For those of us who see the human race as a life-and-death contest between the forces of good and bad, virtue and evil, right and might, need and greed or any other set of moral or ethical opposites, this has been a week of astonishing ups and downs, but unfortunately mostly the latter.

NONE And nothing more vividly illustrates this mostly depressing state of affairs than England’s outbreak of riot, looting and arson that BBC World is bringing to me live on TV as I sit here writing this column.

We’re told that the trouble started as a protest against the fatal police shooting of an allegedly criminal youth.

In Malaysia and a good many other countries, of course, the death of a ‘suspect’ at the hands of the police would have been regarded as so routine as to hardly rate public comment, let alone a public demonstration, violent or otherwise.  

But the police in the UK are subject to the law, and the people have the right to voice their opinions. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the initial protest, however, now it’s clearly turned into a wave of nothing but mindless violence, wholesale looting and wanton vandalism, and spread from London to Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool.

What a woeful waste and disgrace, when their fellow youths in the Middle East are rioting, fighting and dying in their efforts to achieve the same democratic rights and freedoms as these British delinquents are so mindlessly trashing.

azlan Which leads inevitably to the question whether the UK government would be better off investing the millions it’s been spending on protecting the people of Libya from the Gaddafi regime in creating more jobs for British yobs.

Or, better still, killing two birds with one stone, so to speak, and conscripting these self-styled urban warriors off to fight for worthy causes overseas.

The people of Syria could use some support, goodness knows, after months of murderous assaults by the al-Assad regime while the whole world has stood helplessly, hopelessly by.

Glimmerings of good news

But at least Russia has finally joined the Western democracies in making anti-al-Assad noises, and one of this week’s few bright spots has been condemnation of the Syrian regime, however belated, by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the woefully weak Arab League.

Despite such glimmerings of good news, however, there’s still no sign of an end to the Syrian armed forces’ all-out assaults on unarmed civilians. And the regime continues to stick to its lying story that anti-government unrest is the work of foreign ‘saboteurs’.

Whether these are the same Jewish, Christian and communist saboteurs that Umno/BN has claimed to be behind Malaysia’s Bersih movement in its call for clean and fair elections, appears unclear thus far.

At least nobody seems to be using the Somalis as scapegoats, as they’re all evidently busy starving to death, due to a catastrophic drought and a war on their government by Muslim militias.

Nor is there much aid money to spare for these desperate people, as the prosperous nations of the world are all crying poor as they start to realise the consequences of their financial mismanagement and their citizens’ greed.

This self-inflicted situation has been best and most recently illustrated by the US, the world’s richest nation, whose lawmakers brought it to the brink of defaulting on its debts, thus sparking a panic in global equity markets.

As commentators routinely remark, these markets are driven by the twin engines of greed and fear, and thus I personally find it difficult to feel any sympathy for either the winners or losers.

But unfortunately, as in the case of the starving Somalis, it’s always the poorest of the poor who pay the heaviest price for global recessions.

azlan On the plus side, though, financial recessions also often put paid to political regimes whose rapacity exposes their people to more financial hardship than they are prepared to tolerate.

Thus soaring food prices and unchecked corruption are combining to create unrest against China’s communist regime. And similar conditions, plus falling oil prices reducing slush-funds in the Malaysian government’s piggy-bank, Petronas, could well spell trouble for Umno/BN.

In fact there are already signs that the Umno/BN gang is running short of cash to buy votes in the forthcoming general election, as it is apparently resorting to the lower-cost option of creating voters.

Having long ago successfully stacked the rolls in Sabah with thousands of grateful instant citizens from the Philippines, now it’s apparently trying the same trick in peninsular Malaysia by recruiting supporters from among the millions of migrant workers it has long used to prop-up the nation’s economy with a fund of cheap labour.

A losing proposition

If there was ever clear proof that a win for Umno/BN is a losing proposition for Malaysia, this is it. A losing proposition for Australia, too, considering the way my government has played into the hands of the people-muggers and smugglers of Umno/BN’s crooked immigration authorities.

This pathetic people-swapping deal with the Umno/BN government is already costing Australia dearly in terms of reputation and self-respect, and will also, I hope, at the next federal election, be at least partly instrumental in costing the Australian Labor Party its tenuous hold on government.

But meanwhile, the asylum-seekers and their supporters have scored at least a minor win, as the Australian High Court has granted an injunction against their export to Malaysia pending a full hearing in two weeks’ time.

Here’s hoping that will prove a major victory for humanity and compassion, and a massive defeat for the forces of bigotry. And that meanwhile the losers who have been doing the looting in the UK will find themselves under lock and key; and that the Libyan, Syrian, Malaysian and many other criminal regimes will slide a good deal closer to losing power.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia’, ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’, ‘Missing Malaysia’ and ‘1Malaysia.con’.