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With whom will the army stroll?

Azly Rahman 

From: ILLUMINATIONS, Malaysiakini 

 

 

No man is an island, entire of itself;

MCPX

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. - John Donne, English poet

We do not need an emergency rule unless we are still living in 1969. Those days are over. Majlis Gerakan Negara is history. This is a time for the natural state of things to unfold. A time to let a hundred flowers bloom. The semiotics of structural violence must not be paraded in front of Malaysians who now know how to protest peacefully.

They know what a totalitarian regime means. They now know what separation of powers means. They want to see an urgent evolution of this philosophy. Only those in danger of losing power want to maintain hegemony and will use the ideological state apparatuses to maintain power. Machiavellians included.

Emergency rules are for nations in desperation. For dictators facing an imminent and violent political death. For despots who refuse to detach themselves from power. For governments that allow prime ministers to rule for as long as they like. Ours is not. We do not have dictators. We have democracy yearning to break free.

Suharto, Idi Amin, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Somoza, Noriega, and Marcos were are all tyrants. Some fell from grace because of the greed of their women. Typical Marie Antoinette syndrome.

Police must maintain justice

We are evolving into a civil society in which civilians are beginning to speak up in the name of building our own civilisation from the possibilities of social and global justice, universal human rights, cosmopolitanism, and radical multiculturalism. A deployment of the army will kill this image of a civil society, right at its infancy.

Soldiers fight to protect external enemies of the people, not to protect corrupt politicians against their own people. The latter is philosophically wrong.

The police are supposed to be maintaining justice in a world of irrationalities and unjust behaviour. The police need no extra protection if they are true to their conscience and always available and reliable to protect the citizens, even against elected representatives who abuse power.

An image of the army on the streets will be a violent one - both in truth and perception. We need not go that route - the route of Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Uganda, or Burma. We are gentle people with gentle ways of dealing with conflicts. We are not a junta nation. We do not have Hutus and Tutsis.

A gentle people

Gently done, we know when to remove a regime that is no longer gentle to the people who voted it into power. Gently, the Internet will take its natural course in igniting mental revolutions first, and peaceful revolutions next. Gently done, we know how to protest loudly against the violent and sudden price hikes, massive corruption, death of the judiciary, and even unsolved murder mysteries.

We do not need the army on the streets. We need to instead arm ourselves with revolutionary ideals, to hold on fast to our dreams of a republic of virtue, and to use the Internet to voice our dissenting views and to engineer regime change.

We are already an army of intellectuals in our own way, patrolling the mindscapes of Malaysia, spreading the message of peace, policing against politicians that are corrupt to the core. We are an army and a police ourselves. We do not need the semiotics of violence to take root.

Malaysians are gentle people. Only the media is getting more and more violent, feeding our children with stories upon stories of sex, lies, murders, and political intrigues.

Forgotten, unheard stories

We have forgotten the more important news of the day: the rakyat suffering through the recession and possible depression, youth losing their moral compass, failing schools, sprawling urban poverty, continuing systematic spread of racist propaganda in schools and universities, breakdown of family values, siphoning of the nation’s wealth out of the country, declining standards of our universities and a plethora of other issues we should be addressing and finding solutions to.

And many more. Stories of the rakyat. These are the masses whose stories must be heard. These are not the elite whose stories are pushed daily to the forefront, shoved into our consciousness ad nauseum.

No, the army must stay home and meditate or at best be deployed as peacekeeping forces for the United Nations. The people must be trusted to express themselves freely, peacefully.

Malaysian rallies are becoming huge family events. People come in all shape and sizes, from all walks of life, from a hard days’ work to listen to music and their favourite revolutionary leaders, and to renew their commitment to regime change.

The people are armed with better knowledge of what will work for them as Malaysians and what has miserably failed. They want change because the only permanent thing in this world is change.

No, we do not need the army patrolling the streets. The family members of the army and the police are also suffering from the recession and the astronomical increase in the price of everything. They too are armed with the knowledge of why the country is messed up as a result of the messing up of global and local politics.

For whom the bell tolls

In the end, the bell tolls for thee. When the time comes for the truth to surface, no army can stop it from violently appearing from the ground beneath. No police can guard truth from appearing in the eyes of the public.

No army can defeat revolutionary forces that install better regimes through peaceful, silent, ethical and intelligent means. No iron bars can imprison the conscience and the yearn for one to speak the truth to power. The goodness in men and women will be the best police and the best army.

Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.

No army on our streets, please. We are Malaysians. We must let justice take it natural course.

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Category: Azly Rahman's Contribution
Smart schools vs sick schools

Azly Rahman 

From ILLUMINATIONS, Malaysiakini 

 
I read this excerpt of a
MCPX
AFP news story below with disgust.

‘... One-third of Malaysia's schools do not have water and electricity, a minister said, pledging to fix the problem by 2010....

‘Deputy Education Minister Razali Ismail told Bernama that all 9,806 schools will have access to basic utilities by the end of a four-year education development plan....70 percent of schools already have access to water and electricity. The other 30 percent are mostly located in rural areas, but “we are confident the problem will be solved by 2010".

...Malaysia has implemented a series of five-year development plans with the aim of reaching developed-nation status by 2020..In the last national blueprint, announced in 2006, the government said RM1.15 billion would be spent to upgrade schools.’

All we continue to hear are slogans such as ‘2010', ‘Vision 2020', ‘developed-nation status’ and ‘billions of ringgit of funding’.

These cloud our vision of what schools ought to be. It is as if there is a ‘manufactured crisis’ going on: keep schools impoverished so that the government can keep making promises using empty slogans. The aim: only this government can continue to help those poor schools. This is the nature of mystification we have been fed with all these decades.

I recall then education minister Najib Abdul Razak making a statement about "smart schools" - that the first Smart School is being built at a cost of RM144.5 million. Apart from being wired, it would have a hostel for 800 students, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a hockey pitch, a hall and other facilities. Eventually all Malaysian schools will be operated on this concept.

Now we hear that many schools do not have water and electricity supply, let alone computers to make the schools and students smart. I think our children deserve better than empty promises by the ministry in charge of human intelligence and social reproduction.

What has that ministry done since Merdeka to allow schools to be left in such a state? What paradigm of nationwide school improvement has the ministry been using in order to create such a deformed version of democracy and education?

Is it a strategic plan to ensure that children of the poor will continue to perform the worst under such conditions, and that schools equipped with state-of-the-art technologies are select ones for children of the elite?

No wonder we have an increasing number of Mat and Minah Rempit, Along and gangsters - they were educated in the most deplorable circumstances perhaps. They were schooled in environments with teachers who are not committed and motivated, but also imprisoned in classrooms that do not have the basic amenities compared to ‘smart schools’.

Overhaul long overdue

It is simply unacceptable for this government to allow class stratification; schools not only become the stratifier of ethnic groups but also of classes of the poor, through the unequal distribution of resources. This is characteristic of the hideous form of schooling in Asian-style capitalist societies.

How can we develop the child's intelligence to the fullest if schools are designed to fail them miserably?

We must demand the exposure of the conditions of the schools - which schools get access to what and why. We must demand a comprehensive picture on why our schools are failing and unable to produce children smart enough to bring their intelligence, ethics, and problem-solving skills to the university and beyond an succeed in a world that is challenging.

The new governments of the Pakatan Rakyat must undo what the Barisan Nasional (BN) government has done to the most under-privileged schools. They must gather data on what is lacking in the schools and how resources are shared.

Certainly, if the situation has been exacerbated over the last 30 years of BN rule, how are we to see any changes in class and classroom stratification in the next 30 years?

We see many projects like the Petronas Twin Towers, Multimedia Super Corridor, Monsoon Cup and Iskandar Malaysia carried out as fast, so that governmentally-linked companies can make money for the select few.

Why does comprehensive school reform take ages to be implemented? This is the ‘prison-industrial complex’ approach we are taking in implementing national educational policy.

By maintaining the sense of deprivation of the physical, psychological and intellectual aspects of the schools, we hope to produce more of those citizens who will be desperate enough to find ways be and become like the successful ones, but through desperate means.

We are creating a larger underclass tempted by materialism in a system created to encourage conspicuous consumption - these citizens produced out of the smart schools-sick schools system.

What then must we do to heal the system, to make our sick school smarter? This is for the education ministry and progressive parliamentarians to answer.
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Category: Azly Rahman's Contribution
No amount of help will ever be enough, but any help will do. We need to help our Indian community progress faster. How much has the New Economic Policy (NEP) helped the Indians? What then must all of us do? There is still too much infighting and problems of succession amongst the Indian Malaysians. Power is concentrated in the hands of the few. There is no evidence of transformative leadership. There is the ethos of overstaying one's welcome and not giving enough room for younger, brighter, more ethical and energetic leadership to emerge. These 'fights' must stop for the sanity of Malaysians in general.

