Malaysia's Unprecedented GE15: Old Conundrums Face A New & Wilder Pendulum

Malaysians are facing a new political landscape that can be viewed either positively or negatively depending on your political affiliation and biases. 

First, let's summarise the facts of the election results:

1. Barisan Nasional was the worst loser with a record low of 30 parliamentary seats won (down from 79 seats in GE14). This is good news as it means that many Malay supporters have abandoned the traditional Malay UMNO party due to the corruption scandals plaguing its former Prime Minister and several other leaders. 

2. The rise of PAS as a party to be recognised as a new force in Malaysia. PAS won a record 49 seats (vs 18 seats in GE14) for its Malay-dominated coalition Perikatan Nasional (PN), which had the second highest seats of 73. The extreme ideology of PAS led by Hadi Awang poses a great threat to the multi-racial and multi-faith structure of Malaysia of which 36.5% are non-Muslims. 

3. The strongest winner in terms of parliamentary seats is the multi-ethnic coalition Pakatan Harapan (PH) which won 82 seats (down from 113 seats in GE14) and the highest popular vote of 39.7%. While the Malay component party PKR led by a revitalised Anwar Ibrahim did win 31 seats, the overall performance was driven by its component party DAP with a contribution of 40 seats (close to half of the seats won by PH). 

4. The Sarawak party coalition called Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) was apparently the king maker in any tight election outcome between PH and PN. GPS was formed from four former Barisan Nasional (BN) component parties after BN's defeat in GE14.

5. The polarisation of the country in terms of ethnic and religious affiliation with non-Malays and non-Muslims on one side and Malays and Muslims on the other side. Granted there is some overlap as PH has support from Muslims and non-Muslims.

Though I am not a political expert on Malaysian politics, I can identify two important trends arising from the voters choices. 

First, as noted earlier, there is a major rejection of corruption-tainted parties, namely UMNO which could not reform itself despite having two sub-groups known as the court-case Kleptocrats (facing court trials) and the clean image UMNO leaders (e.g. Mat Hassan). 

This is, by and large, a very positive development for a country like Malaysia because corruptible leaders not only leak out resources from the country, they tarnish the country's image in the eyes of foreign investors and Multinational companies. Worse still, these leaders may be influenced by the monetary power of the two geopolitical giants China and the U.S..

The second trend is the shift of the Malay voters towards Islamic conservatism and radicalism, which is represented by the huge rise in the votes for PAS. 

While at this time (7pm 22nd November) the King has yet to decide who will be the Prime Minister and who receives the highest confidence among the Members of Parliament, the dilemma for the country is that a Malay-centric government with powerful Islamic lobbyists (67% or 49 out of 73 seats won by PN) will cause huge civil unhappiness and strife in our multi-ethnic country. 

Despite any guarantees and assurances from the moderate wing of PN, the prospect of Shariah laws which are already enforced in the PAS-controlled states (Kelantan, Trengganu) and likely in PN's newly won Kedah state will cast a long shadow over the future expectations of non-Muslims' life in Malaysia.

And many Malaysians (including the moderate Muslims), who have already migrated out to greener pastures, are likely to increase the brain drain if the polarisation of Malaysia worsens.

The Inevitable Logic of The Political Pendulum

In my personal view, Malaysia has huge economic and geopolitical potential given its resources and its demographic profile in ASEAN. 

I am optimistic that, despite the current trends and dangers of ideological divisions, Malaysia will turn out well. 

Already, the widespread rejection of corrupt leaders has been confirmed by the GE15 results. The rejection of corruption is consistent with the value systems of all religious faiths. 

My optimism is based on the foolishness of the Islamic leadership of the outspoken PAS leader Hadi Awang, who once falsely claimed that non-Muslims were the root cause of corruption. 

Just as a pendulum that has swung to its extreme end, it will invariably swing back in the opposite direction. So the harder the swing force, the more likely will the pendulum swing back with equal force. 

With the Internet and a fairly healthy free press, Malaysians are getting more intellectually and spiritually mature. They will learn from past and current mistakes. Likewise, they will reject leaders who promise a castle of gold in their ideological visions for the country but, instead deliver a barrel of sand. 

