COMMENT | Malays not the only ones who must break silence on racist system

“True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organisation of the polity. ...What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

COMMENT | The idea that it is incumbent on Malays to break their silence on this country's racist system is perhaps one of the more dangerous, propagandistic ideas that have been the bedrock of dissent in this country.

This idea is ahistorical but more importantly, disingenuous because it ignores the reality that this system was, for decades, supported and built upon by a majority of voting Malaysians.

Furthermore, it ignores the political and social reality that Malaysians, but to be more specific whatever class of Malays – middle class, youths or the disenfranchised of the Malay polity – thought to be needed to reject this system, were never given an alternative to the system in place.

Indeed the goal of political power in this country has never been to reform the...