COMMENT Former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad's most recent defence of dictatorships - they can be good for you, he said - recalls a famous remark made about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini - "He made the trains run on time."

Of all recent signs that can be regarded as boding ill for the flowering of Malaysian democracy – the alleged purchase of small weapons for paramilitary units, a reputed plan to place Rela members on the postal-voter rolls, an eight-fold increase in the budget of the Election Commission – Mahathir's reported extenuation of dictatorships is the most ominous.

NONE Taken together with his comment that the government of Najib Razak would find it difficult to regain for BN its customary two-third parliamentary majority, Mahathir's brief for dictatorship can be read as a disturbing portent.

He is testing the acoustics for the imposition of a single voice over a million solitudes - Albert Camus' definition of tyranny.

Quite clearly, Mahathir feels that if Umno-BN cannot regain their previous domination of parliament, then a dictatorship by the Umno supremo would be preferable to the cacophony of a Pakatan Rakyat government.

He trots out an old saw: China's rapid economic development since Deng Xiaoping opted for capitalism as its economic system in 1978 was only possible because of its one-party rule.

People, especially Asians, prefer the good life offered by economic development to the disorder, interspersed with bouts of economic progress that politically free societies are prone to.  

Sweating over hypothetical Pakatan takeover

Mahathir's comments is the strongest sign yet that Pakatan's chances of victory at the next general election are rated highly enough by its chief nemesis for him to expose his latent autocratic self with nary a qualm about what that does to past protestations that he was muzzled for his criticisms when Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was premier.

Apparently, dictatorship is all right if Mahathir and Chinese communists are the ones doing it, so long as they couple it with the cornucopia of economic virility.  Never mind the demeaning corollary that Asians prefer full stomachs to the psychological satisfactions of free thought and expression.

Aside from what all this tell of this sometime exponent of the mantra of ‘Asian values', one has to keep in mind the inherent self-interestedness in the argument.

Only those who fear their past track record cannot withstand judicial interdiction are sweating over a hypothetical Pakatan takeover.

Others would be more than happy, if PAS can be dissuaded from its hudud fixation, to make up Malaysia's lag over economically vibrant but politically effete Singapore in a decade and its supersession thereafter.

It's a wager many Malaysians who have chafed under the sterility of Umno-BN's rule, in the last 15 years particularly, would accept with alacrity.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.