So whatever the outcomes of the King's decision on the Prime Minister and the permutation of political coalitions (be it unity or minority government), the final destiny of this beautiful country filled with good-hearted, peaceful citizens will be much greater and nobler than it ever was in the past.

Postscript: As at 24th November, there is a highly likely outcome of a unity government forged between PH and BN. 

With Anwar Ibrahim as Prime Minister and a deputy PM from UMNO (a visibly clean candidate untainted by corruption charges), the unity government's key mission is to save and by, implication, heal the Malaysian economy amidts the global economic headwinds of rising inflation and stagnant growth.

In the next five years, this unity government can either evolve into two different outcomes: first, it can become a formidable inclusive coalition that recognises the rights of the minority races while accepting the privileges of the Bumiputeras. 

(And by inclusive, the PH-BN government will need to cater to the expectations of Islamic conservatives in its policies in order to weaken the radical elements of PAS in the opposition camp.)

The second outcome is the unity government remains a temporary makeshift partnership between two coalitions that continue to cultivate the 6 decades-old conundrum of race-based politics. 

Three Tigers

In conclusion, what is encouraging is that, this unity government, despite its internal flaws and political incompatibilities, will be able to defang the two giant tigers threatening Malaysia's future well-being: corruption and race-based partisan politics.

The third tiger, namely ideological and religious extremism, has yet to be defanged. 

As I said, this third tiger looks like a powerful and dangerous tiger for the non-Muslims but it will eventually be exposed as a destructive menace to all Malaysians. 

The timing of the rise and fall of this new tiger is in God's hands. May God bless all Malaysians and the King in his wisdom in this hour of change.

The Conundrum of A Phony, Dangerous War

The shock, anger and utter ruthlessness of the Russian-Ukraine war that erupted on 24 February 2022 viewed from a totally human, non-political perspective has simmered into our psyche like a conundrum that we have to learn to live with for the past half year.

The war is a conundrum on 3 levels: 

(1) NATO and the Russian bear: the war could have been avoided or de-escalated months before it erupted at the Ukraine-Russia border. This was a matter of strategic negotiation which the American and European leaders should have done smartly given that their economies have just recovered from a global pandemic-related recession. 

Instead, the Americans decided to escalate the situation by insisting on Ukraine's sovereign right to join NATO (which, of course, is their right as with any nation, but remember, NATO is a military alliance).

(2) Historian experts are divided while media coverage is mostly one-sided: The second conundrum is that historians are still debating on who is ultimately responsible for the conflict. I reckon the pro-NATO to pro-Russia ratio is 3-to-1 while the media's bias is more extreme at 5-to-1. 

So on the one hand, you have historians like Mearsheimer who blames NATO and the US for triggering the war based on his theory of great powers. On the other hand, economic historians like Adam Tooze are saying that Putin has to be defeated by a NATO-aided Ukraine but he admits he is unsure at what cost. 

The implicit rationale for this view is that the cost of an expansionist Russia with Tsarist ambitions is way more costly than the cost of a European war against Russia. 

To me, this thinking just doesnt make any sense when these historians cant envision a probable outcome and the cost of reaching it. Most supporters of NATO's defense aid to Ukraine repeat the warning that Europe has to learn the lesson of appeasement to Hitler when he wanted to annex the Sudentenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938.

(3) The economic costs for the world do not justify any ideological or geopolitical gains: Countries ranging from the more energy self-sufficient America to the hyperinflated poorer countries like Sri Lanka and Turkey have been impacted by this war with prices of oil, natural gas, wheat, edible oils, barley surging between 20%-100% for the year to date.

The direct cost of this proxy war between America and Russia may be relatively paltry for American taxpayers. The US$40 billion of American aid to Ukraine represents only 0.6% of U.S. fiscal spending but it is as much as 20% of Ukraine's GDP).  

For the rest of the world, this war between two major commodity producing nations is immensely costly as it is has unleashed historic levels of global inflation. A  severe world recession looms ahead for the second time since 2020.

