Umno has got what it wants
Terence NettoPublished: Sep 27, 2014 7:00 AM | Updated: Sep 27, 2014 7:08 AM
COMMENT ‘Umno gets what Umno wants.’
This assessment was matter-of-fact in the 1980s when battles among race-based parties that made up the ruling BN coalition over policy options ended with decisions favouring the dominant party’s preferences.
COMMENT ‘Umno gets what Umno wants.’
This assessment was matter-of-fact in the 1980s when battles among race-based parties that made up the ruling BN coalition over policy options ended with decisions favouring the dominant party’s preferences.
Those battles were waged behind closed doors and, if at all alluded to in public, the reference was couched in elliptical language.
Coded language was imperative on the grounds that Malaysians, pace the poet TS Eliot’s apt observation of humankind, “cannot stand very much reality”.
It was the genius of Umno to have intuited that about Malaysians, but as every form of insight has its own special kind of blindness, it was complacent of the party to have feel habituated to getting what it wants.
For the habit of often getting what one wants can lead to one being saddled with what one should not want.
To hear the anguished musings these days of a self-professed promoter of Umno on how it has got a strong leader atop a weak party, one wonders about the origins of that 1980s’ truism - ‘Umno gets what Umno wants’ - and how it has rebounded today in mordant irony.
To be sure, when that opinion was bruited about in the 1980s, it was not suggested as a boast: the dominant party in the ruling BN coalition, with any possibility of a loss of the coalition’s traditional parliamentary supermajority as distant as Mars, was apt to get what it wanted simply from knowing what it could want.
In other words, the party refrained from loading the donkey with more than it could bear.
These days A Kadir Jasin (left), the former New Straits Times Group editor-in-chief, works himself up to high dudgeon on the state of his beloved party, Umno.
He contends that the leader of the party is strong but the party itself is weak, a paradoxical situation which finds the veteran scribe venting his spleen in frustration.
At one time, Kadir’s position as top editor was the most conspicuous and influential in Malaysian journalism.
When The Straits Times was acquired by a state-owned investment corporation in late 1972 and became the NST, its initial top editors wanted it to occupy the niche that The Times of London enjoyed in British society before Rupert Murdoch bought over the paper in 1981.
Editorial handmaiden
The Times declined in prestige under Murdoch’s ownership just as the NST decamped from its loftier goals to become the editorial handmaiden of the Umno president.
The fact that Kadir enjoyed for a longer spell (1988-2000) than the truncated tenancies of his immediate predecessors portended, the top editor’s position in the NST was due in no small measure to excessive zeal in being editorial handmaiden.
The once prestigious The Times coarsened under Murdoch just as the once dominant NST became derelict in its editorial responsibilities to Malaysian society when it opted to become bridesmaid to the Umno president.
Some would say the latter, given the ownership stakes, had no choice but to become what it has turned out to be - a shell of its old self.
Now for someone, who was complicit in reducing a once-prominent editorial institution to something sorry, to hector a political party that has undergone a similar transition from dominance to declension from a comparable abdication of responsibility is a bit rich.
In editorial terms, lamentation is the obverse side of cheerleading. A healthy scepticism, a journalist’s necessary tool, is what helps keep both temptations at bay.
If, as Kadir argues, Umno has now a strong leader atop a weak party, it is because it has had things the other way around - self-enfeebled editors atop formerly vibrant outlets - in the media organisations it has owned through proxies.
Kadir’s current howls of anguish at what has become of Umno prompts a Shakespearean rejoinder - methinks the former editor doth protest too much.
Umno has merely wrought what Umno has willed for itself.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.
This assessment was matter-of-fact in the 1980s when battles among race-based parties that made up the ruling BN coalition over policy options ended with decisions favouring the dominant party’s preferences.
Those battles were waged behind closed doors and, if at all alluded to in public, the reference was couched in elliptical language.
Coded language was imperative on the grounds that Malaysians, pace the poet TS Eliot’s apt observation of humankind, “cannot stand very much reality”.
It was the genius of Umno to have intuited that about Malaysians, but as every form of insight has its own special kind of blindness, it was complacent of the party to have feel habituated to getting what it wants.
For the habit of often getting what one wants can lead to one being saddled with what one should not want.
To hear the anguished musings these days of a self-professed promoter of Umno on how it has got a strong leader atop a weak party, one wonders about the origins of that 1980s’ truism - ‘Umno gets what Umno wants’ - and how it has rebounded today in mordant irony.
To be sure, when that opinion was bruited about in the 1980s, it was not suggested as a boast: the dominant party in the ruling BN coalition, with any possibility of a loss of the coalition’s traditional parliamentary supermajority as distant as Mars, was apt to get what it wanted simply from knowing what it could want.
In other words, the party refrained from loading the donkey with more than it could bear.
These days A Kadir Jasin (left), the former New Straits Times Group editor-in-chief, works himself up to high dudgeon on the state of his beloved party, Umno.He contends that the leader of the party is strong but the party itself is weak, a paradoxical situation which finds the veteran scribe venting his spleen in frustration.
At one time, Kadir’s position as top editor was the most conspicuous and influential in Malaysian journalism.
When The Straits Times was acquired by a state-owned investment corporation in late 1972 and became the NST, its initial top editors wanted it to occupy the niche that The Times of London enjoyed in British society before Rupert Murdoch bought over the paper in 1981.
Editorial handmaiden
The Times declined in prestige under Murdoch’s ownership just as the NST decamped from its loftier goals to become the editorial handmaiden of the Umno president.
The fact that Kadir enjoyed for a longer spell (1988-2000) than the truncated tenancies of his immediate predecessors portended, the top editor’s position in the NST was due in no small measure to excessive zeal in being editorial handmaiden. The once prestigious The Times coarsened under Murdoch just as the once dominant NST became derelict in its editorial responsibilities to Malaysian society when it opted to become bridesmaid to the Umno president.
Some would say the latter, given the ownership stakes, had no choice but to become what it has turned out to be - a shell of its old self.
Now for someone, who was complicit in reducing a once-prominent editorial institution to something sorry, to hector a political party that has undergone a similar transition from dominance to declension from a comparable abdication of responsibility is a bit rich.
In editorial terms, lamentation is the obverse side of cheerleading. A healthy scepticism, a journalist’s necessary tool, is what helps keep both temptations at bay.
If, as Kadir argues, Umno has now a strong leader atop a weak party, it is because it has had things the other way around - self-enfeebled editors atop formerly vibrant outlets - in the media organisations it has owned through proxies.
Kadir’s current howls of anguish at what has become of Umno prompts a Shakespearean rejoinder - methinks the former editor doth protest too much.
Umno has merely wrought what Umno has willed for itself.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.
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