Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 23 June 2014 issue)

Dear Kam,
There is so much noise going on in Malaysian politics at the moment. My question is, what?
Going Deaf

Let’s see if I can list the noise: Children have not been returned to their mothers, Bibles have not been returned to their rightful owners, apparently Malaysia is not a secular state, Isma has said too many things to list, Islamic enforcement departments have recently raided a wedding, a funeral and jailed 16 transgender people, and finally, MH370. Did I miss anything? Probably. I haven’t even mentioned the financial stories. It has been a crazy time recently and perhaps the most crazy thing is that none of the above involved Perkasa, but it has been on holiday in London. It has been so crazy recently that it’s threatening to get out of control.

Is Malaysian politics crazier and noisier than it has ever been before? We’ve always had agencies willing to stir things up. It used to be that Umno and Pas Youth said the darndest things, but they’ve gone fairly quiet. Isma has recently emerged as the new voice for incendiary language. I have to admit that I had not heard of Isma until this year, but now it grabs the headlines on an almost daily basis. But presumably Isma was Isma last year and the year before that, and yet it went largely unnoticed. How come it has the spotlight now? Is it being encouraged? Is it being facilitated by news-media outlets that want guaranteed eyeball-grabbing headlines? Maybe, just maybe, the noise is much the same as it has ever been and maybe words and actions are just being reported more? I think things are noisier, but we still need to seek the true balance for ourselves.

Where is the noise coming from? In Malaysia, we’re so used to viewing issues in racial and/or religious blocs. That’s understandable because the blocs are so big and obvious. How can you not be transfixed by issues of race, when 27% of the population is considered to be a “minority”? Most countries don’t have obvious racial blocs, so issues are usually broken down under different parameters like class/economics, age, gender and historical analogies. Whenever possible, I like to at least try to use these parameters, and push race further down the list. With that in mind, I think the noise is coming almost exclusively from middle-aged men from a lower middle-class background who wish to rise or at least maintain their status within a government structure. Oh, and they happen to be Malay. Could it be argued that what we’re witnessing is a crisis in the middle-aged Malay male world, and the rest of us (especially the poor and marginalised) are just caught in the crossfire?

Malay history is long and largely unwritten. It’s a constant flow of forces vying to move up and down a feudal, client-patron ladder. Movement is fluid and there’s always a good chance to move up the ladder to gain status, authority and respect. History would suggest that the same old forces always win in the end. The noise is noisy. It’s as if there’s a vacuum at the heart of Malaysian politics. But that’s just crazy talk.

Dear Kam,
I’ve been watching the World Cup and although I’m enjoying it, I do feel strange supporting countries I have no connection with. I’d love to be able to support Malaysia at the World Cup.
Anak Harimau

I saw a World Cup TV promo where a Malaysian football fan shouts, “I support England because they’re the best”. That’s just simply not true.

I was watching the World Cup when my wife asked me, “Is Germany any good?” This was as Germany was playing in its 100th World Cup match (the first team to do so) and as it was thrashing Portugal 4-0. Germany has won the World Cup three times and been finalists a further four times. It is very good, so I said, “No, it’s rubbish. England always beats it and usually in a penalty shoot-out.” I figured she didn’t need to know the awful truth and if just one person believes that England is a world-beater, then maybe it will be.

Germany is very good and I admire and respect it, even if I do not support it. I went to Germany a few years back and I couldn’t help studying Germans to see if I could find an explanation for their football team’s success. Being from Malaysia, I am very comfortable with making sweeping racial/national generalisations and I think I have found the answer. Germans are very rational people. I found this in the small things. If my German hosts were given a task, they would do it because not doing the task would be irrational. If I’m given a task, then I will immediately come up with creative ways to not do it and then even more creative excuses as to why it was not done. But that’s irrational and self-defeating.

If you’re rational, then winning is the only thing that makes sense. If you’re going to compete, then you must win, otherwise why are you bothering to compete at all? It would be irrational to allow for losing. Unlike English football, German football is well organised and the training of young players is quite centrally organised, so that many of the members of the German team have known each other since their pre-teen years. This way, each player knows what he has to do and instinctively knows what his teammate will do. Also, they owe their livelihoods to the German FA because they were trained by the German FA. It created an abundance of skilful, consistent and imaginative players. It creates teams. As the old German saying might possibly go, there’s no ich in Manschaftt. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why would you do things any other way?

As with many things, Malaysia is closer to the English way. Each English club has its own system and its own style of playing, jealously guarding its independence, competing for the best young players, training them in different styles and then making a profit by selling them. And the owner is all-powerful in his club. For English football, the priority is the club and English clubs have been much more successful in European club competitions than German ones, and that’s even before the big money started rolling into the English Premier League. If you ask most English fans of the big clubs if the club or the national team should be the priority, they will insist it be the club. There’s nothing wrong with that but you have to then accept that any international success would be a fluke.

We could learn a lot from the German system and its rationalism, but Malaysia and rationalism haven’t always seen eye to eye. Sadly, Malaysia has slipped down the FIFA rankings from 79th in 1993 to 153rd in 2014 and I just happen to think that the international competition is the most important thing. So, I’ll have to continue supporting my usual roster of teams: England, the Netherlands and Mexico, in that order. But I know that Germany can beat them all.

Reprinted with the kind permission of