To the man-in-the-street like us who are paying higher prices for food and energy for our families, why should we care who are the Ukrainians or what conflict they are engaged in for that matter? 

I have a strong conviction that this war with the risk of escalating into World War 3, poses a great danger to all. We are dealing with a hidden enemy bent on creating a new world order after wrecking havoc on the current world order. 

And the real enemy is neither Putin nor Biden, though these are unsavory characters themselves. Rather, it is a core group of powerful global players whose agenda is power, control and illegitimate wealth. 

In other words, the existential threat we are facing is both economic and psychological. For months, we were  bombarded with the narrative that liberal democracies are under threat and are therefore morally obliged to defend Ukraine against a communist tyrant.

The narrative looks convincing until we see that Ukraine politics and elections have been subject to American and European interventions for years. What NATO has done since its Budapest declaration in 2008 is akin to breeding tigers at the border of a bear’s habitat.

But the media isn’t reporting this war and its historical evolution with any semblance of independence. It is as if there is an unspoken agenda to shape how we perceive global events. We are in an information war with media handlers seeking to mould our perceptions and desentisize us to present and future crises. 

So to answer the question of how to resolve this conundrum, we have to ask ourselves how do we see and hear the daily news that comes to us from across the world.

If we take the prophetic view that the global events of the past 3 years: the pandemic, the shut-down-enforced recession, the excessive money transfers and the proxy war against Putin are events that are engineered by a few powerful men and women over the years, then the conundrum is easier to understand as we gain a whole new perspective.

Far from being a conspiracy theorist (an overused term), I have read so many analyses that may seem rational and accurate but fails to resonate with my intuition about human nature in this crisis. 

However, there is one source material that is totally out-of-the-box for intellectuals, and that is the prophetic.

Whether we believe in prophetic revelations from God or any oracle, it is useful to see through the eyes of someone like Veronika West who wrote this in her blog, His Kingdom Prophecy on March 8, 2022:

“Ukraine, Russia, WW3 and Media Deception"

“A Prophetic Riddle received on the USA date: 3/6/22…. and the UK date: 6/3/22.

“Watch and Listen! Tick, tock, tick, tock, go the hands of the clock.

Look to Me! Look to Me! I say, look to Me, for they shall say, “Surely its the beginning of World War 3!”

But I say, open your eyes and see, for the one they call Zelensky, he is no hero and no champion of The Truth.

For he’s nothing more than a political pawn on a globalist chess board and puppet on a string — a traitor to his country and a Judas to his friends. He thinks he has the world hoodwinked to his deceitful and demonic deeds.

But watch! For in the midst of a great shaking, I shall expose and uncover their secret deals and diabolical plans, and I shall strip them naked for the world to see — lights, camera, action — and the curtain will lift and the Puppet Master’s plans will suddenly have to move and shift.

And oh! How they will scatter like cockroaches in the dark. “It’s Putin! It’s Putin!” they all will shout, “He’s to blame for the suffering and the beginning of this Third World War fight!”

But nay I say, “This has been strategically and carefully planned by high ranking politicians hidden in plain sight, for the hungry Bear has now been provoked, by the corrupt hands of those who dared to prod and to poke.

And so watch, as the political dominoes begin to fall, as one by one, they will come into the light, and like a mad feeding frenzy. the media will shout, “This is surely all truth and not false or fake!”

But watch! For just like the boy who again cried wolf (ref), so gone are the days of believing what they say and walking in blind faith, as the eyes of all Nations finally receive clear sight.

And with a loud roar, they will rise from a very deep sleep, and begin to push back the global elites, and so with WW3 now knocking on the Door, will NATO Nations open up for more?

And like a wild cat let loose from a sack, once the Door is wide open — there is no going back!

For greater turmoil and trouble will certainly ensue, as Nations rise against Nations with an appetite for murder and more bloodshed.

So, watch and pray and do not say, “That this is that…,” for many things are not as they seem. So, listen and pay attention and you will learn, to look and to learn.

For I AM The Answer to all that you need. So, fear not My Beloved when they talk of a World War Three, for there is a place of safe Refuge and Peace, which can only be found by resting in Me!””

