Of my last piece in Malaysiakini, The spin gets wilder and wilder , one reader, Naim, wrote: ‘Easy to sit in Oz and comment’ - albeit with a ‘smiley’ symbol that followed it. I tend to read readers’ comments regularly. I see them as essential feedback, bricks or bats, on my writing but more on the content of my writing. Some are fair. Some aren’t. Naim may have said it tongue-in- cheek, but I feel readers should know the vantage from which I generally write.

It’s true that for the better part of my commentaries and opinion pieces are written whilst I am comfortably absconded in Australia - my home, my country. Sometimes they are written from outside Australia, during my travels. But let’s set the record straight here: The four or five pieces that appeared in Malaysiakini over the last couple of weeks were written whilst I was visiting Malaysia. That’s right. And the Umno regime’s Gestapo didn’t even know I had been in town.

Yet, why does the writer’s location matter when writing on Malaysia? Why do certain people resort, sometimes as matter of routine, to ridiculous nationalistic jingoism whenever a foreigner like me has a shot at Malaysia’s so-called government and the state’s institutions? This is especially curious, and irksome, given that even Malaysia’s dumb, corrupt, incompetent and anti-democratic political leadership admits - when it suits the political agenda - Malaysia’s ineluctable ‘globalisation’.

Perhaps some readers have not heard that in democratic world we are free to criticise governments and their political leaders but do so with circumspection, keeping it factual and thus with some responsibility. Of course, responsibility is a two-edged sword: what one may see as responsible comments may not be taken the same way by the ruling authorities. Take the case of Singapore, whose regime bludgeons its critics, especially from the western media, in equal venom of its domestic dissidents. Or China. Or Iran.

This is barely a new label, but in today’s so-called globalising world, writers do not recognise borders - except when they travel from their home countries. I am one writer who, like so many of my colleagues, recognises political borders not so much because of they are constructions of history but more for the nastiness that political regimes wield within their constructed territories that somehow usurp an inviolable sovereignty.

There’s nothing sovereign when a regime like Malaysia’s engages in routine retribution of its critics at home and abroad. When it routinely abuses the democratic rights of its citizens. When it routinely and deliberately uses racism to secure political control and, worse, legitimises its rule solely by appealing to the tribalism of race or ethnicity. That’s a regime that acts cowardly and behaves without an ounce of scruples or morality.

That the Malay-dominated regime harks on its rule and existence being premised on moderate Islamic values amounts to blatant lies. The Umno regime is an intolerable of religions other than Islam, especially at a time when there’s a growing movement towards greater Islamisation in Malaysia and which is being succored by the regime itself for its own political survival. And yet it has the gall to tell brazen lies to the world that Malaysia’s multi-racial communities live in perfect harmony.

It’s also a regime that cannot tolerate political dissidence from within its borders. Operation Lallang in 1987 and others before it and after it are cases in point. Look at how the regime clubbed the Hindu-based Hindraf. Look at the way it hounded Tenaganita’s Irene Fernandez through the courts, whose judges it owns through the attorney-general’s office. Look at the way Anwar Ibrahim, once a Mahathir Mohamad prot é g é , continues to persecuted by the regime.

Look at the way the regime is hounding Raja Petra Kamarudin, whose ‘Malaysia Today’ news portal is the bane of the regime, through the corrupt courts and its officials who have the dubious honour of not only bastardising the Malaysian constitution and laws to ensure the regime’s survival but making a complete mockery of Malaysia around the world.

It joins the likes of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates or, again, Iran, whose Third World mentality is a showcase of political desperation, dishonesty and immaturity.

I am not a Malaysian. I am thankful for that. I am a proud Australian. I am thankful for this too. But why should my nationality matter when I write on Malaysia when it does not bother all my other editors around the world? I subscribe to the notion of writers-without-borders. I think any writer, and I am sure RPK would agree with me here, should be politically free to write on any topic, on any country, whether he is a Malaysian, an Australian and an Eskimo.

If the types of political shenanigans in Malaysia, and elsewhere, continue and become nastier and nastier, then it is incumbent upon writers, at least the serious writers, to blast regimes like Umno and its cretins in the Barisan Nasional in crony-infested, corrupt and racist Malaysia.

Because you know that the craven ‘journalists’, who are owned and paid by the Umno-BN regime to turn its banal dribble into spin and spiel just aren’t holding up their part of the democratic bargain.

Would you trust anything printed in Utusan Melayu, The Star, The New Straits Times, Bernama and a handful of others? Be honest.