary ethnographic evidence of the existence, perhaps pervasiveness, of what we would now call “colour prejudice” at the time of King Solomon.

That kind of prejudice is not, as some like to think, a recent, modern invention of the Age of Imperialism and European domination.

It is not, but something else is.

That something else is not simply this kind of “colour prejudice” but racism itself, in the modern political and historical sense.

Race and Racism: “Colour”, Culture and Power

When the sailors and adventurers of an expanding Europe in the great Age of Discovery reached Africa, Asia and the Americas, they suddenly, often to their great surprise, encountered people of radically different kinds than their own.

These peoples were, so it seemed, different in all manner of things: especially in appearance, speech, and ways of life or “culture”.

Encountering such people posed to those Europeans, or at least to the more sensitive of them (and also, one must suppose, to those whom they encountered) a huge question.

Who are these other people? — since people, fellow human beings, they certainly were.

And, if people, then what were the implications of their evident and undeniable humanity — and of the European recognition of their full but differently “conditioned” and “constructed” humanity — for the European recognition and understanding of their own?

There were two great historical kinds of response to this question, to this intellectual and moral challenge: the positive, or humanistic, and the negative, or violent.

The positive fully recognised “the humanity of the Other” and all its implications.

From this response grew some of the best things in modern Enlightenment culture: moral universalism; a broadened  view of humanity, of “human nature” and its possibilities; a recognition of the inherent dignity of all people including all non-Europeans, sometimes embodied in the at times naïve idea of the “noble savage”; an embracing of the notion that all these different human ways of life, “designs for living” or “patterns of culture” were both mutually incommensurable and equally authentic, equally entitled in principle to respect.

In other words, there was no privileged standpoint “outside” of culture where one might stand to evaluate, judge and rank them.

Ideas such as these found impressive expression in such endeavours as the anti-slavery emancipation movement of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps its finest expression was, at its best, the modern — and now regrettably much eviscerated — discipline of anthropology, which took head-on the impact of those encounters and made the intellectual tension that they generated its scholarly foundation.

What — anthropology always asked itself — were the implications of any one of these many exotic “ways of life” for our general understanding of human nature and the human condition? And, at the same time, what insight might be drawn from our general understanding (such as it was and is!) of human nature and the human condition for the understanding of any such specific, unusual and foreign way of life?

At its best — which, alas it no longer is — anthropology was very good.

That, anyway, was the positive response.

And the negative?

It marshalled and “tweaked” these same experiences, facts ideas in a different way.

For those of this other inclination, certain things were clear, and became matters of doctrine and dogma.

Three in particular:

● First, those foreign exotic peoples looked different: they were of different colour, physiognomy and appearance — or what later came to be known as “race”;

● Second, even if they were human, they lived out their humanity in a different way from Europeans, in different human “life-worlds” based upon different cultures, languages and in different types of (supposedly “simpler” or more “primitive”) forms of social organisation; and

● Third, as became increasingly true as time went on — and became a literally “overpowering” difference by the nineteenth century — there were great differences in power between these foreign societies and their own European societies: notably in the different capacities of some of those societies, namely their own, to impose their will upon and have their way with others.

Those of this negative, inhumane and violent inclination “packaged” those ideas in a certain way.

They in effect said:

Those other people (since they look and seem so) really are biologically different from us; their cultures and societies are different, often seemingly simpler, than ours; and we are far more powerful than they.

This tripartite package they employed, in mutual confirmation and apparent “proof” of its three parts, and in both directions.

They moved up and down this three-tiered “rack” of propositions like musicians, moving up and down playing a scale.

In a self-deluding exercise in circular, self-justifying logic they argued:

First: They are biologically inferior; that is why their ways of life and levels of cultural and civilisational achievement are less advanced and hence “lower” than ours; and that, too, in turn is why we enjoy, and are entitled to exercise, political power over them in any way that pleases us.

And conversely, second: we have enormously more power than they do; this means that the kinds of society in which our great power is based are far better than their weaker kinds of society, which we are able to dominate; and the fact that our societies are stronger than theirs, and we more powerful than they, is both an expression and a proof of the fact that they are inherently, meaning biologically, inferior to us, and we superior, in both might and right, to them.

In other words, our political domination proves their biological inferiority; and their evident biological inferiority vindicates the power that we wield over them.

Racism and “bangsa”

That malign, violent package of self-justifying domination is what we know as “racism”.

It was the “operative ideology” of the “high” imperial age.