Having read this, I am inclined to recall the title of Shakespeare's play All's well that ends well. It is my conviction and prayer that the nefarious players who lead the nations vying for a place in a new world order will be defeated this time round. And a World War will be averted with the intervention of the swift hand of God. 

At our front door, we are visited by two different strangers: one is the war-mongering wolf and the other is a peaceful shepherd who would save his single lost sheep at all costs. Which one will we, the world, invite into our homes?

Prayer for Fruitfulness & Cursing Every Fig Leaf of Barrenness

Lord Jesus, I ask You to remove every obstacle that is holding back the fruitfulness of the Holy Spirit in me. I decree and declare that I will be fruitful in season and out of season.

Lord, help me to be fruitful for You are the One who planted me in Your Kingdom. You are the One who is responsible for my fruitfulness. 

I surrender my life, my thoughts, my work to Your pruning that I may produce fruit. All glory to You. 

For every branch that is pruned will produce more fruit. Help me to sacrifice myself, my time, my resources and my finances that I will bring more fruit in those areas.

I declare that every hindrance or distraction or lie that keeps my mind, soul, and life to be shriveled and be gone just as You Lord cursed the fig tree that had leaves but bore no fruit. 

I declare that the source of this fruit is the river of Your Holy Spirit that is within me.

In the name of Jesus, I curse every fruitless tree – disappointments, doubts, fears, insecurities, and anything that is not bearing fruit. 

I decree, 'Be cast into the sea!' Whatever I declare in prayer with faith, I will receive. In Jesus’s mighty name. Amen.

 

 

Europe's Sense of Time Lost At the Edge of War

European cities have always fascinated me not so much for their art, music or literature though these are impressive testament to the heights of civilised culture. Not even the intellectual vivacity of the Europeans, who can be as pedantic and pretentious as any other urban people around the world. 

    No. The one thing that resounded in my soul is the echo of a cathedral, an empty chamber hall, a promenade of columns. Europe in the early 1970s and 1980s had this strange air of melancholy and spiritual depth (or death, if you will). Yet, there was nothing clearly spiritual about modern European art and literature. Therein lies the paradox (like the rich harvest of wheat fields of Van Gogh paintings versus the empty streets of De Chirico’s works). 

It was as if God himself or a Messiah had visited the European cities, stayed for a few nights as an anonymous stranger and then left to never return. Perhaps, He decided it was better to leave a spiritual vacuum in Europe with all their existential angst and self-centered, post-modernist philosophies. That whisper of a spiritual longing, traumatized by centuries of intra-European wars, may one day turn into a loud cry of desperation.

I know. As an ethnic Chinese student, I stayed in Europe for a decade split between the 1970s and 1980s: mostly London and Paris, cities of many beautiful streets, squares, and palaces. What the Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, said about buildings as the mirror of life—“the presence of the past, the spirit of a place”—is ironically true of Europe.[1] The vast spaces and confluence of Baroque and iconic buildings stand as silent witnesses to the tragic experience of Europeans in the horrendous two world wars of the twentieth century.

And if one is quietly alert, you can almost hear something like an echo of an inner longing for a time lost, un temps perdu. The most evocative description of that echo resonates in some of the classical music of the Baroque period. Listening to Bach/Marcello’s Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor (second movement) in its various forms (piano, violin, guitar), one can grasp the weight of lost longing.

A New Crisis at Europe’s Doorstep

That cry for a long-lost teacher, a spiritual guide, a Renaissance man or woman has never been more desperate in times of crises such as the present war rumblings in Ukraine. For the first time since the Second World War ended in 1945, a major European nation has been attacked and invaded by a foreign superpower. The reverberations of the new war are being felt across the world especially in Southeast Asia where I reside. Economically, rising fuel and food prices had already spiked up before the war and will continue to hit our living costs.

But geopolitically, the Russian invasion of a sovereign country may be a dark harbinger of what might soon happen to Taiwan and to the stability of Southeast Asian countries (at the outset, only two members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Singapore and Indonesia, condemned the Russian invasion but as the conflict intensified, a total of eight Asean member states voted for a UN resolution condemning it). But there is more than meets the eye.

