" For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them." - Thomas More (Utopia)

COMMENT My pro-establishment friends get extremely upset whenever I throw around the term ‘Umnoputra'. "A complete, mischaracterisation of the Malay struggle," they write in emails in response to articles I have written.

Understand now that as someone who has drawn politically incorrect lines in the racial sands of Malaysian politics, I am not sympathetic to the idea that racial preoccupations should be dismissed outright. I do believe that there is a ‘Malay struggle' going on in the greater Malay polity but the struggle is a reaction against the dereliction of duty that a sizeable faction of the Malay community accuses Umno of.

I know a few former and current influential Umno members and the difference between the two is that the latter are completely out of touch with the conflicting sentiments of the average Malaysian but more importantly of the average Malay. You could chalk this up to the divergent Umno cultural differences or maybe as I have argued before that sycophancy is rewarded in the so-called Umno Baru...