YOURSAY | ‘Malaysia can only progress meaningfully with Mahathir 2.0.’

The rise of the ‘Erdogans’

Anonymous 2411571459958017: One article from Bersatu supreme council member Rais Hussin on the greatness of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can be taken as an anomaly. Two articles indicate pursuit of a pattern.

Erdogan is Mahathir 1.0. We know you adored Dr Mahathir Mohamad even back then. But Malaysia can only progress meaningfully with Mahathir 2.0.

Please get on with the reform programme. You live in Malaysia, not in a regressing Turkey.

Newday: Talk about a serious infatuation with Erdogan. I cannot understand Rais’ rationale in his last two opinion pieces when the Turkish president is the opposite of democracy.

Maybe compare the Mahathir of old to the autocratic Erdogan, but not the new, unless you have a crystal ball and you are foretelling our fate after a few years of Pakatan Harapan rule.

I sincerely trust that will not be the case, or we will have to get rid of BN 2.0 like we did the original.

Pakcik Am: It was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who brought Turkey up with his secularism in government and education. Erdogan has taken Turkey down the path of religious fundamentalism.

Retnam: The top six economies in the world are China, United States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and France. Brazil, Russia and Canada are up there somewhere.

Rais thinks Turkey can make the top six? Yes, sure.

Anonymous_1377956996: Turkey, a top six economy when it's falling off a cliff? Surely you jest, Rais.

You’ve lost your bearings. Try true north.

The shared vision of Mahathir and Erdogan

Vent: To begin with, the title introduces a scary and unwarranted comparison between a current Malaysian hero and an Islamist dictator.

It is also sheer bunkum to compare the excesses of Mahathir (and there were many) to the current draconian rule of Erdogan.

Mahathir’s past follies seem to be a blip compared to Erdogan’s outright and massive human rights crackdown on political dissidents, his unilateral strikes against the Kurdish People's Protection Unit (YPG) in Iraq and the Syrian Kurds, and the relentless hunt of perceived and imagined enemies, including journalists, to stay in power.

And even as a proud Malaysian, comparing the histories of Malaysia and Turkey is fatuous, to say the least. Turkey was carved from the mighty Ottoman Empire with a history of bloody wars and tenuous peace.

Malaysia is an incidence of history forged as an entity by a series of colonial conquests from India and elsewhere and later by greedy Europeans, the British and invasions by pirates and fleeing royalty from the vicinity who established hereditary lines of titular heads of states now embraced in the constitution.

So let’s not suffer from any delusions of grandeur. If you have so much prepaid free time, Rais, I suggest you draw a more plausible comparison between this neo-Islamist caliph and that macho Russian tsar Vladimir Putin and the inscrutable Chinese emperor Xi Jinping.

And if you have more time on your hands, please find out what PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim was doing rubbing shoulders with Erdogan. I expect more from the head of Bersatu’s policy and strategy bureau.

Love Malaysia 2: Well, this article is so obviously a piece of propaganda I won’t bother refuting the argument.

The Turkish government still denies the genocide of the Armenians, and so is not comparable to Malaysia or Mahathir.

Erdogan has imprisoned tens of thousands of people accused of being Fethullah Gülen supporters. Thousands of teachers have lost their jobs, the press is not free and the opposition is not given a voice in state media.

Turkey is turning into another dictatorship.

The Pragmatist: If comparisons have to be made, Erdogan is more like former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak than Mahathir.

Backwards in ideas, all he focuses on is infrastructure, ideas that cater to those older than 55 years. He is power-crazy and changed the constitution to make him more of a dictator.

Turkey is still in a state of emergency since the failed ‘coup’, and Erdogan uses it to his benefit. He has also crashed Turkey monetary policy and the lira has tanked.

The youth do not support Erdogan, his methods and ideas have caused Turkey to slide backwards. Everyone in Turkey is poorer based on purchasing power parity compared to 10 years ago.

Darmakochi: This is a very superficial comparison. Please check on the personal liberties of the Muslims in Turkey that were being violated for quite some time as reported in most of the worldwide news agencies.

Most of the population in Turkey are Muslims whereas Malaysia is a multiracial country with many different religions. Malaysia can be a workable model for countries with multiracial populations.

Frankly, I was amazed what Anwar was doing visiting Turkey with his perennial backache problem. Our country does not need inspiration to progress from without, only from within our country.

Mahu See Lui: Civil rights are being trampled in Turkey and moving towards more Islamisation. I hope this is not the path that our new government is treading, since the declared policy is rule of law and greater respect for the Federal Constitution.

But there's little hope that those who were in Umno will change after so many years of cronyism and corruption, especially since the old guards are still holding sway.

Umno culture is hard to break, and it will continue to shout about threats to race and religion, although those threats don’t even exist.

If we were in Europe, this would be called neo-fascism.

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