It is remarkable that confronted by an electoral uprising against 34 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal, the Communists have reacted with the same self-righteous indignation as Puritans faced with the frivolity of reprobates. Politburo member Brinda Karat has reminded those writing the CPM's obituary that the party was born out of the 'class struggle' in West Bengal. She avers the party will draw the lessons from a defeat in the electoral arena—always a sideshow in the Communist scheme of things—but it won't be the same one the revisionists, the faint-hearted and other class traitors are anxious to impart. Ms Karat has implicitly reaffirmed her unbending faith in revolutionary intransigence. In time, other Comrades will complement her logic with copious quotations from Marx or Lenin 'himself'.
It is intriguing why Communists invariably suffix the names of their gods with the term 'himself'. It's never 'Marx said' but always 'Marx himself said'. 'Himself' is perhaps the force multiplier that theologians need. The idea is not to impress non-believers but to baffle possible heretics and potential revisionists.
It is, in fact, quite inexplicable why a movement that flaunts its 'scientific' credentials is so fearful of revisionism. Since 'scientific socialism' has deemed that the victory of socialism is not merely desirable but also inevitable, today's Communists should be as smug as the nut next door who claims to have calculated the precise date on which the world will end. If "history" is indeed "on our side", as the flamboyant Fidel Castro once said, why should Commies be obsessive about textual citations from the Collected Works?
In ordinary parlance, 'revisionism' involves the ability to think, re-think, fine-tune, question and even challenge existing beliefs and assumptions. It's because Galileo was a revisionist that the Flat Earth Society is close to extinction. Yet, 500 years ago, the fear of falling off the edge of the earth haunted explorers and even became a deterrent to commerce in some societies.
To Communists, however, revisionism is about as abhorrent as 'popery' was to Anglicans in 17th century England. The analogy with the abstruse sectarianism that gripped Christian Europe after the Reformation is appropriate. For the fiercely God-fearing Puritans the good life meant rediscovering Biblical fundamentals.
More than a century ago, Lenin 'himself' wrote an article whose contents are no longer worth recalling. But it had a very catchy heading that summed up his sectarian conceit: "Better fewer, but better." Whereas most 'bourgeois' parties engaged in the thankless task of contesting elections and satisfying individual ambition, the Leninist party aspired to be a version of the old ICS—an elite group of the highly motivated with the moral backbone to carry an entire Empire, preferably on its sola topi but if need be, on a majestic Red Flag and to the robust notes of Internationale. Just as the ICS sahibs were presumed to know what was good for the 'real India', the 'vanguard' Leninist party was meant to epitomize the most advanced sections of the 'struggling masses'. The people were mute; the party spoke for them.
Not unnaturally, the people occasionally got a little excitable, demanding the impossible. These resulted, as Bertolt Brecht once rued, in the party having to abolish the people ('counter-revolutionaries') and having to elect a new one. In November 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall triggered a chain of events that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout Eastern Europe, popular fury was directed at a self-serving party bureaucracy that combined tyranny with monumental socialist inefficiency. The grim inheritance of Lenin and Stalin were brushed aside as people chose personal freedom over regimentation and shortages.
What is interesting is the different ways in which Communists reacted to the Soviet collapse. In Europe, it resulted in Communist parties either going into voluntary liquidation or becoming virtually indistinguishable from the Left-wing of social democratic parties. As a political movement, Communism in Europe died with the 20th century. In India, however, the rejection of the Red Flag in Moscow and the erstwhile 'socialist bloc' was interpreted with dogmatic eccentricity.
The socialist experiment faltered, it was argued, because the party was injected with revisionism and had had deviated from Communist principles. For many who learnt their Marxism in parties like the CPM, the key to the future doesn't lie in less Leninism (as the Europeans imagined) but even more of it. For the CPM, the God didn't fail – the people were unworthy and the Comrades didn't pray hard enough. On such profound certitudes are politics in India based.
Najib doesn't seem to do things anything right according to Mahathir. The old man is so stressed up and suffers physical debilitations.
The problem worsens to become person-centric. One person determines and defines UMNO. Inevitably, the right to be in or out of UMNO depends on loyalty to individuals and not on the political ideals, ideas, shared vision and so forth.
The problems become multiplied many fold, when UMNO 'farms' out the responsibility of sieving and determining leadership material to hired hands outside the party. These are the intellectual hacks and overrated audio visual and print media practitioners who arrogate to themselves the ultimate discretion of how should UMNO behave.
Hence there are people who think UMNO is the personal kingdom of some people and that the issues of these individuals exist to inherit the kingdom of UMNO.
What has UMNO become then? It becomes an organization feudal in nature where its leadership depends on being from the right loins. The leadership in UMNO is therefore no different from the method of ascribing extraordinary abilities by being conceived from a buloh betong, materializing from a cow's vomit or suddenly beamed from across the terrestrial highs to bukit si guntang Mahameru.
From thereon, the majority of UMNO suckers pledged eternal loyalty to the blue blood.
There is something disturbing in Premier Najib Razak’s repeated and frantic calls to defend Putrajaya. The latest, when he was addressing youth at the World Youth day gathering in Putrajaya on May 28.
