Having spent most of this week compiling and editing the manuscript for what will be, if my publisher decides to go ahead with it, the sixth book of my columns for Malaysiakini , I’m even more bored than usual with the ‘BNality’ and criminality of the BN regime.

So, in the hope that a change of scene will inspire me to come up with a BN-free column worth writing and even reading, I’ve brought myself and my laptop out to one of my favourite spots at which to lurk, lepak, smoke, and drink coffee - Café News in King Street, Newtown.

However, this move is proving a somewhat mixed blessing. On the downside, as one of Sydney’s most manifestly multiracial, multicultural, multi-sexual suburbs, Newtown offers a multitude of fascinating diversions and distractions from composition or any other activity requiring concentration.

But on the upside, it’s a rich source of stimuli for thought, albeit somewhat scattered and even outright scatty. For example, the very name of this café, News, recalls the fact that most people around the world are expected if not required by their rulers to be content with no news at all, or at least any that rings even remotely true.

An atrocious state of affairs which reminds me that even the greatest of thinkers can be wildly over-optimistic or plain, flat-out wrong. John Stuart Mill, for instance - in his book ‘On Liberty’ published in 1849 and ever since considered one of the ‘bibles’ of liberalism - wrote that “the time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the ‘liberty of the press’ as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government”.

This statement would come as startling news indeed to the billions of subjects of all those present-day regimes that relentlessly censor and skew the ‘news’ in their favour as in virtually countless countries ranging from North Korea and China, to Singapore and Malaysia.

And the great Mill himself, if he was alive today or else enjoying a heavenly view of the world 150 or so years into his eternal reward, would be shocked by the extent to which his ringing principles of individual liberty have since been so comprehensively mis-applied, misunderstood or outright dismissed.

'Tyranny of the majority'

Decrying undue domination by government or by society, in the process famously describing the latter as the “tyranny of the majority”, he declared that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”.

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will,” he continued, “is to prevent harm to others”.

Of course “harm to others” in the form of public theft, organised lying, denial of civil rights and every possible punishment of their critics and opponents from false imprisonment to murder, is precisely what so many of the world’s ruling regimes are about, and thus they are at tremendous pains to paint individual liberty in the worst possible light.

Just like how former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad ( right ) systematically slanders liberalism in every possible fashion. For example, seizing on Mill’s mention of the term “civilised community” as a pretext for proposing that Malaysian society is not yet sufficiently “mature” or “developed” to be “ready” for freedom of the press or many other liberties.

Another of his favourite ploys for justifying repression by himself and his accomplices and successors in the BN is regime is that liberalism is a poisonous product that the “West” is at pains to impose on people in Asia and elsewhere around the world for its own pernicious purposes.

A typically monstrous hypocrisy on Mahathir’s part, in light of the fact that Malaysians - like most if not all other people on the planet - aspire to Western science, technology, transportation, consumer goods and institutions like democracy and the rule of law.

Additionally, there’s the reality that BN regime members and cronies smuggle most of their ill-gotten gains out for storage in secret bank accounts or laundering through ‘legitimate investments’ in the West.

But of course Mahathir’s ultimate false slander against liberalism is his oft-repeated contention, no doubt as titillating to himself as he intends it as a turn-off to his ever-dwindling numbers of devotees, that it leads to people walking naked in the streets.

A proposition that, for better or for worse, I find utterly without foundation from what I observe here in multi-liberal Newtown, or indeed from what I’ve seen anywhere else I have ever been in the so-called ‘civilised’ world, Western or otherwise.

'Lust for naked power'

Mahathir’s attacks on liberalism are, in reality, just so many attempted diversions from his own and his BN accomplices’ lusts for naked power and bare-faced plunder.

Just as the racist and religionist sentiments he continually incites with the support of BN-funded organisations like Perkasa and ‘newspapers’ like Utusan Malaysia are intended to produce and perpetuate what Mill so decried as the “tyranny of the majority” over Malaysians of all faiths and ethnicities.

Such politico-cultural propagandising flies in the face of not only hard-won Western enlightenment and liberality, to the highly selective extents to which these have been observed in their countries of origin, but transgresses the traditional ethic shared by both the West and East alike.

The aptly-named “Golden Rule” of human behaviour, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and its negative relative “Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you” has, despite Christianity’s strenuous attempts to achieve ‘ownership’ of it, been explicit or implicit in most if not all known philosophies and religions since Confucianism and perhaps even before.

And in any event, this café to which I have resorted in what is proving a flagrantly failed attempt to at least for once avoid the depressing topic of Malaysia’s disgraceful BN regime, is itself a symbol of the meeting of East-West, Muslim-Christian minds.

As I read recently in the terrific book ‘Writing on the Wall: Social Media, the First 2,000 years’ by Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist and editor-in-chief of economist.com , coffee-houses, “an innovation from the Arab world, transformed the sharing and distribution of information in western Europe” during the increasingly enlightened and liberal 17th century.

By this account, the first coffee-house in London was opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosée, an Armenian, and before long countless imitators became percolators of not just coffee but also political, intellectual and commercial ideas, with one of their number, Jonathan’s, eventually becoming the London Stock Exchange and another, Lloyd’s, the international centre of maritime insurance.

So it seems paradoxically appropriate that, in attempting to at least momentarily escape from thoughts of BN’s perverted version of Malaysia, I find myself sitting here sipping what was originally considered a Muslim drink.

A drink that has since - despite the contemptible efforts of the Mahathirs of the world to corrupt such civilised contemplations - inspired four centuries of innovators, inventors, intellectuals, and liberals, not to mention mere layabouts like you and me, to think.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.