Of politics and race 2...

UMNO and Utusan: stuck in their time-warped narrative of race

By Sim Kwang Yang

After March 8 last year, we began to hear the new political language of a new era that expresses inclusive, universal values such as justice for all, democracy and human rights. We even hear calls for the People's Dominance, as an alternative to Malay Dominance.

As Michel Foucault would tell you, any public discourse is a platform, in which various different narratives are engaged in a war for power to dominate the political conversation.

I truly do not know to what extent the new inclusive narrative of universal justice and people power has succeeded in capturing the public imagination. Malaysia is in a state of transition, and small battles and scuffles are fought on many fronts all over the country between the two warring elephants, the BN and the PR. The battlefields are very confusing.

The battles are waged in earnest, because during a time of transition in any evolving society, the old order of the status quo will want to cling to power at all costs. There is too much vested interest at stake.

If they are smart, the old order will go through a make-over and a re-engineering of their identity and purpose.

One such success is the Nationalist Party in Taiwan (Kuomintang KMT).

Taiwan politics is always painfully complicated and parochial. Briefly put, it was a one-party dictatorship under Chiang Kai Shek from 1949 until the 1970s. Then the KMT went through a series of reforms under President Chiang Ching Kuo and Lee Teng Hui, allowing more democratic practices, and opening up public spaces. In the presidential election in 2000, the party lost to the People's Progressive Party (PPP) candidate Chen Shui Bian.

Much happened in the KMT during this period. The long and short of it is that in 2005, Ma Ying-jeou, the popular mayor of Taipei, became the first elected president of KMT in the party's 93-year history.

Ma defeated the PPP candidate in 2008, and became the new Taiwan President, thereby regaining KMT's glory in the island republic. I followed that election, and watched Ma speaking the language of change, democracy, accountability, and good governance, the sort of new narrative of which the KMT of old would never dream.

What happened in Taiwan may not necessarily be duplicated in Malaysia. But it offers insight into the dynamics of how human societies can change.

When the congruence of historical forces arrives at any one time in any human society, the onus is upon the leader to manage this change to his advantage. In the case of Malaysia, the PM Najib Tun Razak has felt this pressure, and he has tried to manage change, to re-engineer UMNO to meet the needs for change, by announcing a series of "liberalisations" He has made a deliberate effort to win back the middle ground.

But UMNO has grown too large, too complex, and far too infested with warlords. It has become like a dinosaur, with a small head and a big body. Politically, it has become sluggish, and any movement from the old path is bound to be resisted from within.

Besides, the party ideologues and scribes could not create a new language to meet the new narrative of the PR coalition. When under attack by the new inclusive language from across the fence, their knee-jerk reaction was to revert back to their old language of race. Perhaps, they have been writing in that archaic language for so long that they actually believe in the artificial truth they had created long ago.

This is how I make sense of the very venomous communal narratives found in Utusan Malaysia in recent days.

First, they felt the weight of public opinion against UMNO in the Teoh Beng Hock tragedy, and tried to fight back by racialising this issue.

Then, after the anti-ISA mass rally on August 1, they felt the heat and tried to counter public anger by publishing views that described Anwar Ibrahim as a traitor to the race.

Then, they accused PAS of being a tool of the DAP, in mobilising their members for such a big demonstration of discontent against the Police and UMNO, again insinuating that PAS people are also traitors to their race.

We long-time watchers of Malaysian politics immediately recognise the racial tones emitted from the bowels of Utusan as the text-book utterances of UMNO in the past. It has indeed worked wonders for UMNO in many past general elections. Will it succeed this time?

I doubt it very much. Much of the river of time has flown under the bridge of lived experiences. The socio-political landscape of the Malays has changed beyond recognition. The Malay people today are not a monolithic faceless entity sharing the same racial ideology.

The have become much more diversified, complex and sophisticated than say, 20 or 30 years ago. They will not respond to the old UMNO call for racial unity that relies on the demonisation of the DAP. Urbanisation, education, the changing political reality, and the Internet have changed the old Malay landscape.

The Utusan scribes have not actually recognised this critical change in the Malay community. They are still stuck to the fossilised, ancient, archaic, antiquated, outdated, outmoded, and impotent tactic of turning everything into a race issue. They are preaching to the faithful; they will not gain any converts.

The Utusan is a propaganda instrument for UMNO. If trying to racialise all political issues is the only thing that they can do, against the onslaught of the PR's new, inclusive language of reform and national reconciliation, it means they are running of fresh ideas. By extension, UMNO is running out of fresh ideas.

In this fearsome war of narratives in our political discourse in our public sphere, any old idea that cannot evolve, and begin a process of metamorphosis to manage change to its advantage, has nowhere to go but down.

I am convinced that UMNO will not enjoy, in decades to come, the kind of rebirth and renaissance enjoyed by the KMT in Taiwan. They have been in their comfort zone of power and wealth for too long, to want to initiate any change to their communal thinking that might salvage the party in future general elections.

Source: http://hornbillunleashed.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/3024/