Bad, Bad Bersih in Dirty, Dirty Politics
Prevaricating Bersih
Bersih’s Haris Learns From PKR’s Tian Chua: How to Weasel
Bersih sent invitations to both sides of the political divide but, says Haris Ibrahim, “it’s not our fault if BN chooses to stay away. We say again and again, Bersih is not pro-Pakatan Rakyat. Neither are we anti-Barisan Nasional. We are pro-reform.” – Free Malaysia Today, June 24, 2011.
There is a word in the English to describe the kind of statements such as the one from Haris Ibrahim, above: equivocation. The word means the statement isn’t false - that is, the claim of non-partisanship - but it is also calculated to evade the truth which is, Bersih is in league with opposition forces to bring down the Barisan government. That objective is, of course, politically legitimate, lawful, and well within the rights of citizenry. So, why?
Why is Haris, a Bersih member, at pains to weasel away with his prevarication that the coalition is independent and neutral, especially since he has campaigned in person for the DAP in Sarawak alongside Teresa Kok? Bersih’s Wong Chin Huat is another. One of Bersih’s strongest backers the Catholic Church and the DAP are in cahoots, sometimes openly but most of the times surreptitiously.
With glaring clumsiness and inanity on top disingenuousness, Petra Kamarudin, Haris’s political mate in MCLM, tried to separate the personal from the political interests so as to explain away the presence of PAS leaders in Bersih. Petra: “(S)ome politicians or political leaders may be in BERSIH, even in the committee proper. But they should be in BERSIH in their individual capacities and not as their party representatives.” That piece of waffling was typical of Anglophiles like Elizabeth Wong who once held that her sexual promiscuity, in a sarong on a bamboo mat, was a private affair having nothing to do with her public office conduct as a politician. Like Eli, thus, Petra meant, absurdly, a person is divisible. In his case, he would be separable as a gweilo when he is in England and a Melayu when he is in Malaysia; both fakes.
The question again: Why do Bersih people continually employ doublespeak, meaning deceit, to advance its agenda?
That question has more than one answer.
One, Bersih is itself a political creature borne out of a western ideology and initiated with American taxpayers’ money (through the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy). With such beginnings, deceit becomes necessary; the more of it, the deeper Bersih wades into the muck of politics. This explains why Bersih, while making claims for more political transparency, is itself dodgy, without a complete and open accounting into its affairs. It can’t call a ‘rally’ – in actuality, a demonstration – without the contribution in demonstrators from Pakatan. At best a few hundred would show up. Petra Kamarudin labelling Bersih a Third Force was itself tacit admission into the latter’s political interest, which is basically an agglomeration of varied groups each with its own self-interests, Pakatan being on top of the pile. Those interests say the demand for ‘free and fair elections’ has to be for a purpose; for now that purpose serves Pakatan.
Two, like DAP employing Christianity and PAS Islam, Bersih gives moral cover to anti-Barisan politics which has been branded as “dirty’ and so to be cleaned away. Bersih’s insinuation therefore: we’re clean, they are dirty. This is the exact same morality with which Umno’s Hishammuddin Hussein once used to describe the presence of Teo Nie Ching in a mosque. He called it ‘dirty’, suggesting that a pork-eating non-Muslim, woman at that, would defile the sanctity of the mosque.
Haris Ibrahim chastising PKR’s Tian Chua for leading a charge against a phalanx of anti-riot FRU men (clip below) isn’t a clash of political values between Bersih and its political party backers. Rather, it reaffirms Bersih as a moral guardian of PKR’s ostensibly amoral political position, in western lingo, being liberal. This overlordship is necessary as a political method because Bersih, without enough people to show for the little influence they have, and to show it on the streets, finds morality to be a perfect substitute device in place of a mass following. This explains why Haris employs the term a ‘rakyat movement’ to describe Bersih which has next to no ‘rakyat’, that is, human muscle to speak of. Tian Chua could call out to men behind him to ‘charge!’ the police because those were his party men not Haris’s. If Haris instead of Chua had shouted “One, two, three: Charge!”, he’d find only Wong Chin Huat running right behind him.
Confirmed below: Bersih’s naughty boy Haris MacFirst worked with bad boy Chua.
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“Come on, it’s just yellow, for God’s sake. Don’t be afraid, claim your space. Do not allow the authorities to bully you,” says Haris, the FMT interview continued. (He’d forget what he had told the reporter only moments again: Bersih wasn’t anti-Barisan government.) Haris, adds FMT, expected more than 150,000, which would be more than twice the number in the first Bersih rally in 2007.
