Poisonous politics

The whole world is up in arms about the poisoning of children by milk producers in China. At least four infants have died and over 50,000 children are sick as a result of the adulteration of baby formula and other dairy products with the industrial chemical melamine.

Marketers of the leading Samlu brand were reportedly aware of the atrocity for a month before they were forced to admit to the problem and withdraw the products from sale. And now melamine has also been found in products marketed by more than 20 other companies.

But these murderers are no worse, it seems to me, than members and cronies of ruling regimes in Asia, Africa and the Americas who, through their incompetence and corruption, expose their nations’ children to poisonous levels of poverty, disease and starvation.

Ignorance can be poisonous too, as in South Africa, where for years the recently-deposed president Thabo Mbeki denied the link between HIV and Aids, thus depriving millions of men, women and children access to life-extending anti-retroviral drugs.

And then there are the toxic mental and social environments into which billions of babies are borne - poisonous racial and religious discrimination, often politically promoted, that can blight them for life or cause them to grow up to be killers.

The situation is not as dire in Malaysia as elsewhere, thank goodness, or at least not yet. But the poisoners are hard at work here, as they have been for decades, in race-based political parties that pretend to look after sectarian constituents, but are actually united in a coalition dedicated to perpetuating the pathological imperial practice of ‘divide and rule’.

So every child is born with a label that defines him or her for life as either politically suspect or acceptable, privileged or penalised, then ‘educated’ in schools or universities increasingly designed as much to poison as to improve their minds.

And as if they haven’t been force-fed enough mental melamine by then, thousands go on for a further diet of indoctrination in a highly dubious National Service scheme.

Of course not all of Malaysia’s youth fall prey to this treatment. Some parents protect their children by taking or sending them to study in less noxious educational environments abroad.

But this quarantine strategy doesn’t always work - witness the poisonous exploits of Kairy Jamaluddin and other exiles and escapees from the Malaysian education system when they’ve come home.

On the other hand, it’s amazing that most kids who are locally raised and educated somehow grow up relatively unscathed. Maybe their parents have protected them from racial and religious pestilence, or their own youthful resilience has rendered them immune.

Partners-in-poison

But of course there are plenty who lap up the poison as if it is mother’s milk and go on to join or support racist and sectarian political parties like Umno.

There appears to be no cure for these victims of the system. They wave their keris, call other races “squatters” and make allegations and police reports against them on suspicion, often unfounded, as in the recent case of Seputeh MP Teresa Kok, of causing offence to others’ blood-lines or religious beliefs.

And then there are these peoples’ partners-in-poison, the likes of MCA and MIC, parties ostensibly representing other races and religions but actually supporting the prevailing system for the sake of power, self-enrichment and protection from prosecution.

This noxious nexus of racists and religionists has slowly but surely taken a deadly toll of every aspect of Malaysian life. It has corrupted and bloated the civil service, dangerously debilitated the police and judiciary, stunted the growth of science and technology, paralysed social progress, maimed the media, and half-crippled the economy.

And, most damaging of all, it has sapped the energy, morale and self-confidence of the long-suffering Malaysian people.

For years there didn’t appear to be any antidotes to the potent potions forcibly administered to the populace by BN and its minions. And any antibodies that appeared to develop were summarily thrown into prison.

But if Ops Lalang snuffed-out all resistance for a decade or so, resistance was stiffened by the virulent treatment of Anwar Ibrahim in 1997.

It has increased with the detention of the Hindraf 5, Nat Tan, DAP politician Kok, Tan Hoon Cheng, Raja Petra Kamarudin and Syed Azidi Syed Aziz (aka kickdafella), as well as ongoing harassment of Wee Meng Chee (namewee) and the new sodomy charge against Anwar Ibrahim.

There are also increasing signs that BN is succumbing to its own poison, with vicious infighting in Umno for power or even survival, and imminent threat of a flood of defections.

Political suicide?

In China, the melamine scandal has so far seen the resignation of director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the arrest of 18 people suspected of supplying the poison or using it to adulterate dairy products.

To judge by the Transparency International rankings, China is perceived as far more corrupt and unjust than Malaysia.

Yet I’m not aware of any resignations or prosecutions arising from the European Union’s banning a couple of months ago of suspect seafood products from this country.

Nor do I see the slightest sign of police action against poisonous racial pronouncements by government supporters against minorities or opposition activists.

The most outrageous injustice of all, in my book, is the persecution of Raja Petra (right) on spurious claims of penning and publishing against Islam.

If there’s one true, honest, honourable and militant Muslim in Malaysia, besides the mufti of Perlis, it has to be Raja Petra. He’s been by far the most powerful critic of high-level hypocrites who spew racial and religious poison while using their positions to milk the rakyat dry.

So it’s poetic justice that, in swallowing him up under the Internal Security Act, BN is only hastening its own political suicide.