Sunday, August 22, 2010
Caught midstream in geopolitical turbulence a mile wide with the South-Asian war on the right bank and on the left the Koreas on the boil, Malays in Malaysia may wish they can keep looking straight to avoid having to decide which way they have to go. But they must decide, and fast. Time is running out on them.
There is no middle ground left in the surge of asymmetrical terror in the Clash of Civilizations.
Our old friend in Cuba, Comrade Fidel Castro, has been saying since his recovery from bad health that the war is now verging on the ultimate nuclear holocaust. He may be right.
While the Man of Peace, Barrack Hussein Obama, preside over that civilization clash from the White House, India and Pakistan, both reluctant allies of the US (purposed mainly for the Containment of China), have applied to become members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that started out with Russia, China and five of the Central Asian countries.
As India sets aside US2 billion to reopen the Ledo Road built during WW II to reach Kun Ming through Myanmar, Pakistan and China have agreed in principle to extend the Korakoram road into a highway that will run through the Northwest Frontier into Baluchistan to the new port on the shore of the Indian Ocean.
China has also told Afghanistan she is ready to build a railway connection from Kandahar to the same port in Balochistan.
Iran, meantime, after successfully leading the ECO countries in building the rail connection between Islamabad and Istanbul, has committed US3 billion to build a railway from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan.
After the US has sent back Afghanistan to the Stone Age and that once wondrous country has become the world’s largest producer of opium to stay alive, the great hegemonic power slapped the much-disliked Kerry Lugar aid-trap on Pakistan, giving the US virtually all authority to micro-manage Pakistan in exchange for the paltry USD7.5 billion spread through five years.
Pakistan has since become a death-trap and thoroughly a failed-state, now fearing the US will demand her small arsenal of nuclear bombs and render her defenseless in the South-Asian territorial conflict. To make matters worse, she is currently flooded with 20 million of her people badly affected.
Against the American war, Chinese outfits have been building quality roads in Central Asia and have begun to take electricity from there to eventually reach Turkey, for industry.
Kashgar, the Old Silk Road largest bazaar on the Tajik-Xinjiang border will soon be rebuilt into a modern city with giant trading and shopping malls, with roads leading out to Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and to the Korakorum and to the heart of China.
The contrast between the US and China-Russia with the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) is a simple contrast of War and Peace, leaving Obama, the Friend of Peace, on the side of War – a good man living with bad joss.
That’s about the right bank of the Malay world, in a nutshell. Just as border tensions become unnaturally and unnecessarily high between India and China, the world was edged into frantic tensions on the left bank over the two Koreas, the tensions reaching straight to the Spratlys, the Straits of Malacca, the whole of the China Sea and its neighborhood and stretching the Pacific into a grasp of heat.
In short, the turbulence on the left and right banks of the Malay World translates into World War.
While in the development even Sri Lanka has turned towards the peace-bearing SCO (and ECO), Malaysia, which had spearheaded the move to set-up our own East-Asian Caucus (involving ASEAN, China, Korea and Japan) has now virtually retracted that East Asian peace initiative.
EAC would have given Asean and her partners the leverages needed to return the tension-filled Containment of China back into negotiable conduct of trade,development and cultural exchanges.
It would have also given the chance for Asean countries to redistribute Asean trade which has been hogged by Singapore, the island republic taking the lion’s share o about 65 percent from the start.
Malaysia was en-route to leading the pack of 10 to reform the trade and economic profiles of our regional bloc when the previous to the previous premier led himself into a hilarious power skirmish with his nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, making them both losers. It was ostensibly about sodomy.
Now, with the US-Vietnam nuclear agreement causing the scenario to totally change, the Malays, as they are led by Umno, are quite apparently in a state of bewilderment and not knowing on which side of the Malay River (Sungai Melayu) will the harvests become gold, and which will be fire.
Because around 30 percent of Malaysia is Chinese and the Chinese have been more economically successful in Malaysia (as well as in all Asean), it seems safe to say Malays in Malaysia are generally scared the Chinese would run them aground politically, sooner or later.
But how can the Chinese do that if the Malays do not sell off their birthrights this writer hasn’t been able to grasp since the beginning of time.
