The Undoing of Mahathir by Mahathir

By Din Merican

Dr Mahathir Mohamad has done it again –– as it is more usual these days, he shot himself in the foot. This time he has not just done it in the pages of a local newspaper, by way of written response to a senior lawyer’s strictures; he has gone and done it on the air for a global audience.

On BBC’s Hardtalk no less, a programme its famously combative former host Tim Sebastian had helped make celluloid’s equivalent of boxing’s Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier match-up. Nothing matches watching the tension of a ravening questioner having his interviewee, especially one who holds high office, in his crosshairs; and at times, nothing like seeing the cornered subject hit his inquisitor for a six.

Hence the programme’s enduring appeal, even though feisty Sebastian is no longer its host. Dr Mahathir must have been invited to appear during his tenure as PM. Only Syed Hamid Albar, then Foreign Minister, alone from Dr Mahathir’s cabinet, was brave enough to joust with Sebastian on Hardtalk. Perhaps Dr Mahathir knew that his penchant for scatter shot criticisms is easier pulled off when you are no longer saddled with the responsibility of facing up to their consequences.

You did not need have to hear Dr Mahathir’s rant on Hardtalk to be convinced that our octogenarian just will not ride gently into the sunset. A quiet retirement was never on the cards, despite the former Prime Minister’s initial disavowal of interest to take part in national affairs and gravitation to the ethereal stature reserved in Malaysia for former prime ministers.

Dr Mahathir is going to rage and rant against the newly begun internment of his legacy as the longest serving Prime Minister of our country. He would do that not with substantive arguments as to why his legacy should be kept alive but by pouring diversionary drivel on his pet subjects–– the West, democracy, Zionists — a favoured tactic whenever his back is against the wall.

Dr Mahathir’s back is up against it. You can tell not just from the targets he trundles out to shoot at but from his tendency to talk like a Sten gun, with syntax jangled and meaning garbled. That usually means he is under duress. It is the familiar situation when speech loses its traction on thought. To someone like the proud Dr Mahathir, that disconnect is scarcely cause for pause.

He crassly soldiers on. Small wonder he goes to such lengths to denounce the West. He is the spiteful image of pre-Enlightenment European despots: when a harvest fails or some other calamity befalls the populace, their predictable response was – “Off with the Jews”. A pogrom would then be unleashed.

When the currency and stock market crisis hit East Asia in mid-1997, Dr M’s response was to blame Jewish currency speculator George Soros. When Anwar Ibrahim helped guide disgruntled voters towards a denial of a two-third majority for Barisan Nasional in the Federal Parliament in the 2008 Election, Dr Mahathir segued from chiding Anwar for daydreaming that he could become Prime Minister of Malaysia to chastisement of his nemesis for alleged suitability to become Prime Minister of Israel.

For all his laments about the tendency of Muslims to believe slavishly what they are told by a benighted ulamak, Dr Mahathir is an unabashed subscriber to Zionist conspiracy theories which hold that Jews are adept at using non-Jews to achieve their nefarious designs.

Dr Mahathir’s weakness for non-sequiturs is transparent when it comes to the issue of democracy. He is only in favour of it when it confirms his opinions and his hold on power. Otherwise it is a Western corruption designed to weaken the grip of enlightened authoritarians, like himself, on their grateful wards. There is no way that Dr Mahathir would cite democracy favourably for its suitability in removing a tyrant like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, incidentally a valued friend of Dr Mahathir’s.

The truth-quotient in Dr Mahathir’s claim on Hardtalk that Anglo-Saxon Europeans are historic purveyors of war, slavery and the Holocaust is comparable to that in the claim that in Malaysia, rampant corruption, a weakened Police Force and a lumbering and corrupt civil service are the effects of Barisan Nasional’s misbegotten rule.

A more discriminating interlocutor would hold that when Plato observed that “only the dead have seen the end of war,” he was adverting to a universal, not specifically Anglo-Saxon, reality; that the scourge of slavery flourished just as much because there were willing Anglo-Saxon buyers of human chattel as there were ready West African sellers; and that the Holocaust’s roots owed to the Superman theory of the German thinker Nietzsche that was given a perverse twist by the demented Adolf Hitler.

A Malaysian critic with a comparable feel for nuances may hold that the pervasive corruption of recent times, the dysfunctional Police Force and an ineffectual civil service were the corrosive effects of Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s prolonged tenancy of the office of UMNO president, Malaysia’s Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister than it was specifically due to Barisan Nasional misdeeds, though a degree of negligence is attributable to the latter for the maladies besetting the country.

The legacy of Dr Mahathir is under grave threat in Malaysia by the move to rescue Salleh Abas from judicial disgrace, the attempt to create a judicial commission to select and promote judges, and the momentum towards giving the Anti-Corruption Agency an independent existence. These measures are a threat to Dr Mahathir’s legacy, built on brazen actions and justified on spurious grounds.

A leader of Nietzsche’s worldview and Machiavellian strategy is discovering that such a philosophy allied to the statecraft recommended by the author of The Prince is serviceable while power is retained in one’s hands. But when the centre of political gravity shifts out of one’s ambit of control, even genuine achievements – like building the North South Highway during a time of recession, and embracing the IT world — can turn hazy.

In a time when his legacy is beginning to come apart at the seams, it’s best for Dr Mahathir to go gently into the night, to resist the temptation to rage against inevitable shifts in critical fashion, and instead stake all on preserving his few genuine achievements that should resist time’s passage and wear well in posterity’s judgement.