Being so hard on ourselves reflects the great fear many of us having of falling short. And one of the key obstacles all of us are going…You can touch someone’s life by empowering them, and in turn, you are actually empowering yourself. There couldn’t be a more perfect way…What if our definition of success included not only achievement, but also happiness, well-being and our contribution to society?
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad admitted today he might have made a mistake in giving guarantees for Internet freedom, which has been blamed for empowering and enabling opposition parties to win more seats in the 13th general election.
The former prime minister said if he had the opportunity to do so again he would reconsider his decision to grant absolute freedom for the Internet when setting up the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996.
“When I headed the MSC, I was asked by an American woman whether we would block the Internet.
“I told her no, we will be very free… but now I will think twice about it,” Dr Mahathir said at the closing of the CEO Forum 2013 at the Berjaya Times Square in Kuala Lumpur today.
Dr Mahathir said he did not expect the decision to cause such drastic changes that it can be misused by irresponsible parties and the public making provocative statements against each other.
“When given the freedom, we thought nothing much will change but once you give them freedom, they will usually abuse it.
“Now you see the public provoking each other, such statements have made us to distance from each other,” he added.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has previously promised not to block the Internet, and instead try to approach the people using social media.
He also said the government would not licence news portals or blogs as done by its southern neighbour Singapore, but would enforce existing laws to ensure national harmony.
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter microblogging network have been acknowledged as among the reasons for the “Arab Spring” in Egypt where the people had demanded their then president Hosni Mubarak to resign.
It is estimated that 29 per cent of Facebook account holders in Malaysia are aged between 25 and 34 years old.
Political analysts say Malaysians use the Internet to get information, prompting politicians to use Facebook and Twitter to reach out to voters rather than using the mainstream media which has seen shrinking newspaper circulation and dwindling television viewership over the years. – June 18, 2013
There’s been turmoil in the nursery of individual freedom ever since we had the audacity to question USA’s eye-spy games on people’s private affairs. Cyber nannies have been tut-tutting over signs of gross insubordination, while libertarians have reacted like a petulant teenager revolting against parental tabs on her goings and comings. The jury is split down the middle over the guilt or otherwise of Edward Snowden. He’s the dude who blew the whistle on the US (and UK) government’s mass surveillance programme, revealing how wide and deep intelligence services have cast their clandestine Net under the cover of ‘national security’. The response has ranged from shock to ‘Aw!’.
The red-faced American director of National Intelligence described it as ‘reckless disclosures and significant misimpressions in the media’. That’s an interesting new phrase which our own oft-embarrassed netas might jump upon. The leak business’s chief pissoir, Julian Assange, predictably hailed Snowden as a hero.
China crowed with this proof that it wasn’t the only Peeping Tom. In recent months, it had been finger-pointed by the ‘free world’ for gathering ‘geopolitically significant’ information on governments and critical businesses over the past five years. And the rest of us rolled our eyes and looked askance at such a fuss being made over privacy in a culture where the revealing of every teensy-weensy, disgusting detail has become a mass obsessive compulsive disorder.
The Snowden meltdown merely proves that in the globa lcharade y . But instead of a cynical shrug, why not turn this US surveillance scandal to our own good? We should turn it on its head and, as the older and wiser Gandhi had advised, turn the light inwards. Allow me to propose some reverse osmosis. In place of government misappropriating mass data to spy on the affairs of citizens, let us set up a programme to pry into official non-workings, and thus give the government community a taste of its own cyber enemas.
You would be foolish to say, ‘Oh but laws is an ass already do this for us.’ They don’t. Over millennia, has honed expertise in creating byzantine barriers to information, and knows exactly how to use such knowhow for how-not-to. Their political masters have learnt even faster. Just recently, poli-tical parties, cutting across all external and internal dividing lines, united against the common enemy, namely the public, and opposed the home minister’s move to strip off their protective purdah. Clearly, everyone in some position of power believes that transparency belongs only in the realm of diaphanous attire: it furthers one’s tenancy of Page 3, but leads to certain eviction from Page 1.
Unlike governments who mask their sly-spy actions in such lofty concerns as ‘national security’, government surveillance proposal aims at lowlier, local good. For example, at garbage collection of the physical kind, not the filth collected from closed encounters of the Mahatirism kind. It will issue data-mining licences on a first-proved, first-given basis. In the garbage case, it will encourage acclaimed algorithm aces to come up with a programme which can sift through mounds of municipal inefficiency and corruption with the speed of a virtual ragpicker, and pinpoint which corporator deserves to be recycled, and which sent to the dump without delay or electoral procedure.
This neta-babu surveillance programme has no pretentious justification such as the prevention of global terrorism. Its clear and present purpose is making our little worlds safe from the daily terrorism of official indifference, inefficiency and integrity (lack of). So, here’s to big data on the big dadas of power to end the powerlessness of lowly Citizen Jay.
Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak must have been desperate for a deal with opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
That can be inferred from the type of deal Najib offered Anwar – who declined to personally meet with the Malaysian PM – through intermediary Jusuf Kalla, the former Indonesian vice-president who is friends with both Najib and Anwar
Najib pressed an offer of reconciliation that apparently entailed a national unity government with a deputy prime minister’s role for Anwar and four ministerial posts for PKR leaders. Anwar was said to have rejected the offer.
According to sources, Najib had tried to meet with Anwar in Jakarta all of Saturday but Anwar studiously avoided the PM.
