Your Mind’s Missing a Few Teeth
“The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time eight minutes and thrity-three seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
… That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night
I saw the phrase “Malay dominance” in the news again today. I wonder what that’s suppose to mean. Terms like supremacy and dominance, in relation to race, often leave me befuddled. This even more so when these terms are used to describe Malays. In what fields do they dominate? How are they supreme? Isn’t this what the German Aryans believed of their race? Though, I can think of quite a few notable Aryans but no Malays of note.
When you learn from a young age to believe a certain reality it’s difficult to come out of it. When you are habitually guided and instructed to remove certain teeth from your machinery of reasoning, you stop to miss them. This is why it is so difficult to reason with a totalitarian mind. They don’t see the gaps in their reasoning.
My grandparents remember May 13. They also remember WWII. They learnt from experience to be afraid of people who are different. My generation is not afraid. We believe that we live in more civilized times. However, the sad truth of the matter is that there are many people out there who still believe as my grandparents do. The difference between these people and my grandparents is that while my grandparents buy bigger locks for the doors and stock up on canned food, these people buy bigger machetes and stock up on kerosene for Molotov cocktails.
To these people, I ask them to consider a few facts:
1. There have been Chinese settlements in Malaya since the early part of the 15th century. Even the Portuguese only came a century later.
2. The term Malay Archipelago was coined by the whites to identify the region.
3. The real aborigines (Orang Asli) do not consider themselves Malay. They have their own language and culture.
4. The Malay language was derived from Sanskrit, a classical language of India and the language used in Hindu and Buddhist liturgy.
5. It was an Indian that founded the Malacca Sultanate.
6. Mansur Shah (fourth Sultan of Malacca) took a Chinese bride.
7. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the bastion of Malay language and culture has seen fit to include words such as “I” and “you” into the DBP’s Malay language dictionary.
And one opinion:
1. The fact that the constitution of the country has to define what a Malay is should be terribly embarrassing to the whole race, if you can call it one.
