As strongly as I share Parti Amanah Negara president Mohamad Sabu’s frustration, indeed rage, at the failure of the Malaysian people who have thus far failed to rid themselves of their criminally misruling regime, I don’t for a moment agree with his contention that all Malaysians are cowards .

Nor, I fancy, does even Mat Sabu himself, who in his recent speech to an audience protesting injustice against former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on the anniversary of his latest imprisonment, I assume deliberately made what he knew to be a wild overstatement for the purpose of shocking the rakyat into rallying behind his ‘Cis! Let’s rise up!’ call.

He surely very well knows - as the rest of us do - that the Malaysian population is composed of precisely the same mix of heroes, cowards and every possible shade of courage in between as the rest of the human race is.

And that, as the great philosopher Aristotle argued almost 2,500 years ago in advocating the ‘happy medium’ - a concept apparently somewhat like the Buddhist ‘middle way’ - courage is, like other virtues, most productively practiced in the mid-point between its deficiency or cowardice on the one extreme and its self-destructive rashness on the other.

The most tragic current example of courage carried to rash and catastrophic excess must surely be Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad’s regime has responded to the reckless valour of its freedom-seeking citizens by murdering as many of them as possible with the aid of its so-called ‘defence’ forces assisted by such anti-democratic allies and supporters as Russia and China, and trashing the entire country in the process.

A fate that many other nations have avoided through what could only be described as good fortune.

For example, without any intention to belittle the outstanding courage of the millions of citizens who participated in the ‘people power’ uprisings against the Ferdinand Marcos and Suharto regimes in the Philippines and Indonesia respectively, it must be conceded that they succeeded largely - if not solely - because the police and armed forces in both cases chose to support, or at least not attack them.

But many Malaysians, as courageous - with due respect to Mat Sabu - as a great many are, clearly suspect that they might not fare so fortunately in a people-power-style showdown against Umno-BN.

And indeed, I think they are wise to temper their courage with caution. Not that Malaysia’s armed forces have shown much (if any) sign of being ready, willing, or even - for that matter - able to wage outright war on the people, Syria style.

But on the other hand, Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein is a cousin and an apparently blind, not to mention dumb, loyalist of embattled Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak.

Then there is the thought that the ultimate commanders of the armed forces and alleged last-ditch defenders of the Malaysian people and their rights, the ‘royal’ personages that rotate the rulership of the nation between them, may well, in a crunch, prove to be the Umno-BN puppets they appear to be.

But in any event, the sultans and armed forces could well be beside the point if the moment of truth came in response to a grab for power by the people, given that the police are so clearly in the regime’s pocket and ever-ready to do its bidding.

Even more ominously, the regime has at its disposal the shadowy force of auxiliary police, para-militaries or whatever known as the People’s Volunteer Corps (Rela), whose masters - successive home ministers - regularly remind the rakyat that it boasts more than a million armed members.

And last but not necessarily least, Umno-BN has also bought the support of countless fake, so-called ‘NGOs’ that it systematically uses to spread adverse propaganda and threaten violence against regime critics and opponents.

Erring on the side of caution

So, all these factors considered, along with the fact that Umno-BN members and mouthpieces regularly threaten a repeat of the bloody riots of May 13, 1969 - allegedly fomented by Abdul Razak Hussein so he could replace Tunku Abdul Rahman as premier - and the much more recent urging by Abdul Razak’s son, current PM Najib, to his supporters to defend Putrajaya even at the expense of “ crushed bodies and lost lives”, it seems to make sense for even the most courageous Malaysians to err on the side of caution.

None of which is to deny, of course, that a great many Malaysians evidently are - like their counterparts in all other countries - too cowardly not only to fight for their rights, but even to speak up for themselves.

As Mat Sabu reportedly said in his ‘Malaysians are cowards’ speech - including himself in this craven group - if not in fact at least for rhetorical effect, “We will still keep quiet, we have (loud) voices of men, but (demure) hearts like women’s (suara jantan tapi hati betina).”

Explaining to Malaysiakini after the event why he made such condemnations of cowardice before theatrically throwing the microphone away, he said: “I regret the public’s level of awareness about corruption. It is very low, especially among Malays.”

“The question of amal makruf nahi mungkar (enjoining good and forbidding evil) is not in the soul of Malays, who as Muslims should be at the forefront (in fighting corruption),” he said, adding “but that’s not the case, and in the end our society are just yes-men.”

As Mat Sabu and you and I well know however, the numbers of yes-men (and women) among Malaysians of all races and creeds are dwindling fast. More and more of the formerly cowardly and worse, non-caring, are finding some courage. And at this rate, there soon won’t be enough of the gutless left to keep the rest of us from our goal of throwing the guilty out of government and into jail.

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’.