The history of worldwide struggle against racism and of the overthrow of imperial domination is nothing other than the story of the political pulling apart, and the moral discrediting, of that tight, three-part doctrinal scandal, disgrace and horror.

That’s why all this still matters now.

Alive and well and living in Malaysia?

That is why it still matters even, and especially, in Malaysia.

Why?

Because the entire modern political idea of “bangsa” as it now exists in Malaysia and dominates Malaysian public life is a product of that age of race-based and “racist” European imperialism.

That idea is tinged by the circumstances and time of its modern elaboration in the colonial context of “British Malaya”. It still bears the stamp, and carries the moral burden, of its origins. It is inherently tainted by the circumstances of its elaboration under the sway of the dominant ideas and ideologies of that race-obsessed imperial age.

From its origins in that context, the entire idea of bangsa (as it now exists, and is understood and used) is permeated and pervaded by the stain of those central racist notions and ideologies of the European age, and notably its self-satisfied British variant.

Ideas of “race” are deeply and ineradicably embedded in the word bangsa: in its meaning — both its direct denotation and its further emotive connotations — and in its everyday use.

So those race-obsessed ideas lurk within the language, the basic verbal “coinage”, of all who now speak the Malaysian form of the Malay language.

Not everybody whom I know and talk to in Malaysia is personally a racist. Far from it.

But so many people in Malaysia — the vast majority, some of them unwittingly and others knowingly yet reluctantly — become involuntarily complicit in a kind of “racism” through their use of language:

They have become complicit through their largely inescapable and necessary recourse to habitual forms of language — including, notably, such terms as “bangsa” and its associated ideas, that have “made their peace”, so to speak, with some of the worst features of a now otherwise long-rejected racist ideology, attitude and era.

That era, be it remembered, was one not of great Malay glory and sovereignty but of Malay humiliation and shame at the hands of an arrogant colonial power with its poisonous dreams of imperial grandeur and domination.

That is why all Malaysians, including and especially Malay Malaysians, need to be wary of, to criticise and “deconstruct”, and to reject the insidious term bangsa and all the dubious ideas, residues and implications that covertly “travel” with it.

Wittgenstein’s “Fly-bottle” and Malaysia

Back to “race” and the beguiling of our thinking by that changeable, pesky, mercurial word “bangsa”.

The great Vienna and Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) once famously remarked that the role of philosophy is to disentangle the many confusions entailed by the use of language: by the conventional but often imprecise and confusing customary uses, the unruly meanings, of everyday words.

Philosophy’s task, he maintained, was to serve as the means of overcoming the bewitching (or, as we might now colloquially say, the “bamboozling”) of intelligence — the confusion and frustration of precise and systematic thinking — by language, with all its everyday idiosyncrasies, peculiarities and habitual lack of precision.

Or, as he put it, the role of philosophy was to serve as the means for the fly to escape the fly-bottle.

(In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein posed to himself the question “What is your aim in Philosophy?” To which he answered: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”.)

A fly-bottle is a kind of trap and “specimen jar” that is used by entomologists, the experts in studying the various species of insects, to trap and collect (and then disable and paralyse!) the individual examples that they study.

So philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is a kind of therapeutic treatment, even a kind of liberation technique and strategy. It is the indispensable tool that may enable thinking to escape confusion, or being “bamboozled”, by freeing itself from its disabling entanglement, even imprisonment, in conventional language.

Thinking is like that fly which is trapped, dulled and disabled in a fly-bottle. The fly-bottle here is the confinement of thinking within the limits and distorting constraints of everyday language.

The challenge is to find a way out for that fly, to liberate thinking from dulling and disabling “mystification”.

That, and nothing less, is the task of philosophy.

In the Malaysian case, in this specific Malaysian instance that is discussed here, that confining, constraining fly-bottle — that bewitching, confusing and distorting piece of everyday language — is the term bangsa.

It is a term — so this extended commentary has argued from the outset — that is sorely in need of clarification, “disaggregation” and so-called deconstruction.

*
Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Previous:-

Part 1 – Words and the world, or ‘bangsa’ in question

Part 2 – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2b – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 2c – Exploring and disaggregating ‘bangsa’

Part 3 – Distorted reasoning — or thinking ‘bamboozled’ by language

Next:-

Part 5 – ‘Race’ and the reform of public language in Malaysia

                This entry was posted on Monday, 27 February 2012, 11:28 am and is filed under
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