“Dalam politik untuk pembebasan rakyat, tiadanya penyelamat hebat kecuali rakyat sendiri. Harapan untuk perubahan terletak dalam tangan rakyat sendiri.”

- PSM

COMMENT | PSM is the whipping boy for urban political elites who claim they want change, but all they want is a change in the seat of power in Putrajaya. What happens if the current grand Umno poohbah vacates his seat? You can bet your bottom ringgit that the forces who oppose the current Umno president within and outside Umno will become embroiled in a fractious war that would eventually see the coronation of a new Umno strongman.

What happens if Pakatan Harapan is unable to maintain the status quo or worse, loses badly in the next general election? What would this mean for the forces of change in this country? Would the oppositional intelligentsia and their online apparatchiks blame the “dumb rural folk” for their losses or worse, scapegoat whatever proxy is convenient to shift the blame to?

Harapan has a track record of not choosing its allies intelligently and banking on political personalities to hold disparate oppositional forces together. Remember when PAS (led by Tok Guru Nik Aziz Nik Mat) was supposed to be part of the coalition which would lead Malaysia to a new dawn.

The fact that the opposition needs former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad is an indictment against the opposition and while people support this alliance for various reasons, none of them should fool themselves into thinking they are changing the system in any meaningful way. These people (and I am including myself) are merely working a corrupt bigoted system.

Do not for one minute think we are saving Malaysia. At best, we are merely forestalling our eventual descent into Islamic extremism and even this is not a sure thing (seeing as how the Muslims in Harapan have to bend over backwards whenever it comes to any real voting Muslim’s issues). More importantly, do not mock or belittle a party like PSM for speaking truth to populist power when they remind opposition supporting Malaysians of the history that we are aligning with in the hopes of regime change in this country.

It makes good press when someone like PSM’s S Arutchelvan reminds opposition-leaning supporters of the sins of the former prime minister. Maybe some people are bothered by the fact that the majority of Malaysians voted for Mahathir, Umno and all those laws that we now supposedly disdain. Maybe people are upset that when we voted for him and BN, we used to mock the opposition and claim we were voting for the lesser of two evils and now we have to make that same choice again.

Political observer James Chin, (in my opinion, one of the best minds when it comes to objectively discussing the Malaysian experience) makes the same point in his latest piece - Why Mahathir is at the centre of Malaysia’s opposition power play - “In summary, if the defenders of the Malay establishment are forced to hand over power to someone from outside the Umno, should it lose the upcoming election, there is no better person than Mahathir. For them, Mahathir simply represents an alternative Ketuanan Melayu leadership rather than real political reforms.”

For the record, I am part of the problem. I made...