Terima kasih, Malaysiakini!
COMMENT | A thousand thanks to Steven Gan, Premesh Chandran and the entire Malaysiakini team for the pleasure and privilege of being published by such a courageously independent news portal for the past 12 years.
Many thanks, too, to the countless Malaysiakini readers who were prepared to put up with what some others considered my presumptuous interference in their country’s political affairs.
And my heartfelt gratitude to the many Malaysian activists, from Antares Maitreya, Din Merican, Jaya, Kim Quek and Zunar, to name just a few, to my late, great friend Bernard ‘Zorro’ Khoo, who so kindly welcomed me as a comrade in arms.
But in the course of writing over 500 columns, I feel I’ve finally repeated myself so many times, and played around with so many words in attempting to illustrate my point that their meanings can’t be taken for granted – especially when they’re deliberately misused by misleaders – that I run a grave risk of wearing out my welcome.
‘Grave’, by the way, serves as an urgent reminder that I’m at an age at which I must be fast approaching my last rites, and had better get a move on with those.
Which, now that I’ve spent so much time contemplating and typing in hopes of playing some small part in righting/writing wrongs in the now former Umno/BN regime’s version, or rather perversion of Malaysia, I’m increasingly impelled to devote to excoriating evils elsewhere.
Or, come to think of it, almost, if not absolutely everywhere. As, by way of the most arguably extreme example, in China, or what I personally think of as Chaina, in view of the fact that the country’s fake Communist Party keeps well over a billion of the world’s most intelligent and industrious individuals in chains of secrecy, lies, censorship, and now even a form of the formerly-reviled capitalism, in a soul-destroying, mind-numbing, minorities-persecuting...
COMMENT | A thousand thanks to Steven Gan, Premesh Chandran and the entire Malaysiakini team for the pleasure and privilege of being published by such a courageously independent news portal for the past 12 years.
Many thanks, too, to the countless Malaysiakini readers who were prepared to put up with what some others considered my presumptuous interference in their country’s political affairs.
And my heartfelt gratitude to the many Malaysian activists, from Antares Maitreya, Din Merican, Jaya, Kim Quek and Zunar, to name just a few, to my late, great friend Bernard ‘Zorro’ Khoo, who so kindly welcomed me as a comrade in arms.
But in the course of writing over 500 columns, I feel I’ve finally repeated myself so many times, and played around with so many words in attempting to illustrate my point that their meanings can’t be taken for granted – especially when they’re deliberately misused by misleaders – that I run a grave risk of wearing out my welcome.
‘Grave’, by the way, serves as an urgent reminder that I’m at an age at which I must be fast approaching my last rites, and had better get a move on with those.
Which, now that I’ve spent so much time contemplating and typing in hopes of playing some small part in righting/writing wrongs in the now former Umno/BN regime’s version, or rather perversion of Malaysia, I’m increasingly impelled to devote to excoriating evils elsewhere.
Or, come to think of it, almost, if not absolutely everywhere. As, by way of the most arguably extreme example, in China, or what I personally think of as Chaina, in view of the fact that the country’s fake Communist Party keeps well over a billion of the world’s most intelligent and industrious individuals in chains of secrecy, lies, censorship, and now even a form of the formerly-reviled capitalism, in a soul-destroying, mind-numbing, minorities-persecuting so-called ‘People’s Republic’.
Striving to buy and bribe
And the same Communist Party, or, considering it’s a complete con, Conmunist Party, is now in the process of striving to buy and bribe as much as possible of the relatively free world into its clutches with chains of debt, a grandiose so-called One Belt One Road project, and South China Sea military bases.
Then, there’s that resentful remnant of Chaina’s former rival for leadership of totalitarian Conmunism, the USSR, now reduced to a Russian Federation run by and for the benefit of corrupt oligarchs, organised crime and Vladimir Putin and his accomplices in the Kremlin, or rather Krimelin, that’s hell-bent on trying to regain its former alleged glory by committing war crimes – ranging from the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and forcibly annexing now-free components of its former empire to aiding the atrocious Bashar al-Assad regime in its massacre and displacement of dissident Syrians.
Plus, of course, like or maybe in cahoots with Chaina, using the www.web as a weapon with which to wage cyber www.war on the West and the rest of the world.
Thus, for example,striving to skew if not outright screw elections in favour of their preferred parties, candidates and decisions, as they are most notoriously and compellingly alleged to have done to bias the Brexshit vote in favour of the UK’s disastrous decision to leave the EU, and to help elevate the dreadful Donald Trump to the US presidency.
How much credibility, cash and clout Brexshit will cost the UK and EU when this dumb and dud deal is finally done remains anybody’s guess thus far.
But there have already been any number of deplorable developments in the US, aka the Home of the Brave since Donald ‘Draft Deferment Due to Bone Spurs’ Trump became its commander-in-chief, as well as in the world at large.
Trump's suspiciously close cosying-up
There’s been Trump’s suspiciously close cosying-up to such crooked if not outright criminal autocracies as Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines and the Salman clan’s Saudi Arabia; his simultaneous distancing of himself and the US from countries like Canada, France, Germany and many other genuine democracies; and his apparent indifference to, if not entire ignorance of the existence of, most nations in Africa, Asia and Central and South America.
With the exception of Mexico and other countries, whose citizens threaten to head north to the US, of course, against which ‘invasion’ he’s still promising to build a wall.
Meanwhile, Trump’s much-vaunted trade war with China/Chaina threatens to drag down the global economy, and the American jobs he claimed he was waging this war to bring back from offshore keep on departing for greener or at least cheaper pastures.
And though North Korea hasn’t been so naughty Korea as to fire missiles toward the US since Trump’s vastly over-advertised and self-praised ‘summit’ with ‘Little Rocket Man’ Kim Jong-un, it is apparently still working towards going nuclear as fast and furiously as ever.
Then there’s the fact that – as if Trump’s personal foreign policy wasn’t sufficiently shambolic as to dash America’s chances of his making it great again on the world stage – back home he’s making a mockery of the Land of the Free by fighting a perennial, pitched battle against some of its chief and most cherished guardians of freedom, the independent news media.
And worst of all, Trump and his administration’s spreading of fake news about everything from the media to the evils of environmental destruction and global warming is encouraging other similarly misguided governments, like Australia’s current con-servative Coal-ition, for one, to be similarly dangerously derelict in their duties.
In short, now that Malaysia is in far better shape than it’s ever been, and doesn’t need, even if it ever did, my interference on its behalf courtesy of Malaysiakini, it’s time I turned my columny and calumny in other, more dire directions.
So once again I say terima kasih to all concerned, and fondly wish Malaysia and its citizens semoga berjaya di masa hadapan (success in the future), while also cordially inviting anyone who’s interested in keeping in touch to drop by my blog from time to time.
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 compilations of his Malaysiakini columns include Mad about Malaysia, Even Madder about Malaysia, Missing Malaysia, 1Malaysia.con and Malaysia Mania.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
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