After asking the youth “Will you defend Putrajaya with me?”, and getting a positive answer, he then shouted: “Defend Putrajaya! Defend Putrajaya! Defend Putrajaya!”
His equally paranoid call on an earlier occasion was during the recent 61st Umno general assembly when he shrieked: “Even if our bodies are crushed and our lives lost, brothers and sisters, whatever happens, we must defend Putrajaya”.
Any novice to this country must have imagined that Malaysia must be facing an imminent foreign invasion, otherwise, why should its prime minister be exhorting so earnestly for the defence of its administrative capital?
But we Malaysians know that this is not a case of foreign invasion, but a reflection of the sick mentality of the incumbent political power which has ruled this country without interruption for more than half a century.
Umno has held on to its hegemony for so long that it cannot differentiate between what belongs to the party and what belongs to the people.
Putrajaya is no private property of any political party, but a public asset that belongs to all Malaysians. So no one is entitled to talk about defending Putrajaya, unless the country is facing an invasion by a foreign power.
In fact, Umno is only a guest tenant to Putrajaya, invited by the people to administer the country for a stipulated period. Upon termination of that term of office, the landlord, who is the people, will invite bidders, who are the political parties, to tender their bids for the next term of office. The successful bidder will then be invited to take tenancy in Putrajaya and run the federal government for the next term.
Hence, there is nothing for Umno to defend, except the transient power which ends upon expiration or termination of the term.
It is totally out of order for Najib to talk about defending Putrajaya, least of all its defence with blood and dead bodies.
How would Americans think, if President Obama calls for the defence of Washington DC when facing his adversary in the next presidential election? Surely they would be thinking their President has gone mad! And if he goes on to talk about shedding lives, l bet many will begin to faint.The concept of lordship over the administrative capital as exclusive private domain by any political power is so alien to the principles of democracy that none would even dream that it could ever be uttered by a contestant for political power.
But in Malaysia, Najib seems to be mighty proud for staking that claim over Putrajaya and for being roundly applauded for doing that.
This is how far Najib and Umno have strayed from the original democratic ideals with which our fore fathers had founded the nation!
Not only is Umno obsessed with clinging on to political power as an exclusive right and a personal death-or-live battle, but even the people’s mindset have been so conditioned by Umno’s lengthy hegemony that, many fail to see Najib’s political posture as an appalling affront against the fundamental tenets of our constitution – that the people are the masters, not the ruling power.
Worse than his claim over Putrajaya, is Najib’s inherent threat to resort to extra constitutional means - violence and bloodshed as intimated by Najib – to retain power when facing electoral defeat or potential defeat. Such act, if transpired, is clearly treason to our people and our Constitution. And the latter is the binding contract among the various communities upon which they had jointly achieved the country’s Independence.
Malaysians must therefore ponder deeply whether they can entrust their fate to a political power that does not hesitate to tear up the Constitution and defy the people’s choice, when facing an unfavourable electoral outcome.
On a separate note, we must strongly condemn BN’s exploitation of the youth gathering event in Putrajaya to launch its political propaganda. This festival, organized at great public expenses, is supposed to be a celebration of youth, and therefore a non-political event. But BN has turned it into a BN political platform where it volleyed vicious attacks against its political opponents.
This is but another one of many instances of BN’s rampant abuse of authority and public funds to advance its parochial political interests, and therefore another important consideration for the people to ponder when weighing the comparative trustworthiness of the existing contestants for political power.
This is the earliest symptoms of the inability of UN+MNO to manage success. For over the years, UMNO attracts a multitude of thoughts, aggressive and independent minded individuals, a vibrant ward of supporters, personalized political inclinations as success unavoidably do, that its continuity and longevity, depends ultimately on the ability to manage all that diversity.
This, the current crop of leadership spawned unfortunately during the Mahathir years failed to do. UMNO has generally failed to spawn 'elastic' leadership that is capable of adapting. Instead it has led to the emergence of a leadership hell-bent on preserving freakish control and one opposed to internal transformation.
I can only answer by asking why shouldn't I be in UMNO? UMNO isn't the property of the present crop of UMNO leaders. Some of them are there because of some unexpected happenstance. They have the right 'bins'. You are bin somebody, therefore you are leadership material. This is a fundamental defect of UMNO's leadership. Which I will continue to offer criticisms.
Secondly, I believe I have done nothing wrong to be the guest of the disciplinary committee. Finally, there are of course many good things that UMNO has facilitated, whenever there was good leadership.
There are of course the people whose replies are directed ad hominem. My personal problems used as weapon to demolish my arguments. My service as a one term UMNO ADUN taken as an indication that I have not performed well. To the first approach, it only serves to entrench my conviction that the majority of UMNO members and supporters do not have the stuff to win over people with reasoned arguments. I employ the term stuff as a mild description. To the second, I myself can't defend my track record. You asked my detractors they will give you the answers you desire to serve the purpose by which you set out in the first place- i.e. to look for 'facts' that can vilify me.
In the not so distant future I hope to be able to tell you my side of the story. I believe it will show that it is not I who will be found wanting- but we will discover that I am put in an environment where UMNO can't manage success.
This then is the biggest problem with UMNO now. It just doesn't know how to manage success. It can't because it doesn't have the right leadership with the right values, the right institutions to manage the overall success that UMNO has generated for the country.
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