It's interesting to see to what lengths people will go to justify their own bitter cynicism and failure of imagination. The Seven Member M'sian Diaspora letter is a wonderful case in point.
Invoking 'the global village' on one hand, and the painting a scenario of an impending collapse ('failed state', 'sinking ship'), the writers counsel emigration as a pragmatic as well as ethically sound strategy. They even recognise those 'left behind' and make provisions for them in their moral tale fit for the 21st century.
As a child of another diaspora from another land in a different time, I am neither in the position or am interested in judging people who make choices about where and how they choose their 'struggles'.
What I do take exception to, however, is the willingness of the part of the writers to speak about Malaysian realities in one-dimensional terms.
In that, the writers resemble the likes of the Hindu Rights Action Force, who, ironically, represent those members of Malaysian society less likely to be able to heed this new call join the diaspora. In their ludicrous attempt to sue the British government for failing so-called 'Indians', they have chosen to paint a wholly negative picture of the Malaysia state and Malaysian society and to discount the very many successes that individuals and communities of South Asian origin have made in this country.
And because of its commitment to a narrative of race oppression it refuses to see the problem in class terms and refuses to seek trans-ethnic solutions to the very real problems they seem genuinely concerned about. They unashamedly utilise the term 'apartheid' in their highly emotive but intellectually hollow, negative PR campaign against the present government. Why 'unashamedly'? Because the problems we encounter in Malaysia resemble nothing of the race tyranny that the term actually refers to historically.
This carelessness and flagrant abuse of language for political ends is rife in the so-called progressive movement with, for example, words like 'totalitarian' bandied about as if the Malaysian state's authoritarian practices could somehow be equated to Nazi Germany's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags.
The willingness on the part of these would-be prophets and leaders to bend words and reality to conform to their poisoned imaginations is a symptom of the problem. They see no chance for compromise, no middle way, no negotiation, no new vocabulary or possibilities for invigorating a democratic ethos because they are exhausted intellectually. They are the tired minds and hearts that four decades or more of Malaysian nation-building has produced in some individuals.
However, in other Malaysians, good sense, intellectual clarity and a willingness to remember all the joys and delights we have in living in this land, will help balance a necessary 'pessimism of the intellect' with an equally necessary 'optimism of the will'.
