The most obviously topical subject for a column this week is this year’s gala performance of the annual Umno event that highlights the ‘ass’ in general assembly, then proceeds to take the concept to its most asinine and indeed fascist extremes.

But every right-thinking Malaysian already well knows this stupid sandiwara for what it is - an orgy of self-aggrandisement by a gang of greed-crazed crooks and others so ga-ga as to support them in their twin projects of running the party and ruining the country.

Or, in other words, and as Malaysiakini cartoonist Zunar so aptly depicts it, it’s nothing but a circus. A circus so laughable that nothing I could say here would render it any more ridiculous to the majority of outside onlookers than the clownish speeches by Umno’s alleged ‘leaders’ do year after year.

Unfortunately, however, the joke is ultimately on Malaysia and Malaysians, as these clowns are using their laughability as a diversion from the deeply serious fact that they’re not legitimate leaders, but rather nothing but misleaders and bleeders.

Misleaders of the people about everything from how their money is spent - or rather misspent, squandered and outright stolen in its countless billions - and bleeders of everything from the nation’s natural resources to its citizens’ rights to transparency, justice, proper education and true information.

The last of which finally brings as to the point of this column, which is to celebrate the transmission of the truth by those of us who refuse to be silenced by Umno/BN’s poisonous Printing, Presses and Publications Act or by the Sedition Act that Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak made a pre-election promise to abolish but, to the delight of the asses at the recent Umno general assembly announced that he will retain.

This is no problem for me personally, as I’m fortunate to live in a relatively free country and thus enjoy immunity from prosecution or persecution by Najib and his goons.

But the more I appreciate my own sense of safety, the more powerfully I feel impelled to support my friends and colleagues who, in Malaysia as in so many other parts of the world, can’t speak, or more specifically write or otherwise employ their pens or keyboards, in safety.

Like the much-admired gentleman, scholar, philosopher, three-term DAP MP for Bandar Kuching and former fellow penner of columns for Malaysiakini, Sim Kwang Yang, who sadly died this week. As well as paying homage here to his courage and persistence, and sending heartfelt condolences to his bereaved family and friends, I also hope he will long be remembered along with other fallen comrades like Irene Fernandez and Bernard Khoo.

It is also most timely to speak out in support of the very much alive-and-kicking cartoonist, Zunar. In fact this supremely talented and globally-awarded Malaysian is in the very prime of his life, and kicking the Umno/BN regime so hard for its incompetence, corruption and criminality that it has taken to targeting not only him and his books of cartoons, but the buyers of his books to boot.

And if Najib and the gang keep trying to make an object lesson of Zunar and his fans by means of its stupid, self-serving and unconstitutional Sedition Act, there should be an outcry in protest.

Stop sympathising in silence

It’s way past time for honest, upstanding Malaysians of all races and creeds to stop sympathising in silence, in private or in coffeeshop chat for victims of Umno/BN injustices and atrocities, and start making their voices heard publicly in word and deed.

As Steven Gan and Prem Chandran so bravely have in the 15 years since they founded Malaysiakini, the first newspaper to challenge the supremacy of the Umno/BN regime’s lying, spinning mainstream media.

Too many Malaysians forget, or never even appreciated in the first place, that it was Malaysiakini along with literally a handful of anti-regime bloggers that pioneered, inspired and enabled the massive pro-democracy conversation that today gives contemporary Malaysians some hope or prospect of change, despite the worst intentions of the ever-ruling regime.

So, as disappointed as I was that I couldn’t be with Malaysiakini management, staff and friends at the 15th anniversary party, I was tremendously proud from a distance to be a small part of it all, and greatly admiring of the fact that so many people did attend and thus show open support.

And that a great many had even proclaimed both their moral and financial support by sponsoring bricks bearing their names for the new Malaysiakini building.

Not to forget, of course, in all the anniversary excitement, that thousands if not millions of Malaysians have played their parts in helping Malaysiakini survive and thrive by subscribing to this great newspaper.

Most of them in the knowledge, I assume, that however anonymously they subscribed, Umno/BN could at any time identify and track them down by forcing the payment entity to disclose their details, as it is doing, or attempting to do, to punish the purchasers of Zunar’s books.

On the funny side of this issue, however, there is the evident fact that the regime itself has funded lots of Malaysiakini subscriptions - no doubt with public money as is its standard corrupt practice - for the purpose of enabling its paid cyberscum to make comments in its favour.

Witness the outpourings of lying and largely barely-literate comments in ‘support’ of the latest Umno/BN mega-scam, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) whenever Malaysiakini runs a report on this rort, and similarly in ‘favour’ of Najib’s typically treacherous decision to go back on his word and retain the Sedition Act.

The pen is mightier than the sordid

Apparently, in its futile attempts to win the propaganda war it’s been steadily losing for at least the past 15 years, the regime hasn’t realised yet that the proverbial wisdom that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ is based on the presumption that the pen is writing - or as in Zunar’s case drawing - the truth.

Or in other words, as I recall observing in a column years ago, even if the pen may not always be mightier than the sword, it is certainly always much mightier than the sordid.

A lateral thought that leads us to the realisation that the word ‘pen’ is also ambiguous. On the one hand meaning ‘writing or drawing instrument’, and on the other, especially in the US, signifying the slang shortening of ‘penitentiary’.

So for us writers and cartoonists, the battle of the pens with Umno/BN is on two fronts. On the one hand for the truth on paper and increasingly on screens; on the other for who goes to prison first.

Can the regime jail enough writers and cartoonists on trumped-up sedition charges to shut them and all the rest of us up? Or can we all keep penning the truth until it sets Malaysians sufficiently free to see justice finally done, and the criminal members, cronies and supporters of the regime thrown into the pen?


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’.