A revolution is needed in the minds of the Indians. The revolution must be translated into praxis. Had all the warring factions of the Indian leadership spent less time arguing and torching newspapers and started reading what the chapters of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord) said about greed, lust, power, the divine and the demonic self - the Indian population in the long run would be better off.

There is so much wisdom in this timeless text of the Bhagavad Gita that it can also be used to engineer profound social changes based on the philosophy of self-help/participatory democracy in the Indian community. There is the potential of embracing the philosophy of 'kampongism' - one that prioritises pastoralism and participatory democracy over profit-driven and parochial demono-cracy.

Multicultural marhaenism

It is time for the other races to engage in serious and sincere gotong-royong to help the poorest of the poor amongst the Indians. It is time that we become possessed with a new spirit of multicultural marhaenism. The great Indonesian leader Ahmed Soekarno popularised the concept of marhaenism as an antidote to the ideological battle against materialism, colonialism, dependency and imperialism. The thought that the top 10 percent of the richest Malaysians are earning more than 20 times compared to the 90 percent of the population is terrifying. What has become of this nation that promised a just distribution of wealth at the onset of Independence?

I have a perspective to resolve the issue of the Indian community.

The Malays and the Chinese too need to help the Indians progress. Malay and Chinese multimillionaires and billionaires can set up grants to help the poor Indians succeed in all fields of human endeavour. The Malays can get MARA (Majlis Amanah Rakyat) to share ideas, expertise and technology to make Indian children succeed and learn entrepreneurship skills.

The same strategies of affirmative action given to the Malays must be extended to the Indians and designed for their children. The Chinese can help with sharing of good business strategies that will help the Indian community create opportunities for their children. Indian graduates can continue to help the children of the less fortunate ones see the importance of education so that we will not see high dropout rates. They can help initiate the establishment of good boarding schools ala Mara Junior Science College (MRSM) to help bright Indian children from poor families succeed. Indian millionaires and billionaires can help create as many philanthropic organisations as they can to offer financial help based on merit and needs. Malay and Chinese teachers can volunteer to be transferred to predominantly Indian schools in the estates in order to see for themselves how much help people of other races need.

Those 60,000 unemployed graduates need to be trained as teachers and sent to the most economically-depressed schools in order to learn what social justice means and how to help solve social problems irrespective of race, creed, colour and religious orientation. Education is a gentle and humane enterprise that ought to teach teachers to fight prejudice, intolerance and to educate each child as if the child is his/her own. Each child is a gift, a bundle of love and joy, a khalifatullah (vicegerent of God) and an opportunity for the teacher to develop his/her fullest potential. Poverty creates more children that will have less resources and more emotional stress. Poverty must be eradicated regardless of race, creed, ethnicity and national origin.

Not an Indian problem

It is not an Indian problem. It is problem of humanity. Poverty cuts across racial lines. It is now a class issue that requires class struggle. Poverty creates mass anger and can result in revolutions. How much longer must the Indians suffer? They have helped build this nation we now call Malaysia. Their work in the rubber plantations has helped Henry Ford expand his global empire and Proton to spin its wheels of fortune. We are shackled too much by greed. The conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is not about a 'battle'. It is about a jihad and a crusade against the injustices of man against man, man against nature and man against himself.

Stop fighting - think of what we are fighting for? But first, understand what the Gita, Sutras, Ramayana, Mahabharatta, Quran, Bible, etc. say about fighting over wealth and power. We'll all be humbled and will soon discover that all these will be left behind, in a world structured as maya and samsara (sengsara as the Malays would term it). Our common enemy is greed, materialism, militarism and corruption. That's our Mahabharata - our great war!

Our common enemy is our insatiable urge to acquire arta (harta in Malay, wealth in English). We have been building structures of oppression and setting up international advisory panels to help us plunder the natives in the name of development and Vision 2020. We do not understand enough the meaning of "trickle down" in capitalism, as we continue to create wealth that trickles up and finally flown outside of the country into bank accounts in Switzerland and Cayman Islands. We then claim that we are nationalists when those things we do are for our self-interest and greed at the expense of the rural, urban and middle class poor struggling to make ends meet and not knowing who has been making their lives chaotic.

