"An army is a miniature of the society which produces it."

- CLR James (The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution)

COMMENT Many former and current serving armed forces personnel are bewildered by Navy chief Abdul Aziz Jaafar's comments that former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad was addressing the crowd in the Lumut Naval Base about "solidarity" and not "politics".

Why do our Armed Forces need a lecture in solidarity? Whom do they have to come together against? And the implication here, considering that Mahathir is the Perkasa patron, is that solidarity means Malay/Muslim solidarity and the question, then becomes, is this the kind of solidarity that a supposedly multiracial 1Malaysia Armed Forces requires?