Making America ‘Third World’?

A NEW government leader is elected and proceeds to do the following:

He fires everybody who he has ever imagined said anything negative about him. Or who were appointed by his predecessors despite their credentials.

He appoints all sorts of people who have praised him to high heaven to very important posts.

He demands the judiciary drop charges against corrupt people.

He uses race and religion against people he doesn’t like, especially if they didn’t vote for him.

He bans books.

It might sound like people we know but for once, it’s not us. As I follow the international news, I am both amused and bemused by how the United States is rapidly becoming a “Third World” country by doing things that sound so familiar to us.

Okay, it’s not completely alike. We do deport illegal migrants but (thus far) we are not putting them in ankle chains and making gleeful videos about them. We do try to be friendly with all sorts of dubious leaders, but we try not to blame countries for being invaded by others. That’s a bit like blaming rape victims for being raped, right? Oh wait, sometimes we do that too.

We may not be rabidly against diversity but some of us think it’s nationally important to complain that public signage should not have more than one language. And we still think people should apologise for the way their guests dress.

Of course, we don’t really like protests either, especially not by students or some NGOs.

We’d like to control what entertainment our young people get but like young people everywhere, they know how to get round that anyway.

We already have a King, so we don’t need to behave like one by issuing three hundred orders a day.

As much as we complain about bureaucracy, we do recognise that civil servants are necessary. We’re not about to fire a whole lot of them overnight indiscriminately including letting go of those with any expertise at all. Besides, they are a rather big group of voters.

We have a great suspicion of young people so we’re not about to let some fresh-faced punks have so much power that they can be disrespectful to older people and hand them their dismissal letters.

We are somewhat reluctantly dependent on our women so if they shout about their rights, we do try and concede some to them. For example, they don’t want to be beaten by their partners or be not allowed to have top jobs or be not able to pass their citizenship to their children. So, we hem and haw as long as we can and then we give it to them. (Of course, to make up for our loss of face, we make it conditional. We’ll only be nice to their children born since we passed this law, not those who were unfortunate enough to have already been born).

We encourage our people to read. But not everything. Especially not children’s books that might be “woke”, wanting to explain all about different human beings everywhere. Or any sort of literature that might make a politician’s cheeks blush. Given that our people mostly read religious or get-rich-quick books, you must wonder why they bother to ban anything at all. But at least we’re not banning books from schools just because they talk about history that isn’t sugar-coated. That’s probably because our school history books are already sweetened.

In some countries, people claim their right to say the most hateful things as free speech. We, on the other hand, don’t squabble about this, because we don’t have free speech anyway. Or at least, some of us don’t. Others are quite free to say the most despicable things, orally or in print, and get away with it. Especially if they put a religious veneer on them.

Really, we should be grateful that we are where we are, and not in a country that claims to be democratic and then behaves in an autocratic way. We know that we are under-democratic, able to vote but without a free press or the right to freedom of speech and expression, so we can’t really be accused of hypocrisy. Although sometimes we forget ourselves.

We might be appalled at the defunding of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) for example, while at the same time complain when we send some money overseas to assist people whose country has been bombed almost into oblivion.

In case anyone thinks that all I do is complain, I have to say that I am proud that our country is one of the Hague Group, and the only Asian and Muslim country in it, that has recently been formed to hold countries accountable to their obligations to the warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israel for its war crimes. It seems that we still have some gumption left.

Marina Mahathir is getting some popcorn to watch the US implode and hoping fervently that Malaysia learns some lessons on what not to do from it. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.