In the 15 years or so since I wrote my first column on this topic (recently re-posted on my blog, in case you’re interested, here, I’ve fought and lost so many verbal battles that it often strikes me that if I had any sense I should have conceded defeat by now.

And in some ways I guess I have. Total failure in my fight against the forces waging guerrilla and gorilla wars in Africa, the Muddle East and elsewhere has disabused me of any belief in the alleged wisdom, or, given that it’s evidently based on nothing but wishful thinking, wishdom, that the pen is mightier than the sword.

More dire still has been my discovery, in the course of a decade spent decrying the corruption and other evils of Malaysia’s ever-ruling Umno/BN regime, and witnessing this situation only go from bad to worse and now utterly woeful, that the pen is not even mightier than the sordid.

As depressing as my reverses have been, however, and as many times as I’ve thus thought of giving-up fighting fiction posing as fact by the writing of faction and friction, I find I’m hopelessly addicted to it.

Addicted not so much to frontally attacking the forces of error and evil with barrages, bombardments and blitzkriegs of words, but to sabotaging, defusing or disarming the very words they use as weapons against the rest of us.

As weapons ranging from literal booby-traps like ‘bye-election’, which in Umno/BN’s Malaysia, as years ago I was delighted to point-out to the intended boobies it was supposed to entrap was actually, considering all the regime bribery involved in it, literally a ‘buy-election’; to intercontinental misguiding verbal missiles like ‘people’s’ and ‘democratic.’

As I mentioned many years ago in a Malaysiakini column entitled ‘Wronged words’, the term ‘people’s’ in the official name of a nation is a dead-set certain sign that its government is at war with both its people and the truth, and so is the word ‘democratic’.

Thus North Korea, currently the apparently leading contender for the title of the world’s most dick-headed dictatorship, wages an especially vicious version of the word wars by billing itself as not just ‘democratic’ or the ‘people’s’, but both.

Umno/BN’s Malaysia, on the other hand, as discussed at some length in a long-ago Malaysiakini column titled ‘Democracy with a difference’, wages a more covert war against its democracy-, justice- and rights-deprived citizens by claiming to be rather than naming itself ‘democratic’.

So it gave me a good deal of satisfaction to counter-attack against this sneak-attack on reality by contending that, far from genuinely democratic, Umno/BN-dominated Malaysia is a domocracy designed for the greater benefit of one race, and thus also a dermocracy.

It is also as racked by ruling-regime corruption and criminality as any other of the world’s virtually countless kleptocracies, dimocracies and dumbocracies.

And as if Malaysians weren’t casualties enough of the word wars to be going on with, the Umno/BN regime keeps fooling the Malaysian people by fueling an apparently endless war over the word ‘secular’, which is what the country’s constitution supposedly is.

In the latest episode in this conflict, which is clearly designed to keep opposition parties and sectors of the populace at each other’s throats, the regime is pretending to consider a piece of legislation known as Act 355 proposed by hard-core Islamic party PAS, or, as I can’t help thinking of it, PUS, for the purpose of making penalties more severe for Muslims who offend against Shariah law...