Behind the School: the Boys vs Helen

by shuzheng

A Belated Response to U-En Ng – the Malaysian First Mob

Sebastian Haffner (in Defying Hitler) has put forward the point that Nazi fascism “made all Germans everywhere into comrades”.

This, he added, was a moral catastrophe although at the time the making of comrades might have started rather innocently: the equivalent motivation of a schoolyard fight, a group of school boys at each other’s throats. All the boys know, intuitively or as a matter of moral fact, they won’t be held individually responsible for their conduct.

The inference from the analogy is extraordinary: being in a mob absolves or mitigates individual responsibility.

Mob comradeship is its own value system. It has no rationality, nor is conduct pivoted on reason. Comradeship relieves the individual ability to alone think and also, according to Haffner, the “responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before their consciences. . . . Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everyone else does.”

Haffners’s idea extended, it makes clear why Lim Kit Siang’s Malaysian First possesses the fascistic quality: the attempt to make all Indians, Chinese and Malays into comrades. It’s a multitude, throng ideology, with notions parallel to Haris Ibrahim’s Bangsa Malaysia (plagiarized from Mahathir Mohamad).

Within its mass, Malaysian First collapses everybody into a single species, a single identity that represents the only standard for … well, being Malaysian. And, because the ideology kills the individual identity and supplants it with a set of group values, and that on a national scale, there is no space in it for different or for other moral choices. There is only one value, that is, the group’s.

At Malaysiakini, Helen Ang had, at one point, likened her criticisms against the DAP as wading into a certain “territory”. This metaphor recalls Haffner’s comrade analogy wherein a physical line is drawn in the sand: you don’t cross it. No person is allowed to deviate from the Mob.

But where is this territory?

Out of pure necessity over the Internet, where the Malaysian Bangsa / First Mob has residence in Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today. But this fact bears a caveat: the Mob was never indigenous to (say) Malaysiakini. Rather, they had immigrated from elsewhere.

It’s much like PKR which, as a political association, isn’t a unique, distinct home-bred group of politicians wanting to promulgate a different set of politics (they called it New Politics) or drive the country into a new golden age. Rather, they had come in from Umno and the Barisan. After which, only the house rules changed. Its internal construction remains identical to the old house.

Like Umno’s ketuanan philosophy, PKR’s justice and equality slogans are designed not to offer the maximum free space for people to live, however they choose, but according to fixed precepts and standardized codes of conduct and behaviour. The overriding precept at PAS is Islam; at DAP Malaysian First.

Malaysiakini, the Mob’s residence, may grant dissension but that’s only because dissent is food for the very ideology it eschews – superficially, western liberalism. In an ironical outcome, dissent is the standard for its liberalism. This is a self-destructive quality, but that’s its nature. It’s liberal not because of any character intrinsic to it but rather that which it is forced to put up with.

To see how this works is to visit Malaysia Today. Very clearly it is not Barisan sympathetic. Yet it carries a lot Umno voices or ‘articles’ from the mainstream media (MSM) – notorious of the examples is the one time Rocky Bru – after which the M-Today throng would attack it relentlessly, 30 comments, sometimes 50 over a single piece. For a while Rocky was the fodder. In Malaysiakini Helen was that fodder too.

Virtually all the head residents at Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today are former MSM members (or Umno ex-affiliates like Petra Kamarudin): Steven Gan, Thomas Lee, Josh Hong, KTemoc, backed by their little minions, with such perverse names as eyes wide open (and still blind), proarte, adcin, better my, stupid me, dan dan, and so on (the list is endless).

Helen Ang was attacked not for wading into a Malaysian First territory; the DAP doesn’t own people’s minds nor the sole right to define what’s Malaysian. She was attacked for breaking the pre-eminent house rule: the Mob First.

Moral of this post: (a) there is no wisdom in a crowd and, (b) in their propaganda articulation, Malaysian journalists, or ex, are so infantile.