COMMENT | We tend to take for granted the fact that a state and government exist primarily to remove violence from our everyday life.

The most fundamental function of a state is to monopolise the legitimate use of force.

It is thus deeply troubling and disturbing to have members of our government and political parties actively approve of violent tendencies - namely the throwing of slippers, chairs and flares at the Nothing to Hide 2 forum recently.

Let’s examine their responses closely, as well as discuss how the Memali incident should and should not factor, into what is unfolding in the present.

PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang said: “Thank you to those who sought an explanation for the Memali incident. Those who failed to answer the question should not get upset... The youths alone should not be faulted (for the fracas), the cause of it should also be blamed” 

Minister Nazri Aziz said: “"He asked for it... He wants to be a street fighter, you want to behave like a gangster, that's what you get. You don't want to behave like a statesman, that's what you get." 

Malaysiakini reports on our very own Prime Minister, Najib Abdul Razak:

“"Don't say one thing now and another tomorrow. Who made the U-turn?" he asked, laughing... "That is why so many chairs flew that day. Thank God, no chairs flew today," he joked.”

A joking matter?

How nice that Najib gets to enjoy himself amidst jokes and laughter, while people are actually getting physically hurt.

I’m usually all for injecting humour into political observations, but there comes a point when such a flippant attitude reveals something genuinely dangerous to society.

Nazri and Hadi exemplify the worst of the “s/he was asking for it” mentality, among the worst variants of which is the whole “she was asking to be raped because she was dressed like a whore”.

I don’t know how many more times we need to repeat that when a crime occurs, the criminal is at fault, not the victim.

I’m not here to argue that Mahathir Mohamad has never broken the law in his life, but I’m pretty certain he wasn’t breaking any laws in the moments or hours before thugs started throwing physical objects at him with the intention to harm him.

The latter is, without a doubt, a crime.

Apes or humans?

I mean, we get it - people have political differences and like to say mean things about one another.

I wrote recently about the free marketplace of ideas, and I believe strongly in freedom of expression, and the need to debate opinions in search of truth.

I do not believe for one second that using violence to further one’s political beliefs is in any way necessary in the Malaysian context, nor should it be condoned or approved of in any way.

Perhaps it's joke material for stand-up comedians, but not for prime ministers.

I believe the evolution of humanity can be measured - perhaps even primarily so - by the degree to which we use violence to solve our problems.

As apes and Neanderthals, violence is the de facto, primary means of resolving differences. As history and civilisations progress, violence becomes an increasingly absent factor in day to day life.

The question then is: do we want to be an advanced civilisation? Or do we want to be apes?

I’m not so naive as to suggest we can wipe out violence entirely, but surely we can aspire to such great ‘heights’ as to expect that the highest leaders of our country do not condone violence, encourage it, and/or blame victims for it.

Contemplating Memali

Let us take a brief look at the Memali incident.

First off, I think we have to acknowledge that it is almost certainly spurious to think that rage about Memali is what organically triggered the incident at the Nothing to Hide 2 forum.

The kids who were arrested after were aged 17, 18, 19, meaning they were born some 15 years after the incident.

For my money, I imagine they don’t even know very much about what happened out north in 1985.

More likely, the entire thing was orchestrated to achieve the very result we see today: further alienation of PAS supporters and a reintroduction of one of Mahathir’s darkest chapters back into the current public discourse.

All that said, this is not to say that the Memali incident should be forgotten. It was, without a doubt, a black day in Malaysian history.

Malaysiakini has done a fair and objectively informative recap of what happened, which is certainly worth a read, along with the article on Wikipedia, which is as informative as ever.

As I recall, former The Malaysian Insider editor Amin Iskandar also did a documentary a few years back on Memali that may be worth watching.

I’ll leave you to those sources for a complete picture, but by way of the most basic summary possible:

After a long build-up of tensions between PAS and Umno / the government in 1985, the police attempted to arrest Ibrahim “Libya” Mahmood, which led to a standoff between the police and the Memali villagers who were followers of Ibrahim Libya.

Violent clashes involving guns, parangs, sharpened bamboo sticks, molotov cocktails and such resulted in 18 deaths ( four police, 14 civilians), and 37 injuries (23 police, 14 civilians).

Who is to blame for Memali?

The hotly debated question about Memali is: whose fault was it?

It feels like after considered reflection, the most accurate and objective answer is: it was a lot of people's fault.

There was a whipping up of violent sentiment by Ibrahim Libya, in the months leading up to November 1985, that radicalised many villagers, and set the stage for a violent confrontation with the authorities.

At the same time, it seems almost certain that there were many terrible (though hardly surprising) mistakes made by the authorities, as testified by then Baling OCPD Tunku Muszaffar Shah Tunku Ibrahim.

If the authorities had chosen a different path at any of a number of forks along the road, it is entirely possible that the bloodshed could have been avoided entirely.

The circumstances in which Mahathir turned out to have been lying about being out of the country during the incident, making his deputy Musa Hitam the scapegoat, was cowardly and shameful, to say the least. There is little or no excuse for such behaviour.

Mahathir in the present also could perhaps take a less cavalier attitude towards Memali, especially given all that could probably have been done to avoid a violent confrontation.

A fundamental tenet of civilisation

Ultimately, however, there are almost no circumstances in which it is justified to throw slippers, chairs and flares at a man in his 90s, and this most certainly was not one of them.

To put it simply, that's not how justice works.

Protesting (arguably) illegitimate violence in the past by perpetuating illegitimate violence in the present is a classic case of an eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind.

With regards to Memali, perhaps something along the lines of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, as suggested by Lim Kit Siang, would be a productive first step towards truth and justice.

If Mahathir is truly guilty, then let him stand trial for his crimes. Until then, he had the same right as the rest of us to share his views with whoever is willing to listen.

Whether in Memali of 1985 or a Shah Alam forum in 2017, we should aspire to a political process completely free from violence. What use is all of the other gaudy trappings of ‘civilisation’, if our leaders and ourselves cannot even commit to such a fundamental tenet of civilised life?

NATHANIEL TAN limits his violence to video games. 

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.