Help the poor

A reminder to the wealthy and powerful. Help develop the poor – especially those from the Indian community. Detach yourself from your wealth, as the Bhagavad Gita, Sutras, Quran, Bible, Granth Sahib, etc, would ask you to. The wealth that you have acquired is not yours - they are those of the children of the poor and of the orphaned.

You must learn what 'detachment from worldly possessions' means in the context of a cutthroat economic system like ours. It is time to understand how our lives are connected in a complex web of power, ideology, technology and consciousness.

Help restructure the lives of the poor before they help restructure the lives of the rich.
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Category: Azly Rahman's Contribution
Our ‘rempitised’ education system

Azly Rahman

From ILLUMINATIONS, Malaysiakini
Oct 30, 2006

My definition: Rempitism (noun; also concept and ideology borrow from the neo-Malay word rempit) - a Malaysian phenomenon in which youth uses the public road system to break the speed limit with customised motorbikes in illegal, past-midnight drag-races that rob the restful sleep of peaceful citizens; a phenomena akin to a capitalist economy of a struggling showcasing Third Word nation such a Malaysia that hypermodernises beyond the ability of its people to cope with its sensationalised designs of ‘economic miracles’.

Both phenomena rest upon idiotic pride and arrogance that endanger a peaceful, ethical and sustainable future. Both present clear and present danger on the equally dangerous highway of globalisation. See also rempitise (adjective) and Mat Rempit (special noun).

A ‘rempitised’ economic and education system ‘rams’ human beings into different ‘pits’ (hence the term ‘rempit’) of the conveyer belt of the capitalist production system; creating what looks like a natural progression of meritocracy in education and social evolution. The foundation of this system is neo-colonialism, structural violence and the alienation of labour.

(Note: Like participants in the global rat race, Mat Rempit always want to finish first in the deadly race and be the first to do a wheelie for the world to see.)

Is our public education system failing? Is it producing more and more Mat Rempit, Anak Abu (anak-anak angkatan bawah usia), bohsia (bawah usia or the under-aged girls), bohjan (jantan bawah usia or under-aged males), gangsta rappers, hip-hoppers and youth alienated and put at-risk by our education system?

Are we creating class systems in education the way we have created varying types of classrooms that correspond to different classes in society? Why are we seeing the tuition industry becoming a billion-ringgit business, helping our children memorising more and more but understanding less and less of what they learn?

Do we have people in the education ministry well versed enough in analysing the phenomenon of our rempitised economy (speeding it up illegally) and how this is directly related to how we are ‘schooling’ our society?

Do we now have an entire system of higher education inheriting the children of our rempitised economy and contributing to the low quality of graduates - who cannot think critically and are always subjected to the whims and fancies of a totalitarian regime only interested in tightening the stranglehold on our universities?

British and American scholars like Paul Willis, Henry Levin, Peter McLaren and Martin Carnoy who studied the phenomena of schooling in capitalist societies observed the nature of the learning process in countries in which the rapid and unreflective industrialisation and post-industrialisation process have created one-dimensional citizens out of youth.

Schooling teaches these children to become good and obedient workers in a economic system that reduce the larger population into labour, while enriching the upper class into people and property-owners in a rempitised economy.

What’s lacking in teachers

Is our education ministry training teachers well in urban education and in the schooling of our at-risk youth? Do we actually know the root cause of rempitism and gangsterism in schools, and are we able to design better learning systems for those who are already marginalised and left behind by our rempitised economy?

I have a sense that the cases of gangsterism and bullying of teachers will continue to increase. More private schools will be built and Malaysians will lose confidence in their public schools. More private schools mean more divisions in society. The rich will produce better schools and the poor will be left behind in this rempitised system we have all created in the name of the New Economic Policy.

Teachers do not have the necessary concepts and skills to deal not only with the Millennial children (high-tech, high gadgetry, low attention span, low school-tolerance) but also the rempitised children who have low skills of reading, writing and computing.

Children left behind will be those who become Mat and Minah Rempit. They will be destructive to the classroom process and will translate their social anger into counter-productive and destructive activities. These are the ones who will be made criminals as a result of an uncaring education system that criminalises the human mind by placing unmotivated, uncreative and unprepared teachers to develop the untapped geniuses in our classrooms.

Should we rename the Mat and Minah Rempit as Mat Cemerlang (Excellent/Glorious Ones) as suggested by an Umno leader? Should we build a racing circuit for them to continue drag racing?

I do not think we should. I think those who propose such names and measures of glorification need radical counseling and education on the meaning of education. I think it shows a clear laco of understanding of the root of the problem. Wrong diagnosis of social ill.

