Here’s wishing you all the very best in achieving whatever New Year’s resolutions you’ve made to improve your life in 2016. Though I haven’t actually made any myself, for fear of once again depressing myself for failing to live up to them as always in the past.

But in any case I feel no need for personal resolutions, as the resolution on Malaysia that the European Parliament passed at the end of last year has given me more than enough to look forward to in 2016.

In fact the European Parliament’s scathing indictment of the Umno/BN regime’s crimes against the Malaysian people and international principles and laws was the kind of root-and-branch resolution that could presage a revolution.

A revolution that the world has lately become vividly aware that Malaysia desperately needs after almost six decades of blunder and plunder by a coterie of criminal bigots and bleeders posing as leaders.

Not, of course, that I expect the regime to take a blind bit of notice of the European Parliament resolution, any more than it does of such other damning evidence that keeps emerging against it, like Malaysia’s regular ranking as one of the world’s worst in outflows of illicit capital, revelations by the Wall Street Journal and other sources of the massive 1MDB and RM2.6 billion prime-ministerial-bank-account fiascos, and the recent rating of these latter inter-related affairs by Washington Post subsidiary foreignpolicy.com as one of the ‘world’s worst corruption scandals of 2015’.

But as strenuously as Umno/BN attempts to ignore such resolutions and revelations, or to scorn them as opposition-inspired conspiracies by a big, bullying world against poor little Malaysia, this rotten regime must be getting very, very worried indeed.

Because, as even the most willfully stupid of its members and supporters must have realised by now, it is damned if it does reform itself, and equally damned if it doesn’t.

Self-reform would mean abandoning such anti-constitutional legislative atrocities as the truth-denying Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA) and Official Secrets Act, and such people-repressing laws as the Sedition Act and now the National Security Council Act.

And even more inevitably fatal to the regime would be reforms in the face of increasingly strident local and international urgings for an end to its co-option of supposedly independent institutions like the police, judiciary, and electoral commission for the express purpose of keeping itself in government.

Plethora of corrupt protections

Everybody knows, especially the perpetrators of this system themselves, that without such a plethora of such corrupt protections, these thieves would long ago have been summarily removed from office by the power of the Malaysian people, and thus can’t afford to show so much as a sign of reforming themselves.

On the other hand, however, they are increasingly faced with the fact that their failure to reform is inexorably leading to the kind of global condemnation that could very likely result at the very least in the freezing or seizure of their stolen assets under international laws against money-laundering or terrorism-funding laws, and at most indictment by the International Criminal Court, not to mention trade and other sanctions against Malaysia at large.

Thus their desperation to convince themselves and the Malaysian people, as the craven Youth and Sports Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin, tried to do recently following the denial of visas to two Israeli contestants in the Youth Sailing World Championship in Malaysia, that such Umno/BN activities ‘do not affect the nation’s reputation.’

In a perverse kind of way the dreadful Khairy Jamaluddin is right, of course, in that Malaysia’s reputation could hardly be worse, as it has so long been utterly abysmal for countless reasons ranging from the criminal greed, pathological deceptiveness and pathetic quality of its leadership to its lamentable record in every conceivable field including citizens’ and workers’ rights and justice, religious freedom and racial equality, and care for the health of the environment and the safety and well-being of the people.

In short, the bad news at the close of 2015 is that Umno/BN’s Malaysia has long been and remains a disgrace to the human race, but the good news is that the world is increasingly aware of this dire state of affairs and thus closer to actually doing something about it.

Here’s hoping, then, for not just a 2016 that is not just a replay of 2015, but a genuinely new New Year. A year of renewal or better yet ‘revolution’ for Malaysia, as so rightly and righteously demanded by not only every thinking, feeling Malaysian citizen, but now also by the European Parliament’s recent, if long-overdue pre-New Year resolution.

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’.