Back to the loony-bin

Dean Johns Nov 21, 2012

I have the greatest admiration for anyone who can live in BN's Malaysia and maintain some semblance of his or her sanity.
Because for me, merely writing about the cretinous criminality of it all just one day a week from the apparently safe distance of Sydney is almost enough to do my head in.

So much so, in fact, that after six years of such cortical self-punishment, I felt that what little might be left of my brain might benefit from a bit of a break. Not a rest so much as a change of scene, as in the study of Arts at Sydney University.

And this is certainly proving a refreshing experience. But now, unhappily, it's all over for this first year, and after three weeks off focusing on essays and exams, it's back to the old loony-bin.

Loony BN, that is, of course, as I see from a quick study of stories on Malaysiakini that the regime's inanity and insanity have been as unsanitary as ever in my absence.

A fact that's far from unexpected, as the BN never ever changes its woeful ways, and never will. However many times it gets caught red-handed and dead to rights in daylight robbery or worse, it never repents, never relents, but tells a lot of ludicrous lies and proceeds on its madcap, badcap way.

And no wonder, as I see that the megalomanic malevolence behind this monstrous misgovernment of Malaysia, former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, is still madly manufacturing the kind of mega-mendacity that has become the BN trademark.

He convened a rag-bag rabble of cuckoo conspiracy theorists to once again push the proposition through his pathetic Perdana Peace Foundation that Islamic terrorists were not responsible for the Sept 11, 2002, attack on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Centre.

Having apparently abandoned his previous psychotic theory that the 9/11 attacks were faked with Avatar-style special effects, Mahathir now claims that the atrocities were real, but Arabs were incapable of carrying them out.

"The Arabs may have been great warriors in the past," Malaysiakini quoted him as declaring, "but after they fell under Western rule they seem to have lost their prowess in wars.

"In their wars against Israel they were so inept that they never won a single battle even though their forces so outnumbered the Israelis."

Pretending to be the protector

Having thus put the Arabs firmly in their place, he went on to pin the attacks on either the CIA or Israel's Mossad, whose agenda was to make Muslims the "universal enemies of the whole world".

With friends like Mahathir, however, Muslims don't need enemies, as this is the man who has defiled and disgraced the name of Islam by leading BN in pretending to be its protector in Malaysia, while all the time using the religion as a smokescreen of sanctimony behind which to commit countless crimes against the nation and its people.

And the battle for ‘ownership' of Islam in Malaysia still rages unabated, as if God was some kind of Godzilla to be deployed on the one hand by BN to keep its Malay victims and dupes in line, or on the other to aid PAS in its loony-tunes aim of turning Malaysia into a theocracy.

So, it was hardly any wonder, I guess, that the entirely sane and sensible recent remark by Nurul Izzah Anwar that all Malaysians, even Malays, should be entirely free to choose their religious affiliations was greeted with a storm of insane invective from both sides of politics.

Not that politics, as in the good of the people, has anything whatever to do with the true motives of either side of the religious divide.

The PAS fundamentalists just want the power to chop people's hands off or stone them to death, and the forces of BN, whose members, let's face it, would be sliced, diced and stoned out of existence if hudud was to come to pass, need God to persuade idiots to keep voting for them while they get on with their careers in crime.

Mahathir, to get back for a moment to the godfather of this loony-BN situation, has never yet been tried for any of the crimes he committed against the nation's system of justice and media freedom, let alone his massive practise, or at least support of, corruption.

In fact he keeps getting away with blithely denying any wrong-doing, while the BN beneficiaries of his narcissistic, megalomanic and above all kleptocratic rule treat him as some kind of patron saint, even to the extent of recently rewarding perhaps the filthy-richest of his M-word sons, Mirzan, with the ridiculous "honour" of Entrepreneur of the Year.

Another father-son team with a murky Mahathir-style relationship are BN's de facto Law Minister Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz and chip-off-the-old-block, Nedim. Nazri, as we all recall, recently told conflicting stories to Parliament about the RM40 million money-laundering scandal involving BN bagman Michael Chia, then rebutted allegations that Nedim, who was implicated in a mysterious murder several years ago and an assault on a security guard more recently, has received a RM450,000 Hummer from the same Michael Chia.

And when questioned as to his ignorance of his son's business or other dealings, just like Shahrizat Abdul Jalil claimed of her husband and children's involvement in the $250 million National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) scandal, Nazri came up with the deranged response that "that's husband and wife. I don't sleep with my son. I'm not gay. My son is not my wife, my son is not my lover. I don't sleep with him."

While Nazri and his son may not be bedmates, many of us would love to see them as cellmates, or perhaps more appropriately, padded cellmates.

But for the time being their crimes and misdemeanours have been eclipsed, BN-style, by even bigger and uglier cases of combined corruption and incompetence, like the Automated Enforcement System (AES) so clearly riddled with cronyism that cynics have dubbed it the Automated Enrichment System.

And now it has been revealed that the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) has lost track of recipients of much of the RM45.41 billion it has approved in loans over the past 10 years, leading to no doubt well-founded suspicions that many of the "students" that it funded were bogus.

So, it appears that my best efforts to get my mind off BN through studies has come back to haunt me. Not that I really expected to escape so easily. Because as long as this criminally insane regime persists in power, I know I'd go as loony as it is if I stopped criticising its demented antics.