 
Rehabilitation programme

I think we should beef up the highway police force and stop illegal drag racing, round up the Mat Rempit and send them for six-month rehabilitation in rempit camps near Perlis, guarded by graduates of the National Service. We should build a somewhat safe motor-cross clearings/zones and let them drag-race happily in these areas until they are exhausted.

In between these sessions we ought to give them a good and safe motorcycle education so that they will understand what it means to ride safely and not endanger the life of others. We can have the Biro Tata Negara write the module so that good indoctrination programmes will be used more on these rempitised and rempitising youth instead of those who do not need to be indoctrinated into any form of totalitarianism.

Peace-loving, rest-needing, night-sleeping citizens affected by the activities of rempitism will appreciate this radical programme of reconfiguring the mind of the rempitised youth.

 
How to de-rempitise our schools

In the meantime, how do we deal with the leadership of the public education system? We need to start by selecting only those who are well-versed in the entire spectrum of education.

We have ministers, educational experts, specialists and educational representatives who either have minimal classroom experience or none at all - let alone have much-needed knowledge in the history, theory, post-structurality and possibilities of education.

We place them in this ministry based on political considerations. They mess things up and show their inability to understand where our youth are heading, or how to design an education system good enough to reflect the dream we have - a dream of a just, equitable, environmentally sustainable, intellectual and ethical society.

We are more concerned with having our students and teachers pledge blind loyalty to the signs and symbols of power; one-dimensional thinking; and politically correct behaviour instead of developing, celebrating and further grooming good teachers who can radicalise the minds of the youth of tomorrow.

We force our university students to ceremoniously recite the Pledge of Loyalty, and round on those who protest against corruption and social injustice.

We do this against the backdrop of our speeded-up, hypermodernised economy - one we rempitised in the name of the New Economic Policy.

The question for us now is: how do we de-rempitise our society?

 

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Category: Azly Rahman's Contribution
Memories of the colony
Azly Rahman
Apr 9, 07 11:51am
En route from Amsterdam to London for the Oxford Roundtable, on board a Boeing 737 on March 25, my mind scanned memories of my childhood as the plane ascended.

Memories of my beloved grandfather who died more than 20 years ago took shape in my "mind's eye", as Jungian psychologists would say.

Like Irish poet James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" these images played out like a slide-show at intervals of several minutes.

My grandfather, a bicycle-riding government messenger for the royal court of Sir Sultan Ibrahim, taught us how to make kites. Born in the British Military Hospital in Alexandra Road in Singapore and growing up in Kampong Melayu Majidee in the late 1960s, my activities included kite-making.

Grandfather would patiently and meticulously guide me through the process: how to cut bamboo, make the frame, carefully refine its shape with special paper, and finally put designs on it. He was a man, though without much material wealth, imbued with good 'ol Johorean ethics which he passed down to his children and grandchildren.

He was a man who wept for hours beside his radio-gram the day a man named Tun Abdul Razak died. Perhaps the Bugis blood in Grandfather saw the connection between the leader and the commoner in a time when life was not yet complicated - a time when you did not hear of murder cases involving C4 explosives. This was a time when the Internet was not yet supreme.

‘Sir’ Sultan Ibrahim, like ‘Sir’ Sultan Abu Bakar, were Malay knights of the British Empire as much as Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney are English knights.

The Malay knights had their own army - Askar Timbalan Setia - maintained with the taxpayer's money. Sir Ibrahim, reportedly one of the richest individuals in the world, did not believe that the Malays could govern themselves.

Why did the British inscribe foreign titles onto the ruler of natives thousands of miles from the centre of the colonial empire? Perhaps this was a strategy of psychological colonialism that went well with material and physical colonialism.

But knighthoods as hegemonic tools are no longer necessary these days. Installations of McDonalds and Starbucks, British-style boarding schools, American-style MARA Junior Science Colleges, and 100-channel Astro TVs from satellites owned by Malaysian billionaires are what a nation need to create little ‘sirs’ and ‘madams’, mad-dogs and Englishmen, or little brown Yankees who pay taxes in an international and hidden system of ‘taxation without representation’ of the post-colonial empires.

A good system of hegemony - from physical to the psychological, from inscriptions to institutions - is what is needed to give the natives their daily "bread and circus".

