Vick
So I came home from a one-of-a-kind “silent protest cum street theatre tour de KL” (#millennials), peeled my shirt off my back (global warming is REAL, Trump!) and sunk into my couch and decided to indulge in some ‘stupification’ to unhinge myself from the harrowing realities faced by the Orang Asli we were protesting for, or the destitute of KL we were protesting around.
I switched on the state sponsored too big to fail satellite television (that tells us what to feel, think, opine and what we are supposed to desire, based on our age/gender/race/language) and flipped through the channels (looking for something to review, secretly):
- Malay drama about the religious, saintly, covered up, village wife; her monster-in-law, and her old, unattractive, dim-witted husband with a slutty, modern secretary who wants to steal him using black magic.
- Caucasian, middle aged chef with hair inserts teaching us how to cook Singaporean dishes, while on holiday in Singapore (get real, Everyone knows all Singaporean dishes are Malaysian!)
- Documentary about how Jesus, Garuda, Anubis, my physics lecturer and Stalin are aliens! (what?)
- Korean drama (dubbed in mandarin, with Malay subtitles only) about a love quadrangle involving a poor psychic who can see ghosts, who may or may not be in Stockholm syndrome love with her PTSD boss/2nd generation capitalist/abusive mall owner.
- Re-runs of an indian celebrity game show about locking up a bunch of rich, privileged, middle aged have-been stars in a studio to bicker and melodrama amongst themselves.
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
I don’t know what I expected.
They have successfully delivered at failing in quality, whilst increasing in costs and size over the last few decades (the television network, like many other establishments in this country; run privately, but handed a monopoly by the government… the car, the airline, the petrol, the sugar magnate…)
Like every other so-called millennial, I needed a safe space from the crappy television shows, so I stopped scrolling at Indiana Jones, and sought refuge in my smart phone (which is now surgically attached to my left hip and snaps pictures whenever I voluntarily dispense gas from my digestive system). As Harrison Ford was treated to a banquet of chilled monkey brains and scorpions (standard Indian sweets, people!) on screen, I decided to elate myself by reading some fiction and comedy, so I read the news.
I started with the opposition party mouth pieces for the best laughs. Then I proceeded to the opposition party owned mouth piece that worships the current government, and then I saved the oxymoron newspaper named one language that exclusively reported in another language, for last. I don’t read the government’s crony newspapers because our previous deputy PM once told me they report “fake news” (I believe him, they once tried to convince me more than 200 people showed up for a Bersih rally – Do I look stupid to you?).
Anyway, before I get into my boring review of Indian Jones and the Temple of exotic delicacies, I wanted to share some intellectual, cultured, historical discourse with you, if you would bear me.
“Carcosa Seri Negara: Birthplace of Malaysia’s Constitution to be reborn as beacon of peace.”
I would love to spoon-feed you the history and significance of the Carcosa and Seri Negara but that would be too mainstream and full of my opinions (as if the rest of this article is Not!) therefore, I leave that to your own perceptions and reading.
What I will highlight is:
- It was erected during the British colonial era, as the residence of the British High Commissioner,
- named Carcosa due to some nickname he stumbled across in literature, (“I did not call the Resident General’s dwelling “Government House,” or “King’s House,” because neither seemed an appropriate name in Protected States. I did not give it a Malay name, because it was to be the residence of a British Officer; so I took a book name as has often been done before.”) and
- Funnily enough, it was once again used as the official residence of the British royal family during the 1998 Commonwealth Games.
Now, this long standing love bite left by the British in the heart of KL (where inequality still plagues millions of KLites and Malaysians due to systems put in place by the British) is going to be made into an icon of “Peace”.
TL;DR Version: a bunch of rich, white mercenaries raided a peaceful, rich oriental country and groomed their inhabitants to worship their new overlords for more than 160 years, taking all the wealth of the soil with them. And then when they realised other countries could do the same to them, said overlords decided to make it a trend to pull out of their victims,… 6 decades later, their brainwashed and whipped victims still worship the very land the mercenaries missionaries once walked on.
(#rant)
It amazes me how the victims of colonisation join clubs/sports leagues led by the colon (yes, that is what I shall refer to them as; the ‘colon’ was responsible for the ‘colonisation’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonised mentality’), gift land to the colon, emulate the culture of the colon, send their offspring/heirs to migrate to the colon and always insist on looking back at their oppression as paradise.
It is understandable that the colon still regularly refers to the period and all activities as “glorious”. They seem to think the torture and the excrement that they whipped out of their once colonised underlings, is a piece of art.
But for those victims of genocide, pilfering, torture, purge, oppression and other inhumane atrocities, to refer to their sentence as a “heritage” from the colon – requires a lot of programming/ brainwashing/ propaganda. If ‘holocaust denial’ can be a crime in Poland, and anal sex (yet another colon-ial heritage law) a crime in Malaysia, why can’t the atrocities committed by the colon be given a name, taught to students and openly criticised?
Since anti-semitism and racism are apparently celebrated in this part of the world (Fun Fact: Malaysia is one of very few countries that has refused to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination 1969 – Will Malaysia Baharu continue this heritage, dulu, kini dan selamanya?), I shall quote (without agreeing to his many other allegiances or philosophy) Kevin Alfred Strom who once said “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it I am not permitted to criticize?” (can’t believe I just quoted a neo-nazi).
Why has so much effort been put into making sure we hate communists, leftists, trade unionists and locals who fought for independence and our rights; whilst every effort is put in place so that the thieves of our independence and sovereignty – the colon, is always worshipped and thanked for returning (part of) what they stole from us? Why do we regularly come across (historical and current) labels as such as ‘Communist bandits’, ‘Barua komunis’, ‘penceroboh Jepun’, but not popularised titles such as ‘penzalim british’, ‘babi eropah’, ‘white-faced-demons’ or ‘syaitan inggeris’. In fact a Google search for ‘anjing penjajah’ will render you results of an insult hurled at Anwar Ibrahim and B.J. Habibie (#tryit).
