Just days ago, July 20 was the 47th anniversary of the moment when US astronaut Neil Armstrong took the last step from the Lunar Module of the Apollo 11 mission. Placing his foot on the Moon’s dusty grey surface, he intoned: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind!”

And so it was.

Millions on planet Earth looked skyward, mouths agape, as the event was broadcast live on TV worldwide. The US had beaten the Soviet Union in the space race started by President John F Kennedy in 1961, articulated succinctly in 21 words viz “that this nation will put a man on the Moon and bring him back alive before the end of this decade”.

JFK was shot dead in Dallas in November 1963 but Americans set about with inimitable energy and passion to reach their dead president's goal.

Today America is much further ahead in sociopolitical and technological development. The only nation whose economy has come close (with a GDP of US$11 trillion compared to the United States’ US$18 trillion) has found itself slowing down despite their best efforts.

Economic gravity has finally hit China and the Chinese Communist Party now admits that “slower growth is the new normal”. It is debatable whether, even with four times the population, China will ever catch up with a US that keeps moving forward, setting new goalposts.

China also has big demographic headaches - a rapidly ageing population, bedeviled by the double-whammy of 30 years of their ‘One-Child policy’ and years of female infanticide and employing male-preference fertility techniques that result in skewed male-female ratio at birth- they have too few women of child-bearing ages, even as the population rapidly ages.

For us, 1969 was also a climatic year, but for all the wrong reasons!

The May 10, 1969 elections produced a moderately changed result, not on the scale of the March 2008 Tsunami of GE12 where Penang, Kedah and Selangor (the richest state) all fell into opposition hands! Yet no racial riots occurred this time and people accepted the results.

Why?

Dr Kua Kia Soong went to London to find out. UK law provides for the release of official secrets after years have passed. He researched records of diplomats and journalists during that May 1969 and wrote a book on ‘May 13’ That strongly suggests that the 1969 riots were orchestrated. Hidden hands allegedly recruited rural people from northern states in Malaya, brought them by lorryloads to Kuala Lumpur and used them to massacre hundreds of Malaysians, mainly Chinese.

And why were the Sarawak Rangers, an apolitical force, withdrawn after just one day, and replaced by the Royal Malay Regiment, which were then and now open only to one ethnic group?

Malaysia became effectively a Malay Land after that date, despite peninsula Malaya (the place most Malays called home then) comprising only 40 percent of the territory of Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak making up the other 60 percent.

A 50.2 percent ethnic group with links to 40 percent of the land, ruling 100 percent of the nation! No wonder the ruling communalist party is deeply worried.

Making themselves into the Chosen Ones

But this systematic racialism, combined with the creation of a new identity ‘bumi’ (Sanskrit for soil) and ‘putra’ (Sanskrit for prince), in one leap addressed the Malay yearning for advancement while mired in a feudalistic mindset and elevating their constitutional ‘entitlements’ (of state preferences in government jobs, licences, scholarships and others, including having sole entry into an army) into an existential, somewhat mysterious ‘right’ which they, and only they, could claim as theirs.

They made themselves into the Chosen Ones.

Now the Jews are also accused of thinking of themselves as the Chosen People of God Almighty. But the Jews, on the other hand, jhave earned an enormous number of Nobel prizes, completely out of proportion to numbers. There are twice as many Malays as Jews but alas, nary a single Nobel graces their walls.

Instead, they have developed a mega-myopia.

‘Their’ party can do no wrong.

‘Their’ party’s leader can be quite easily figured out, by connecting the dots, to be Malaysian Official 1 (MO1) and thus linked to financial shenanigans involving US$ billions of national funds expropriated and channeled into buying expensive paintings, apartments, personal slush funds and even an expensive personal jet.

But no, it’s not him. It just can’t be, don’t you see!

It must be someone illusory, someone else, some other rascal surely.

And is there a long line of cause-and-effect that could be drawn between the events leading to May 13, 1969 and today’s MO1? Have the Malay and the Malaysian population been effectively seduced into believing the fantasies and outright lies that have been spun and distributed as the truth by the Goebbel-like creatures of the establishment such as the well-known filmmaker, the Chinese Muslim defence university professor, a former chief justice who famously said “A Muslim cannot tell lies” and many more.

1969 was a wonderful year for Mankind but an Annus Horribilis for all Malaysians who believe in an egalitarian colour-blind society where everyone, without exception, has freedom to believe in whatever he or she wants and no religion is placed on a false pedestal.

Yet I am confident we shall arrive one day to a place and time when we finally enjoy a more perfect unity sans a Unity Ministry. Because I believe in the goodness, energy and natural loving kindness that has always existed between all Malaysians, whatever their ethnicity or faith.

E Pluribus Unum - ‘Out of many, One’.