On the one hand, the globalist Great Reset elite of Europe in alliance with some of their American peers, are planning a new world order, politically, economically, and militarily. That new world order is modeled after the European Union, a concept that is politically flawed as it subsumes the sovereignty of nations under its umbrella to the laws of the EU state. (Incidentally, the insight into this flaw was revealed to me in a conversation with the theoretical founder of the Euro, the late Canadian economist Robert Mundell, who said: “The currency union would work perfectly on the assumption of free labor mobility.”[2] In simple terms, it assumes a jobless Spanish factory worker can move to Germany to find a similar job there. The cultural and social differences are simply too stark for this ideal state to ever be achieved.)

On the other hand, Russia’s nationalist President Vladimir Putin is clearly looking to achieve his life-long goal to rebuild the Soviet empire while China’s president-for-life is also eyeing Taiwan. The Cold War between the liberal Western democracies and the autocratic communist regimes in the East never ended in December 1991. It simply went into hibernation and infiltrated American universities and Congress through ideological subversion, a process clearly described by former KGB propaganda agent Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970.[3]

How to resolve the war in Ukraine? Ukraine, on its own, a nation with a surprisingly small GDP of US$165 billion despite its vast natural resources, does not matter as much to the Western European nations as it does strategically to Putin. As a tactical move to de-escalate tensions between Russia and Ukraine at its borders, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation could just as well have told Putin that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO for the “time being” in lieu of rescinding the NATO 2008 Bucharest declaration which promised to accept Ukraine and Georgia into the military alliance. (We can recall what happened shortly after that declaration: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008). But strangely, this de-escalating chess move was never put on the table of diplomatic negotiations before the invasion on February 24, 2022. Now, the world and most acutely the Ukrainians are suffering for that tactical mistake, which may have been intentionally made for reasons only the globalist elite may know.

If European politicians and the stumbling Biden administration have made a Faustian bargain to trade a pragmatic peace for an ideological clash of civilizations, then there is nothing we, citizens of the world, can do but pray and speak out against the plans of the warmongers. By all accounts, Russia’s Putin is clearly the aggressor, and we shall see if he has the wisdom to just de-weaponize Ukraine as he claims, and hopefully leave the ravaged country to rebuild itself on its own prerogative as a neutral sovereign state.

Post-war restoration is perhaps a distant future. Yet, one can’t help but notice  the swift change in mainstream media’s focus from the Covid-19 variant to the war. Just when the black swan of the pandemic was near its end, another black swan swept into view like a Greek tragedy. This is why to keep our hearts and minds from the media’ gloom and doom lens, a quiet meditation on ancient art, faith and silent spaces is a refreshing balm to the soul. One recalls that amazing scene in the movie The English Patient, where the war-weary nurse Hanna is pulled up in a rope by her friend Kirpal Singh to admire with a torch the frescoed murals of an Italian cathedral; it is those quiet moments of joy that restores our sanity.

The nurse Hana in the film, The English Patient. https://sikhchic.com/books/another_look_at_the_english_patient_the_book_the_film

While the echo chambers of Europe resonate with rumors of war and confusion, the cry for wisdom from God or Providence is what Europeans need to listen to. The key is not for each man and woman to ask the "how" and the "why" in this crisis, but to ask what has really ailed the nations of Europe for decades, and to wake up to the voice they have been listening to all this while: the voice of the wolf or the voice of the shepherd?

[1] I.M.  Pei, “For Changing the World, One Building at a Time, Lifetime Achievement Award,” Asia Society, https://asiasociety.org/asia-game-changers/im-pei.

[2] Author interview with Robert Mundell, “An Asian Common Currency: The Case For and Against,” Smart Investor, September 2000.

[3] Ankit Kumar, “Use of Deception in Warfare: Case of Russia,” Centre for Land Warfare Studies, July 10, 2019, https://www.claws.in/use-of-deception-in-warfare-case-of-russia/.

This article was first published in Rising Asia Journal (May-August 2022 issue)  

https://www.rajraf.org/10282/uploads/article/1055/1_Long_Shih_Rome_OK.pdf