Respecting everyone’s freedoms

Some people have called for Malaysians to wear white in protest against refugees and migrant workers.

IN a world that seems to be increasingly oppressive, this quote by Nelson Mandela from his book Long Walk to Freedom, seemed fodder for thought: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

Despite spending 27 years in prison for his fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa, Mandela did not mean freedom as just the privilege of not being physically constrained. He meant freedom in every sense of the word but primarily in the way we think and consequently in the way we conduct ourselves. 

How do we exercise our freedom of thought? There are some people who believe that we should not have freedom of thought because then we might come up with awkward questions that they may not be able to answer. How do they prevent people from asking these questions? By ensuring that they don’t have the education and information to do so.

When I see the type of mob mentality our people sometimes exhibit, I must wonder what sort of mental chains they are unknowingly bound by. Are they lacking in knowledge about what the true situation is, or are they just mesmerised by the claims of manipulative people? In other words, do they know that they’re being played?

Just a few days ago, large groups of black-clad men, their faces hidden by balaclavas, descended on the English south coast towns of Dover and Portsmouth to stop asylum seekers who had crossed the English Channel in flimsy boats from being allowed into the country. It was a frightening sight, similar to Mussolini’s Black Shirts or Hitler’s Brown Shirts.

- Facebook

That incident might seem far from anything that would affect us. We might indeed scoff at all these White people who forgot that their nurses, janitors and bus drivers once arrived from over the seas to do the jobs they didn’t want to and still don’t. But when I see posters exhorting people here in our country to wear white as a form of protest against the arrival of similar groups of oppressed people from across the sea, I have to wonder whether one day we will also have bands of thugs ready to beat up anyone they don’t like.

How did these people come to form this impression that foreigners are taking over our country? Perhaps we forgot that once upon a time, foreigners did colonise our country. They did it not by “swarming” us in large numbers but by the sheer confidence that they knew better than us on many things, along with the support of a few gunboats. Numerically they were incapable of overwhelming us. 

Nor were they taking over our jobs. In fact, they were giving us jobs, to tap rubber, build railways, mine tin, the products of which to send home to their own country and enrich themselves. For 171 years they administered our country and made us work for them. We didn’t even complain very much until almost the end. We finally freed ourselves of these foreigners in 1957 but kept their style of administration and many of their laws. All while thinking that we had become free.

There seems to be a difference in the way we see foreigners in our country. If they are White and come from richer countries, we call them expats and are delighted when they praise us for how civilised and developed we are. But if they are brown and come from much poorer lands, we think of them as dirty and menacing. I marvel at this cognitive dissonance; why do we think that people who have lived through violence and conflict and been forced to flee their countries with barely anything to their names are capable of taking over a country that is far more advanced than theirs?

Is our imagination is so limited that we think that people who work the worst manual jobs for a pittance, who are unable to send their children to school and who cannot hope to be treated by a doctor when they are ill, are more likely to conquer our country than the people who are devising endless means of doing us out of jobs by replacing us with artificial intelligence?

We think we are strong by denying people different from us their humanity and their freedom. Yet we don’t recognise that the danger resides elsewhere, literally in the ether, in spaces we cannot see but which have the capability to control everything we see, do and think. If anything, perhaps the most free people are the poorest and most marginalised among us because they are not subjected to the same levels of control that our  expensive devices now have on us. The algorithm doesn’t care about them because their pockets are empty. But they sure care about what they can do to deplete ours, along with our minds.

This Malaysia Day, I take Mandela’s words to heart. We fight among us humans, thinking that some of us are superior to others and deserve more in life. Yet we don’t see how we are being manipulated by some people for their own interests. They keep us unthinking, they don’t allow us all the information we need to make our own decisions, and they turn our sights on the most vulnerable among us to distract from their own sins. 

We submit ourselves to their commands thinking it makes us freer if we oppress and deny other human beings their dignity. Meanwhile every day, all of us are blind to a future where none of us will have a say in anything.

There’s much to love about our country. Any trip away gives us that perspective. But to preserve it, we cannot turn on one another, nor on those who need our help, human or non-human. Our obligation as true citizens is, as Mandela said, to respect and enhance the freedom of one another and others.

May your Malaysia Day be a peaceful and reflective one!

Marina Mahathir is appalled and disappointed in the hate that my fellow citizens can sometimes sew towards other people as well as animals. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.