In today’s world, while armed invasion by colonialist invaders may be out of fashion, countries like Malaysia is in danger of being colonised via ‘mind control’ warned Communications and Multimedia Minister Salleh Said Keruak.

“Today, military occupation can no longer be applied. The superpowers need to colonise countries such as Malaysia through economic domination and through what some would crudely call ‘mind control’.

“You need to dictate public opinion and guide the thinking of the people. And with the popularity of the Internet this becomes possible,” said the minister in a blog posting today.

The media and the banks are very crucial to what we can consider this new form of colonisation, he opined.

“It is basically colonisation of the mind. It worked 100 years ago when the west first embarked upon controlling a country by determining how its people think.

“And nowadays all it needs is the media, the social media included, to bring down countries if the right strategy is applied,” explained Salleh further.

Salleh related that in the past, for more than 2,000 years, colonisation has always been through military intervention or occupation.

However, he noted that the Emergency in the then Malaya, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and others have shown that military might was no longer enough. It takes more than guns to dominate a country.

While the US used the military to fight the Korean and Vietnam Wars without much success, he argued that the British in contrast successfully fought to win the hearts and minds of the people first before following up with the armed forces to mop up.

Malaya was too important to the British and they could not afford to lose this prized colony. Britain was practically bankrupted by WWII and Malaya contributed to two-thirds of the British economy. Without Malaya Britain would have taken a far longer time to recover.

And that is why Malaysia is not a communist state today, one of the few countries to win the war against communism via the hearts and minds campaign, said Salleh.

He warned that the same strategy, albeit with new tools, to win the hearts, minds and shape the opinions and beliefs of Malaysians may be used to colonise the country by external forces.

Malaysia is currently gripped by international scandal as foreign authorities investigate alleged embezzlement and money-laundering involving sovereign fund 1MDB.

The matter is widely reported in the media, went viral on social media and has led to financial institutions downgrading Malaysia’s ratings.

Government loyalist accuse all of those as being foreign propaganda, an attempt to affect a change of regime and interfere in Malaysian domestic affairs, though critics have accused the powers that be of trying to cover up its wrongdoings.