I was fortunate enough to attend a forum by Bernice Chauly and Amir Muhammad, where they happened to discuss Malaysian films and literature. According to their research it turns out, in all these years, there have been no known movies made in Malaysia that actually depict the colons as evil, oppressors, or even villains. The communists, the Japanese, the Chinese, royals and (of course) poor people have all had their chance to dawn the villain mantel, but not the British! This is completely alien to our neighbour, Indonesia which continuously depicts (in books, plays, movie and other forms of art) the Dutch as oppressors, evil, thieves, rapists, murderers and even colon-holes.
(#rantover)
Speaking of movies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a pretty realistic story, I was shocked to learn it was classified as a sci-fi movie!
It is a story of a 30-40ish old archaeologist (who is also a linguist, anthropologist, acrobat, martial artist and whatever the plot needs him to be) who travels the orient stealing (or gambling for) artefacts in order to “protect” them from their current (inherently barbaric) owners. He is accompanied by his walking Asian stereotype (under-aged) toy boy and a mobile damsel-in-distress (who seems to be attracted towards being spoken down to and manhandling) who he ‘picks up’ along the way. Together, they travel into the heart of exotic, dirty, primitive India to (guess what) save a relic from a barbaric group of locals who wish to use it to spread their Hindu cult across the world by ‘wiping out the Hebrew god, the Christian god and the Muslims’.
After hours of standoff against these barbarians and their diamond mine, the white man saves hundreds of enslaved child labourers from the cult’s merchandise sweatshop, destroys the mine, kills the cult leader (by feeding him to crocodiles), and saves one of three relics. In the end, the Indian army (led, of course by British generals in moustaches) arrives right on time (2 hours late) to save the day and slaughter the barbarians. The end scene is filmed in such perfect colonial patriarchy as our white hero returns hundreds of kids to the one village they are all from, resolves an argument with his new girlfriend by whipping her and kissing her, and then his walking stereotype mounts an elephant and performs a circus trick on them. Perfect!
I think the movie does exactly what it sets out to do; to depict a sci-fi fantasy. A white colon’s wet fantasy of saving exotic Oriental relics from the wretched of the earth. If you don’t believe me, work harder, buy a ticket to the empire and go visit the British National Museum!
The movie perpetuates the idea and behaviour I described above from the perspective of the giver; the colons, and the article, vice versa. The ‘lazy local’, the indigenous, the global south, the third world, was colonised as a ‘natural path’ of history, and we were saved from barbarism of our local thugs, royals, and warlords, and then our booming industry, our ‘road to nationhood’, our Rights, Law and Order, and even our Constitution were gifted to us by our benevolent colonisers who sought to make us civilised humans.
A lot of this thinking makes sense when analysed through the lens of ‘violence’ conceptualised in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Basically, Monsieur Fanon states that the process of decolonisation is inherently violent (in addition to the process of colonisation, which is universally accepted as Violent) owing to the fact that the settlers (in this case, the colons) do not view the natives as an equal species – the natives are (perceived as) incapable of ethics and therefore, the embodiment of ‘absolute evil’, as opposed to the settlers who are forces of good/light/white.
Fanon divides the way settlers view the natives into 3 categories:
Fanon views the lumpenproletariat will be the first to discover violence in the face of the settler – owing to their position in society. These are also the people who are viewed of least value to the settler; who is eager to use the ‘colonised intellectual’ to preserve and defend the settlers’ systems and interests.
He uses this to explain 2 phenomena in the colonial world. First, the idea that decolonization is the replacement of one population by another and the second is that since the native knows that they are not animals; they immediately develop a feeling of rebellion against the settler.
The idea of revolution (once conceptualised amongst the natives) begins as an idea of total systematic change, and then through the application to real world situations is watered down until it becomes a small shift of power within the existing system (sound familiar?).
Fanon explains, “pacifists and legalists…put bluntly enough the demand… ‘Give us more power’, but the native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world”. The settler offers non-violence and then compromise as further ways out of the violence of decolonization; mechanisms to blunt and degrade the movement.
If this theory is beginning to sound familiar to you in the slightest, I implore you to consider looking up where the first demands for “Merdeka”, “Merdeka dengan darah” and similar demands from collectives/parties in the history of Malaysia. Look into which class of society, and how revolutionary the ideas of independence and nationhood was, before it was watered down, degraded and replaced with a different substitute, (created and acknowledged) by the colons (within the mechanism of their abruptly introduced Registrar of Societies) to curb radical political ideas, and to usher a “non-violent” decolonisation (sometimes mispronounced as ‘independence’) process.
And lastly, look into the titles and names and class of society, hand-picked (and colon-friendly – having experienced the least of the colonial violence, unlike the lumpenproletariat) to lead this colon-engineered, acknowledged party to rule the natives, without rejecting the colon’s laws, products, systems, and ownership of colonised resources.
There have been 3 constitutions proposed for the Malayan nation; one by the British, which was immediately rejected by most Malaysians, followed by 2 others. One, by a coalition of parties, collectives and unions (#PUTERA-AMCJA); and another one, proposed by British officers, (and by invitation only) members of the Malay elite and British-groomed aristocrats; in Carcosa. Guess which constitution was ‘accepted’ by the British, the Queen and the empire, in forming Malaya? Have I mentioned, Carcosa was subsequently ‘gifted’ to the British Empire, by Tunku Abdul Rahman, after independence?
A symbol of peace? A symbol of peace for whom?