Sunday, May 27, 2012

Biased Malaysia Episode 1

-Some acquaintance asked me about the effect of Malaysian education on the minds of people of Malaysia. He asked this due to the trends of the Facebook updates (which I don't think should be taken seriously; most of the time they're just rhetoric repeated again and again with varying levels of effect) that worries him nowadays.

-Malaysia is constitutionally a monarch. Plus, it enshrines Islam as the official religion. Which I think is quite a bad idea that undermines the ideals of a nation founded in the principles of democracy. But nevertheless, it is the case that Malaysia is a constitutional Muslim monarch which has an official understanding of religion.

-Plus, Malaysia was formed by the right-wing politicians of UMNO (the historical UMNO, not the current UMNO which, while still right-wing, has evolved in nature) and these right-wing politicians felt a need to carve a country equipped with the right education, culture and also the ranks of citizens who are both pro-UMNO and pro-monarch.

-Yet, politics is never that easy. There are always leftist thinkers, those politicians who felt out of touch with both the monarch, the Malay right-wingers (for various reasons) and the establishment of an official religion of state, arguing that Malaysia needs to be secular, and a secular republic at that.

-Yet the leftist are always associated with the ideology of socialism-which is bad luck for the leftists, as this socialism is ultimately linked with Marxism-the ideology of the ultimate enemy of the state. Parti Komunis Malaya. Double bad luck; this party is also heavily Chinese in composition, hence the right-wings which form the bulk of the Government felt that the Chinese population is some form of demographic bomb that would threaten the ideals of Melayu Islam Beraja.

-Hence the Chinese became the target of the right-wings, albeit in a rather soft way. Instead of singling out Chinese as targets of discrimination, the right-wings establish a form of affirmative action called the Bumiputera-favoring policy. They define what a Malay is, they define what Bumiputera and non-Bumiputera is-and they tell everyone that this is for the betterment of the Malaysians. The Chinese are of no help; after the PKM was singled out as the enemy of the state, the rise of Chinese right-wings ("We demand Chinese schools with Mandarin-language as the medium of instruction," sound familiar?) who collaborated with UMNO as MCA has made the integration between Malays and Chinese difficult.

-(Indian and other Bumiputeras are of course in the whole process, but still, they are being left aside by historians and politicians alike, so I can say little)

-But then came the Islamists. Parti Islam Se-Malaysia. This party, influenced by a lot of things (Ikhwanul Muslimin, Iranian Revolutionaries, etc) was formed initially as the voice of those who felt that UMNO was not Malay enough, not Islamic enough, and they gained influence over the years, through their strategies of infiltrating the mosques, the Islamic education classes-all of which has effected the political and societal ideals of Malays.

-And due to these ideals, we have our education today.

To be continued....(when I'm not that lazy)

No comments:

Post a Comment