Whereas Najib had the edge over Anwar on how a pre-polls pact between the two had panned out, the latter regained the initiative in supposedly reconciliatory gambits initiated by Najib in Jakarta to which both leaders had repaired over the weekend.
Last Friday, Anwar had flown to Bali to meet Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who a week after the May 5 polls in Malaysia, had requested that the Pakatan leader visit Jakarta for discussions.
Anwar told Bambang (left) he could only meet with the Indonesian President after a pre-planned visit to the United States.
That visit over, Anwar flew to Bali last Friday where he met Bambang who gave vent to his views on the May 5 general election.
According to a source close to Anwar who met with the Pakatan leader on Monday, Bambang said he had expected a bit of fraud to taint Malaysia’s Election 2013, as in most such affairs throughout the world, but the extent of the cheating that took place in GE13 had appalled the Indonesian leader.
The source, a former senior PKR leader, said the Indonesian president told Anwar he was deeply disappointed by what had happened.
No meeting in Jakarta
After his discussions with Anwar that continued on Saturday, Bambang lent Anwar the use of his presidential jet to fly to Jakarta where Anwar was scheduled to meet former Indonesian VP Jusuf at the latter’s residence at 3pm the same day.
Najib was waiting to meet Anwar whom the Malaysian PM had expected to arrive in Jakarta from Bali through the Halim Perdana airport but the presidential jet landed at another airport in the Indonesian capital.
Unable to meet with Anwar at Halim Perdana, Najib bided his time with a round of golf with Jusuf (right) whose good offices the PM had sought in arranging a meeting with Anwar.
In conversation with Jusuf over golf and later at Jusuf’s home in Jakarta where Najib waited for Anwar to show up, the PKR source said Najib sold Jusuf on the idea of Anwar as a leader of impressive calibre.
When Anwar declined to show up at Jusuf’s residence for the scheduled meeting because he wanted to avoid Najib, the former Indonesian veep came to Anwar’s hotel in Jakarta to convey Najib’s proffer of posts for him and his PKR cohort.
But Anwar declined to bite the bait and flew out of Jakarta. At a PKR political bureau meeting last night, Anwar tabled Najib’s proffer for discussion, only to find his rejection of it affirmed by the party.
he Malaysian history written today is biased especially the details in the struggle for independence and the achievements of the past Malaysian leaders.
This fits UMNO just fine but still it was inherited from the British, thus our written history has not painted the British as bad either. Nothing much was written on the Japanese Occupation and the real hardships faced by our people during that time.
Our historians are more interested in just writing our history in the form of diaries with chronology of the events without any analysis or points for us to ponder. That is why we never learned from history. A proper history should be holistic and not selective.
History of Malaysia or the UMNO book of fairy tales?
But everything written on UMNO has been rosy in our history books; UMNO has achieved so many things and has never failed us! So actually, from the UMNO point of view, there really is no need to re-write our history as suggested by former Umno president and ex-premier Mahathir Mohamad.
UMNO is already whiter than white. But perhaps the Machiavellian Mahathir is thinking of blackening the part of our history that relates to other people and other parties that are non-UMNO related.
Of course, there is also the possibility that he wants to ‘improve’ the image of UMNO even further and put his party on a pedestal, with Mahathir – the founder of UMNO Baru – right at the top.
But that would be outrageous and outright repulsive for the majority of us; making it hard for the 51% who voted for the Opposition to swallow.
The new history would just be like a fairy tale fit to be read and memorised only by small children. But in a few years, these children will grow up and with the Internet, and all the information at their finger tips, they too will find the new history repulsive.
The bad must also be highlighted
However if Mahathir really wants our history to be re-written, then it should also relate all the failures and not just the successes of the various governments.
Our history must also record all the wrong doings of UMNO leaders and their scandals. It must also highlight the successes and failures of the New Economic Policy which has played a key role in moulding our history. The historians must write on how our natural resources have been plundered and our environment damaged. And please do not omit the May 13 racial riot instigated by UMNO!
Also, please do not forget to write on the performance of our security forces when several major incidents are still fresh in our minds. For example, how they blundered in defeating the Suluk insurgents in Sabah and how the police brutalized the very people whom they are supposed to protect. Write also about the increase in crimes. Please include also how our judiciary has lost its integrity.
Then, write on the incompetence, arrogance and lack of principles at the Election Commission too. Write on how the main stream media was used by UMNO as propaganda machines. The RM250mil NFC debacle and the Scorpene –Altantuya corruption-murder scandals are big enough to warrant separate and dedicated chapters too.
The younger generation must also be told that it was not just UMNO who struggled for independence and for that matter it was not just the Malays who sacrificed their blood and lives to secure our independence.
Any new findings, or more accurately said, other points of view on the heroic acts by non-UMNO members such as Mat Indera as pointed out by PAS deputy president Mat Sabu must also be highlighted. Who is UMNO to vehemently deny and negate the rights of others to a place in Malaysia’s history? It is a fact that at that time the Malayan Police were indeed under British control, loyal to the King of England and not our Agong.
Liar King!
Anyway go on Mahathir – change, re-write, fabricate, exaggerate, lie and what not, you won’t change anything.
The people are in the know and they know what has been going on all these while. Re-writing our history won’t change the historical facts even a little bit. Only UMNO cronies will get the benefits to undertake the re-writing efforts, publishing and selling the new history books.
See, you can re-write, lie and re-lie but you cannot change history!
