COMMENT The National Professors Council's recent pronouncement that Malaya was never colonised by the British reminds me of the ‘Ah Q's conception of history'.

Ah Q was, of course, China's most famous modern writer Lu Xun's euphemism for self-deception. In Lu Xun's fable about the Chinese national character of his time, the feckless Ah Q would put on a ludicrous front of self-deception even in the face of extreme defeat and humiliation; he was a bully to the underdog but sickeningly deferential to the powerful mandarins.

Denying that we were ever colonised by the British is certainly a novel interpretation but intensely ‘Ah Q' if you ask me. I do believe our learned professors have got their intellectual knickers in a knot simply because they wanted to show that our gallant men at Bukit Kepong were not defending British colonialism, and thus chastise PAS deputy president Mat Sabu in the process...