A 17-year-old girl reported that she was raped by a National Service trainer at a training camp in Terengganu. The recent accounts in our national press of the alleged rape were greeted with a mixture of hyperbole and apathy.

It was reported that the prime minister described the crime as despicable and unpardonable, and demanded capital punishment for the National Service trainer if convicted.

On the other hand, I first heard of the report in a coffee shop. Those who were talking about the rape were, as is common among coffeeshop commentators, critical of the government, but mostly unconcerned. The scandal did not affect them, or their families, directly.

Malaysians can scale Everest and parachute near the North Pole, but most of us seem incapable of expressing moral outrage. There have been more than 72 reports of abuse at National Service camps and these reports have described alleged physical, and now sexual, assaults by National Service trainers.

Dishonest food contractors and missing bus drivers have provided evidence of graft and incompetence. This should stir the rakyat to insist that the defence minister must resign immediately and that the government must suspend the National Service programme.

The minister concerned, Najib Abdul Razak, has been quoted in The New Straits Times as saying he would send his own daughter for National Service. This is an insult to the girl who reported the alleged rape, and to her family.

Of course, we expect the defence minister's daughter to be protected from such horrific abuse, being the daughter of a minister. We live, after all, in a society where Very Important Persons beget Very Important Progeny.

A far more important observation to make is that the Defence Ministry has been unable to protect ordinary, young Malaysians from the dangers of such abuses of power. These young people have been placed in camps away from their parents and loved ones, under the guardianship of the defence ministry, in the hands of trainers who have betrayed this responsibility.

What are we teaching these young people? It appears that they learn to remain, always, subordinate to people who wield arbitrary power over them. They learn that they can be subjected to abuse, yet very few will speak up for them.

Concepts such as 'patriotism' and 'national unity' have proved crucial to those in power - in various countries and historical periods - who want to preserve their power. Patriotism and 'the need to maintain national unity' have been effective weapons employed to silence dissenters and suppress critical thought among the general population.

Is this what our National Service means? Perhaps our political masters could themselves benefit from some education in an alternative definition of 'national service'.

The members of the executive and legislative branches of government are elected representatives: they are servants of the electorate. They have sworn to serve the people; and not vice versa - it has never been proposed, to my knowledge, that we should line up to swear subservience to our member of parliament.

Yet we behave as subjugates, and are treated as such. Whatever economic development we have achieved is attributed to various leaders, and not the efforts of all Malaysians. Our political masters have been far more interested in maintaining the political status quo, than in serving the electorate, despite the noble words reserved for party conferences, election campaigns and retirement speeches.

Political power, according to Socrates in The Republic , is not an end in itself, but a means to achieving justice. "There is no one in any rule who, in so far as he is a ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but always what is for the interest of his subject or suitable to his art; to that he looks, and that alone he considers in everything which he says and does."

There is an alternative political landscape, described by Joseph Conrad in his novel Nostromo , in which the citizens of a country live in 'dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security, and without justice'.

Which would you rather have?