There you have it. History has spoken. Our deputy information minister has peered into the tea leaves and declared his diagnosis of world history in lapidary terms. Press freedom is now irrelevant. That we live in a different world now. Where have we heard this before?

CNN and the BBC have abandoned the values of press freedom. So should we. Since its promoters have killed it off, so let us all just stand o­n the seashore waving it a fond goodbye.

Our deputy information minister presents in its stead our very own mutation of it: "guided press freedom" (Guided, perhaps, by a pantheon of thin-skinned want-to-be god-kings and the eager millionaires scraping at their feet). Press freedom is *so* 20th century.

This would be a great argument except that it is a cretinous argument. Mr Zainuddin Maidin conflates the Western press , the militarism of the Bush administration, the defenders of press freedom, and the very principle of press freedom. For him, they are all somehow 'the same thing', presumably because they are all somehow associated with white people.

To be sure, he has had practice thinking in this fashion. He is among those who inhabit a world in which The Boss = The Party = Government. Any criticism of 'The Boss', nay, any failure to praise 'The Boss' in sufficiently obsequious terms as the Economist

has discovered, constitutes an insult to the entire Malaysian people.

No, Mr Zainuddin, Fox News is not the same as the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists), in case you have been too busy being cynical about press freedom to have heard of them), the US State Department is not the same as Amnesty International because they are both 'Western' institutions, and Ariel Sharon is not the same as Uri Avnery.

We lesser beings will try to keep these strands apart.

The deputy information minister claimed that "media freedom issues have become irrelevant after their Western proponents abandoned these values in the Iraq war coverage."

No, Mr Zainuddin, the freedom of the press is a principle, an idea. Principles do not go out of style because they are violated. What might happen, however is that we start getting puerile 'everybody does it, so should we' arguments from the little tyrants when principles are consistently violated by the big tyrants. The principle 'Thou shalt not kill' does not become "irrelevant" because somebody, no matter whom, "has abandoned that value".

The hypocritical, even murderous, deployment of the principle of press freedom by the Pentagon and by Mr Murdoch's newspaper empire violates the principle of press freedom grievously; it does not discredit it. O­n the contrary, violations are o­nly identifiable as violations because we have some principle to identify them.

The present American regime's disregard for multilateralism and the rule law does not make these principles suddenly "irrelevant", as Mr Zainuddin's argument would imply, it makes such principles even more important. Clear principles become more - not less - vital in unprincipled times precisely because they become in such times all we have to keep our judgments afloat.

The deliberate killing of journalists by American forces in Iraq and by Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories were also universally condemned as attacks o­n the principle of the freedom of the press. They were not condemned not as violations of peculiar American, Israeli, Iraqi or Malaysian mutations of press freedom.

Mr Zainuddin's is said to be a promoter of the 'Asian values' concept. "We (Malaysians)," he is reported to say, "have to establish our own press freedom concepts and values. It has been proven that we have the ability to be stable, to suppress extremism through guided press freedom,"

No, Mr Zainuddin, this is what tin-pot dictators and gangsters everywhere say to justify their tyranny. Based o­n your special criteria for Asian values, the US and Israeli armed forces would then turn out to be a wondrous breed of super Asians. We should welcome them with open arms as true brethren. After all, they practice a particularly enthusiastic form of "guided press freedom." They shoot journalists.

Based o­n your special criteria, the "Filipinos and Indonesians" that you sneer at, "who don't even have enough to fill their stomachs" are not Asians at all (don't let mere appearances fool you). The real Asian values - the values that will give us Asian guided press freedom - is the freedom of those with filled stomachs.

The Americans, the Israelis, and the Malaysians of this world turn out as the true Asians. Each of these prodigiously well-fed groups has their own specially tailored system of moral values. As for the others, "who are they to lecture us o­n press freedom? We are more qualified because we have full stomachs," asks Mr Zainuddin. The hungry should just shut the their little craws.

Mr Zainuddin could be congratulated for his clear articulation of morality for the farm animal, but this may leave out his true achievement. Unbeknownst to all, our deputy information minister has really been contributing to the wheels of economic progress. He does this because he is at the lever of a failsafe link between repression and prosperity. This is the real relationship, between repression of the press and lots of grub. Out of swill? No problem. Have a pull at the lever of repression.

Pronounce "sedition" to fine, threaten, menace, raid and jail the journalist. Prosperity and wealth will flow by iron law, and the well-fed will thank you.

Happy World Press Freedom Day.