Things have come to a pretty desperate pass when we’re forced to fall back on proverbs to keep our hopes up. Because most proverbial wisdoms are more products of wishful thinking than of actual, practical experience.

But hope springs eternal, as they say, and thus, deprived of all properly-constituted protections against the depredations of the Umno/BN gang, all those of us who deplore the ruination of Malaysia by this lying, thieving and altogether rotten regime have to resort to such highly debatable consolations as ‘the truth will set you free’ and ‘when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own’.

Certainly it is undeniable that factions of the Umno/BN thieves are falling out with each other big-time. Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who devoted his 22-year premiership to robbing Malaysia of a proper judiciary, honest police force and credible news media the better to enable the misrule, robbery and outright rape of the country by himself, his Umno/BN accomplices and cronies, has openly charged the second of his hand-picked successors, Najib Abdul Razak, with ‘stealing the government’ .

But so far, at least, it is far from clear whether the political gang-warfare that Mahathir’s campaign is provoking will ever benefit the vast majority of ordinary, honest Malaysians.

Nor, of course, is it intended to do so, as Mahathir’s motive is obviously not to give back the government to the citizens from whom he and his henchpersons have stolen it along with so much of the wealth of the nation, but to position his son Mukhriz to eventually succeed him as head of the Umno/BN mafia, of which he still sees himself as the Godfather.

A term that reminds me that, unlike the original Italian or rather Sicilian Mafia, which has long been officially spurned by the Catholic Church to which most of its members pretended to belong, Umno/BN has stolen not just Malaysia’s government but also its majority religion.

The nation’s ‘religious’ authorities have been as comprehensively politicised, corrupted and co-opted by the ruling regime as the judiciary, the police and the media have been, and thus Islam has been perverted and pressed into the service of this criminal regime and its currently warring factions.

The most sickening recent example of this was the exhortation by Crime Minister, Chief Thief and Leading Liar to his accomplices and supporters to pray for the salvation of the very Malaysia they have been for decades so hell-bent on looting and misleading. And widely-published pictures of these hypocritical predators pretending to engage in such prayers was literally enough to make a person puke.

Denying they’re falling out at all

As, indeed, is the pack of lies with which they endlessly force-feed the public. Currently most of the lying by the thieves of various factions is designed to deny that they’re falling out at all, and thus to deprive the citizenry of any hopes that ‘honest men will come by their own’ through an expression of no-confidence in the prime minister personally or his so-called government in general.

Thus the firing of leading figures in the criminal regime like long-time deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin and his replacement with worse, the thuggish highly-suspect Zahid Hamidi, the ‘transfer’ of possible trouble-makers from positions of power to mystery posts in the Prime Minister’s Department, and the ‘resignations’ of others on such spurious grounds as ill-health.

But of course the most massive barrage of blatant lies by everyone from Najib himself on down to his ridiculously idiotic and largely illiterate paid apologists infesting the social media and online news portals like Malaysiakini is still devoted to denying and decrying incontrovertible allegations of massive prime-ministerial corruption.

It’s difficult if not outright impossible to keep up with the frequently changing and even conflicting stories about the blundering alleged plunder of RM42 billion from 1MDB and the mysterious deposit of RM2.6 billion in one of Prime Minister Najib’s personal bank accounts.

But one of the most ridiculous explanations for the RM2.6 billion windfall was that it was a reward by some anonymous benefactor from the Middle East for Najib’s efforts in opposing the terrorist organisation that, in an Umno/BN-style co-option of religion to justify its crimes, calls itself Islamic State.

As for as I or anybody else I have heard from is aware, Najib has done precisely nothing to counter Islamic State. Quite the contrary, in fact, as he is on record as having only months ago urged his Umno/BN organisation to emulate the ‘courage and spirit’ of IS in its battle to cling to power.

A battle it will surely eventually lose if the ‘when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own’ proverb actually has any truth to it. Or, if fact, whether the truth can actually someday set Malaysia free.

An eventually that the increasingly embattled Umno/BN thieves are striving desperately to prevent by censoring the Internet so that what people can no longer spread what Najib recently called ‘insults and lies’ - or in in other words the truth - about him, his associates and all their corrupt and otherwise criminal works.

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', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.