The Prime Minister denounced the recent anti-ISA protests as being an inconvenience. Well, he obviously stayed at home on Saturday and failed to notice that the real inconvenience was not the protests but the wantonly placed police roadblocks all over the city.
Little plastic tables and chairs were placed on many major arterial roads leading into the city by policemen who assiduously sat down and spoke to each other while ignoring the fact that they had turned these roads into massive car parks.
One by one, cars were forced into a bottleneck ushered by cones that squeezed three lanes into one for no greater reason but to slow progress into the city and form large roadblocks against the inalienable and democratic right to assemble peacefully.
The trouble with democracy is that you often have to put up with points of view that are not necessarily yours. The beauty of democracy is that you may at the same time freely choose to disagree with these points of view and proffer your very own opinion.
Unfortunately for this country, the Government of the day can neither be bothered to put up with the trouble nor is it too concerned with appreciating the beauty of democracy. It fails to realise that dissent is almost always a sign of loyalty to the country and not treachery.
UMNO Youth leader Khairy Jamaluddin nonchalantly brushed aside the significance of the protests on the grounds that it comprised members of the opposition and not the general public. A man of his intellect should know that every citizen including members of the opposition is part of the general public.
In fact, this country achieved its independence through the exercise of the right to assemble and oppose. Tunku Abdul Rahman in his book Political Awakening acknowledges this fact in beginning of the chapter “Victory at Last” where he says:-
“The constitutional battle to back up our demand for election began very soon after the Alliance decided to ‘go it alone’. Alliance members went round the country whipping up support from among the people; and we were encouraged to see the response, which was spontaneous and most enthusiastic.
Very soon the Government changed their attitude. They must have felt the gathering momentum, and felt that unless something was done the situation could get very serious and out of hand. We held demonstrations, and presented appeals to the Rulers to join us. Banners splashed across the length and breadth of the country making demands for self-determination and ultimate independence. Other parties who were not members of the Alliance also took part in our demonstrations, with the Umno members wearing red armbands.”
The right to demonstrate and splash protest banners were therefore part of the nucleus that eventually sparked independence. It is therefore bizarre that the Government of the day would try so hard to suppress these basic freedoms.
The march was against a draconian law which allows for detention without trial at the behest of the Home Minister. This is no trivial matter and neither is it a racial matter that some have painted it out to be. The fact that laws similar to the ISA exist in other countries makes no difference whatsoever.
It is a law that could cost you precious time in detention simply because the Home Minister makes a mistake as seen in the case of journalist Tan Hoon Cheng and blogger Raja Petra Raja Kamarudin.
If it could happen to them, it could happen to you. All that is needed for this abuse prone law to survive and continue clamping down on human rights in this country is for the general public to be silent.
Speaking of clampdowns, news that the Government of the day plans to introduce internet filters to block certain websites and blogs must, if true, rank as the worst decision taken by the Najib administration thus far. The very idea is repulsive.
Apparently, the grounds for this foul policy are that the filter is necessary for the maintenance of racial harmony. This is a load of nonsense and it paints Malaysians out to be fools so easily swayed or influenced by random internet content. It also reflects the Government’s lack of confidence in the Malaysian people.
The Government should not worry itself to much about this as many Malaysians, Malays included, have by themselves been able to filter out the unrestrained racist drivel coming out of Utusan Malaysia’s pen for so long and dump the same into our mental thrash folders.
It cannot be the duty of the Government to descend into the arena of determining what we read or watch. The moment this happens, this country’s spirit will be broken and we will have a society that is unable to exercise the discretion to make informed choices.
Quite apart from the grave effects this filter will cause, can we really trust Government officials with this important task of sieving our information consumption?
Last Thursday, BFM radio interviewed t-shirt designer Patrick Saw who runs a t-shirt shop in Bangsar Village. At the height of the V.K. Linggam scandal Patrick created and sold t-shirts bearing phrases such as “Correct, correct, correct” and “Looks & sounds like me, but so does Brad Pitt”.
During the radio interview, he mentioned instances of raids on his shop by Government officials from the Publications and Quranic Texts Control Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs.
They apparently seized pop art t-shirts created by Patrick that take the mickey out of Chairman Mao with words and illustrations such as “Mickey Maos” and “Mao Tais”.
The Publications and Quranic Texts Control Division considered these t-shirts to be subversive as they glorified communism.
If these Government officials cannot tell the difference between pop art and communist paraphernalia they are not qualified to decide what we can or cannot read and watch.
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