COMMENT | For a doctor, Mahathir Mohamad, twice Malaysia’s ex-prime minister, is immutably obnoxious.

He uses charisma and patriarchy to swoon his audience who foolishly fall under his spell. This audience, as gullible as guppies, thinks a rabid racist and autocrat like Mahathir should be hailed an “international statesman.” It’s bizarrely stupid – as vacuous as the Sunway Medical Centre staff who last Thursday asked Mahathir with blithe ignorance if western liberalism is to blame for Covid-19’s surge in the west.

Mahathir, of course, opened up his playbook of clichéd artifices. He claimed China and South Korea were winning their Covid-19 wars because the people were “disciplined” and obeyed their governments’ “instructions.” Instructions meaning orders. “That’s why … China and South Korea can handle [Covid-19] more effectively, because when … given a directive, the people will obey.”

He contrasted his claims of China and South Korea with Americans and Europeans who, he said, ignored government orders. “The people do everything, because they believe that they are a free nation and have their rights, and should not be dictated to by the government, and they know what to do.”

And this gem: The US and Europe, being advanced countries with superior medical facilities, haven’t been able to deal with Covid-19’s rampage because “their nature is a factor” that has reduced their ability “to control this pandemic.” By “nature” he means their rights and freedoms, because westerners in general reject the nanny state, the surveillance state, the authoritarian state, and dictatorship.

In authoritarian Malaysia, police are nabbing Malaysians who “follow” the movement control order (MCO) – because they are “disciplined” and “obey” the regime’s “directives”. What about the blasé tabligh and Masjid India crowd and several of the current regime’s politicians who spurned the MCO?

Mahathir should come to New York and see for himself just how deserted this city of 8.5 million people has become. It’s been this way after New Yorkers, like Californians and other Americans – except for US President Donald Trump’s “deplorables” whom he has incited to publicly protest against lockdowns in Democrat-controlled states – were told by mayor Bill de Blasio and governor Andrew Cuomo to stay home apart for essential services and needs.

New York has been a ghost state a whole month, even before the death-rate surged towards the first couple of hundred, let alone a couple of thousand. When modelling showed possibly 100,000 or more Covid-19 deaths, Americans vanished indoors. Every borough in New York City – Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island – is empty.

This is how the US – and Europe – have been managing the crisis. Mahathir must stop his ravenous passion to mislead. He must stop milking the crisis for his venal ends as he becomes more irrelevant even in Malaysia.

He’s implying that the more authoritarian the state, the better a country can deal with killer viruses like Covid-19. Yet authoritarian Malaysia has failed to solve dengue or corruption or state-sponsored kleptomania. Now it must stop the economy plummeting into deep recession, with exponential explosion of joblessness.

Not going away anytime soon

Most virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists say the pathogen is still beyond full comprehension, so an effective vaccine is 12-24 months away no matter what woolly medicines China says it has produced. Until then Covid-19 will likely stay, mutate and resurge.

The curve might be “flattening” in Malaysia and in China and South Korea but the war is far from won. Besides, not all 31 million Malaysians, 1.44 billion Chinese, 52.3 million South Koreans – nor Malaysia’s millions of foreign workers and illegal migrants – have been tested for the illness. So it’s totally daft to claim the disease will nevertheless be eliminated soon enough.

Mahathir might be a doctor but he hasn’t practised for half a century. He has a right to his opinion but not the right to intentionally peddle untruths. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has shown better sense, at least on Covid-19, than Mahathir has in all his time in politics.

He might also want to reconsider China where the killer disease originated, the regime’s cover-up and its constant multitude of duplicities. The communist state may have “dealt with” the pathogen but not by vaccine or its one-party state totalitarianism, as in Singapore whose infections rate is the worst in Southeast Asia, surpassing Indonesia.

Fact is, the “dealt with” is predicated entirely on lockdowns – exactly what the US, Europe, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries have been doing. And India is supposedly a democracy. Conversely, Bangladesh’s slide towards authoritarianism didn’t stop 100,000 people attend a politician’s funeral last week, in defiance of the state’s lockdown directive.

At 94 years old, Mahathir’s still lacks the sensibility to be honest and decent.

MANJIT BHATIA reads economics and international politics in New Hampshire in the US.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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