In other words, that fear seems to be seated on the self-assumption the Malays are corrupt, are naturally corruptible and will sell off their birthrights for a fee and bits of flesh, like it had been in Palembang and Jambe, the Malay heartland.
Some Malays appear to have been gripped by US propaganda that has made China into a US archrival now that the Muslims have been reduced into intra-Islam anarchy of sects (and sexes).
China, on the other hand, is the third country in Space and has modernized her arsenal to include ICBMs with cluster-nuclear warheads. But the US may be able to blow these with her anti-missile lasers.
The meaning is this: China is still decades away from becoming a contestant for hegemony or even for hemispheric imperialism.
China is, instead, a very successful vendor of intercontinental trade, diplomacy and development.
The same as with Iran, which the US and Zionists want us to believe is well on the way to becoming a regional power wishing to nuke Israel, China too is being made into a bogey by the US.
Some Malays enjoy this fear-the-Chinese syndrome. It had been a Malay trait from before WW II and dubbed in history as the Great Fear, becoming the motive force of the efficient anti-Chinese movement in 1944-46.
Truth is, China has just moved into a GDP of US5 trillion. Because the Japanese GDP had shrunk a bit, China may have become statistically the second largest economy in the world.
But that is US5 trillion in a country of 1.3 billion. It makes the Chinese urban per capita income only about RM5,000 and with about RM1,500 for the rural. Take note the numbers are in RM, not USD.
That is, indeed, a great leap for what had been an abject poverty-clutch only three decades before. But China would need time to use domestic consumer spending to boost her economy. She will be export-dependent for a long while yet.
This means, unless she reverts to the old style of command economy, she is not about to become imperial.
Militarily, while she has a huge infantry and a remarkably fast-expanding modern air force, she is merely in the process of building her first two aircraft-carriers to contest the mighty US Pacific Fleet.
Hence, the danger China poses to us is more in her cheap goods than in her military might. She is a US embarrassment because of the US1.8 trillion America owes to the Bank of China rather than for being militarily a contestant.
Because the US and Britain/Europe have all the time been technology-stingy, more and more countries in the world have been looking to China and Russia for technology-transfer and for state-of-the-art aircrafts and weaponry.
The US sold us (Malaysia) F-fighter jets without giving us the code to open the bomb-hatch! Will they give us the code if Anwar Ibrahim becomes the Malaysia Prime Minister? Is there any guarantee forthcoming from the Pentagon or from the Whitey House?
The Chinese isn’t much of a threat. Chinese in Malaysia can become difficult if they were to smuggle into the country something like three million persons from the Chinese mainland into the recently constructed economic corridors.
Short of that kind of a stunning human smuggling racket, the Chinese in Malaysia are at worst merely a case of bad breath, and at best, a vibrant commercial and industrial community that can become astounding with the right opportunities and the right mannerisms.
This is to say in the Sino-Malay periodical effervescences, it is the Malays that have been at fault.
Corruption-prone, they have been quick to swerve into banshee-screaming to extend the tenure of the super-privileged gotten-rich-quick class of Malay princes, politicians, contractors and businessmen, the Malay Labor left out and instead, made to pay for the costs of the hubris and debauchery. Malaysia is now on the edge of bankruptcy.
Hardly anything has gone into the way of Labor under the leadership of Najib Tun Razak who is hosting the High Income Economy, ensuring his father, The Great Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, is now truly dead.
Hardly anything worth redeeming has been heard of a Social Policy in Najib’s New Economic Model (NEM), him busy wooing Chinese and Indian voters who probably will continue to vote against the Barisan Nasional (BN), anyway.
The Malays are in critical dilemma once again for the lack of an ideological guidance other than an absurdly distorted Islam,
One Malaysia must need an ideology that can offer Malaysians a way out of the ethnic and sectarian conflicts or it will merely be a political posture worth no more than a lollipop that will melt under the sun.
The Malays have no place to rally around. This is an industrial society and it is senseless to believe Malays can anymore stand together around fundamental Islam or around the pool of the super-privileged nationalist elite that has gone berserk in corrupt practices and in arrogance.
Going back to Labor in Co-production is possibly the only way there is.-- a. ghani ismail, 22 August, 2010