Haris’s MCLM couldn’t muster 500 heads if he gave away free yellow T-shirts, so Mat Sabu of PAS had to promised 100,000, PAS Selangor 30,000, and DAP 10,000(?). PKR? All the promises were for nothing. In the end, and to save everybody from embarrassment, Malaysiakini‘s Steven Gan reported 50,000 turned up, after which Haris, again forgetting the 150,000 he had himself said would show up, tried to made nonsense and irrelevance of the numbers, even his own, by saying this:
Never mind whether 6,000 people came out that day (as what the police says), or 20,000 people (as what the mainstream media says), or 50,000 people (as what some say), or 200,000 people (as what others say), or whatever. The numbers are not as important….
Whatever happened to 150,000? Poor Haris, the lawyer turned novice politician. But Bersih is the platform with which he quickly learned politics, and learned hard to prevaricate like the ‘bad boy Chua’ who, accused by Haris of instigating the police by charging them, tried this:
The video footage only showed a few people rushed out toward the open air…
Yes, of course, Tian Chua instigated them to ‘rush out’. He didn’t mean to ‘charge’ the police. Chua’s own party PKR went even further with its doublespeak: the man was ‘running away’ from the police.
This familiar sort of weasel words – the same kind one hears from Chan ‘Mommy’ Lilian, Uncle Lim Kit Siang, PKR’s Anwar ‘Liwat’ Ibrahim and the PAS mullahs – reveal why political morality, shared by all alike, is the same between Barisan and Pakatan. This means that when English Hat GE Lim et al shout ‘change!’ they meant changing only the government but never the ethical nor the philosophical foundations that in the first place had birthed the kind of government at present and onwards to Pakatan by extension.
Bersih’s equivocations, and Pakatan’s, are symptomatic of continuous deceits delivered in reciprocity to Umno’s. All are in the same moral camp.
Bersih is not, however, the contradiction of its namesake, Clean. Rather, it stands as a flagrant representation of a nefarious opposition coalition that’s full of religiosity but without virtue, of morality but without ethics, and of politics but no national programmes.
Consider this for example. One week after July 9, 2011, and still treating the Pakatan KL demonstration as news, Malaysiakini has this to report, citing the PAS man Mohamed Hanipa Maidin: “Even sex workers took leave to join Bersih 2.0.“
In the same page, the DAP was in near apology for a PAS decision to shut down all Kedah “entertainment outlets” for the Ramadhan ‘holy’ month. DAP, says the Pakatan mouthpiece Malaysiakini, would “persuade” its political ally PAS to drop the prohibition.
The DAP doesn’t say “fight” the PAS decision, one of the most frequently employed words with which its English Hat plucks from Pakatan’s political vocabulary. Fighting would imply that the DAP stood resolutely against any kind of encroachment into the lives of ordinary Chinese and Indians. But, the DAP could no longer afford that. This DAP sale of Chinese and Indian interests to PAS in exchange for the crown’s seat in Putrajaya isn’t for the first time – both parties being representative outgrowths of religious tyranny. Rather it’s their combination of moral deceptions that have the effect of continually drawing people, naive ones especially, onto their side.
Here are the deceptions stemming from the PAS decision and Hanipa’s statement delivered by Malaysiakini simultaneously. Between prostitution and ‘entertainment’, PAS prefers the first. It was their backhanded way of deriding Barisan as dirtier than prostitution. (Note the Malaysiakini term ‘sex worker’ when connecting these women to Bersih. On other occasions against Barisan, Steven Gan uses the word ‘prostitute’. Regardless, how does Hanipa know about those women? He is a regular Chow Kit client?)
Between the contradiction of prostitution and its religious politics, PAS prefers the first to get to the second; between Islamic morality and Chinese secularism, DAP prefers the first over the second which it knows is not the font of ultimate power. The DAP has got all the Chinese (and Indian) votes it could possibly get to, so Chinese interests, which aren’t Christian anyway, must now be set aside for the Muslim vote.
Pakatan heaping deceptions on deceptions then stirring them into a pot of moral and political contradictions didn’t begin with Bersih and won’t culminate with it. This tells why Kit Siang will need more yellow shirts for weekend wear and why Hannah ‘Mother of Sham’ Yeoh will have wash more yellow; and then there is this Joshie ‘trek’ talk of post-Bersih like he is going to climb Mt Zion, good Christian boy that he is.
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