Colonialism is pervasive and cancerous. It is an ideology that legitimises colonisation, slavery, dependency, and imperialism. Different epochs of colonialism style themselves differently.

Colonialism shapes the mind and consciousness and turns the body into mini-temples of colonialism - turning what the Algerian thinker and psychiatrist Albert Memmi called "the colonised into becoming like the coloniser???, in taste, language and disposition.

Colonialism as process

The process of turning the colonised into colonisers is a complex yet discernible one. This is how is goes.

First, the Empire must study the resource-rich area to be colonised. Second, use power and knowledge to catalogue all aspects of the lives of the natives. Next, study the local chieftains, sultans, kapitan, rajah or any leader of the natives. Study their strengths and weaknesses by going into their psyche and the system of social dominance they have created to sustain their power. Next, know what these local leaders want and how to create more ‘wants’.

Patrol their waters in a display of military might. If possible, as in the historical account of Kota Batu (Qota Batoo) in the mid 1700s, use the word "terrorists" to describe the pirates of the Malacca Sultanate, and crush them in order to create more inroads into the area to be colonised.

Use "economic terms" to describe the areas to be colonised. For example, ‘Spice Islands’ (The Nusantara) ‘Cape Horn’ (Africa), Gold Coast (Africa) Ivory Coast (Africa), Silicon Valley (California), Multimedia Super Corridor (Malaysia) and the latest ‘Iskandar Development Region’ (Johor) and perhaps the Johor Disneyland, should it come into being to complement Singapore's casinos.

When these areas are earmarked for conquest, make early contact with warring factions in order to make alliances. Divide and conquer is the strategy - then, now, and forever. Create maps that will define who will own what. In politics it is called gerrymandering. Refine the map as colonies are created. The natives, including the sultan, rajah, kapitan and village chiefs will not understand maps as these artifacts of power are of a different literacy genre. The natives are used to literacy of the Oral tradition. Maps are of Print Literacy.

Even the concept of space and time between the coloniser and the colonised are different. It depends on the concept of ‘the clock’, alien to the natives. Technology of ‘time-telling’ and ‘time-keeping’ varies among nations. ‘Chronos’ is a subjective concept. Whoever controls the more modern concept of ‘chronos’ controls the means of defining which native is the laziest. It all boils down to the mode of production and reproduction. All this must be done with one's mastery of the political philosophy of Machiavelli.

Finally, when the natives are colonised, turn them into images of the coloniser through indoctrination, education and the ideology of consumerism. Write history for them or, in the case of Africa, get Hollywood to create Tarzan movies to be shown to Africans and to tell them why they cannot govern themselves. Let them learn that only the diamond dealer Cecil Rhodes can perform miracles for Africa such as calling a nation ‘Rhodesia’.

Back to the story of my kite. I cannot remember any other design I would make except one - the Union Jack! It was one of the most glorious feelings to ‘fly’ my Union Jack. That beautiful blue and red striped flag of a nation thousands of miles from where I live - a nation that I came to be obsessed with in my study of the human condition years later.

Mental colonisation

In the story of the boy with the ‘British’ kite, lies the archeology of knowledge, the geneology of things and the nature of "psychological inscriptions" we all subjected to as "cultural beings constructed out of the invented reality of others".

Herein lies the hegemony of colonialism of all sorts - shackles that the human mind wishes to be liberated from. In my case, the feeling of wanting to constantly analyse myself as that "culturally constructed??? being is always there - especially when my senses interact with the "installations and institutions" that exist around me, those that are "inscribed" onto the landscape and forces humanity to become "objects of history".

What makes one a "culturally-constructed" being?

What makes us become the colonialist, the colonised; the imperialist, the imperialised; the racist, the humanist; the nationalist, the communist; the democrat, the technocrat; the dictator, the freedom fighter? All these perceptions are contingent upon the way we see ourselves as ‘beings’ being constructed by history as written by others.

This is an interesting notion of history - that the history of an epoch is the history of the ruling class. But the age of the bloggers might change this notion and prove Marx wrong. History marches on - from Pax Brittanica, Pax Nipponica and Pax Americana to Pax Barisan Nasionalisma and Pax Malaysian Bloggeria.

Bloggers have nothing to lose except their free accounts and passwords.

How we evolve out of these constructions and contradiction is a more interesting notion of history - that history is an enterprise that must undergo deconstruction.

How do we interrogate ourselves as active beings reduced to become objects of history by those who write history - the history of sirs and sultans, of colonisers and their consorts?
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