Malaysian independence to me is one big farce. I constantly ask people, independence from what? What are we free of exactly? What oppression did we find relief from when Malaysia was declared an independent, sovereign nation?
The honest truth is we traded one oppressor for another. That is of course if you want to label the Brits as oppressors. Personally, I don't think they were all bad. Racism aside, the Brits brought us into the 20th century. A feat I suspect this backwater nation could not have achieved on its own, not at least at the rate it has done. Which to a certain extent in spite of the technologies, policies and ideologies the Brits brought with them, this nation remains a third world nation with prevailing 5th world mentalities.
Some might argue that the Brits came to pillage and plunder, rape the country of all its resources and then leave like locust. I say that argument is specious. If the Brits were hell bent on keeping all the wealth of this nation, Malaysia would be more like Indonesia, where the Dutch truly did drain the nation of most of its resources in order to line coffers of the Dutch treasury. I think our foreign conqueror was a much kinder taskmaster than that of many other nations.
We speak of independence day like we did something to fight for it. We didn't. What the history books neglect to tell you is this, the general British public opinion after World War II was to do away with the colonies. England had to recover from the beating it took and no longer had the resources to maintain a presence in their colonies. This was especially true after they lost India, who by the way really did fight and suffer for their independence. India was their pride and joy, the jewel of the empire and without it they weren't interested in the rest of us. How did we win our independence? On a silver platter. We sent a delegation to meet the Queen and Prime Minister of England and after talks, the terms of our independence was agreed upon. Which by the way, thanks to the manipulation of the constitution has been grossly breached.
And then there was unrest here in the form of the communist movement. Sir Gerald Templer, in charge of putting to route the communist insurgency told England that if they expedited the process of independence, the insurgents would have no reason to fight. So instead of independence in 1963, we received it in 1957. By the way, the Brits didn't leave immediately, they left armed forces here to protect us and many of the positions in the civil service were still held by British officers until Malaysians had been trained to replace them. They could have packed up and left straight away, which would have been disastrous for a fledgling nation like ours. Especially in light of the threat that the Philippines and Indonesia posed at the time when they had lofty ideas of creating Maphilindo.
Our condemnation of the British has made us a bitter people and has also turned us into ingrates. It is truly disgraceful, the manner in which we regard the British. We forget about the countless lives, of young British men and women who shed their blood on our soil to protect us from the Japanese invasion, soldiers as young as 17, if you look at the gravestones in Batu Gajah and Taiping. Our lack of gratitude makes a mockery of the lives these men lost and the families that were broken apart by those casualties. By the way the Japanese were the most brutal occupational foreign force to have ever set foot on our soil. They were cruel, heartless and downright despicable. This is especially true for the Chinese people, who were slaughtered because of some ancient grudge that the Japanese had against them. Under Japanese rule, if you were outside your home after curfew, it didn't matter what the colour of your skin was or how old you were, if you weren't Japanese you were shot, if you were lucky or beheaded if you weren't.
Today the Brits are painted as the worse thing that could have happened to us. When any sane person, with the ability to logically deduce things will realise that the scum that runs this nation today are truly the worse thing that could have happened to us. At least during the British occupation we were all discriminated against equally but if you preformed well you could go far. Well as far as the bounds of racism would allow you and in British racism, that was pretty far. But today the apartheid like nature of this country robs everyone of true freedom and independence.
What bogs me down is this, the stupidity that is the underlying driving force behind the sentiment of "Malaysian Independence". It makes me sick to my stomach. So many people wish each other happy merdeka, happy independence day, so on and so forth. What they're doing is telling people how ignorant they are of the situation this nation is in and how far we truly are from an Independent Malaysia, where all men are equal.
As cliché as this may seem, I quote Martin Luther King Jr.
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent."
No comments:
Post a Comment