– wrong thread
The only annoying thing about the article is just the straightforward reporting of the comments it’s highlighting which means it’s still stuck in a paradigm that there’s such a thing as a Malay ethnicity (it’s not, it’s mainly a political identity with shared cultural features; this is rarely acknowledged today and most ppl are ignorant of it, but this is why the constitutional definition of melayu could not even say berketurunan such and such but it’s all cultural practice including religion. Also why the old Malay way of saying converted to Islam is “masuk melayu”). Admittedly it’s a paradigm that racists like him perpetuate, so I’m tempted to defend him when he says, no he’s Malay, but fuck it.
If you read The Malay Dilemma, he genuinely had no real love for the more (“real”? “full-blooded”) Malays/locals/natives with no immediate migrant blood either. He rly said Malays are backward because of incest and too much intestinal worms. Maybe that’s why he and Kuan Yew can’t stand each other, since their respective brand is hating on their own kind 💀💀💀
Does LKY hate Chinese…?
You listen to his rhetoric and it might at first strike you as different (because it’s not the same things) but he essentially harangues chinese Singaporeans for faults of character as well. This was especially since Singapore had a real contentious political scene then and he was frustrated that they didn’t see his point of view. If it helps he has a worse view of Malay and Indian Singaporeans? 😂
It’s actually pretty mainstream thinking for that era. We Malaysian Chinese school students studied Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q in Chinese literature class which was pretty much a book about all the racial faults of the Chinese people. The Japanese who invaded Malaya during Mahathir’s youth were even trying to “rise above” their shameful Asian heritage. Mahathir’s thinking was pretty normal for the era he was born in but the problem is he managed to stay in power & remained influential well into the modern era 🤣
Edit: and this kind of mindset is still present, though somewhat toned down & now with a lot more pride, in the Chinese community (both in China and elsewhere) who still believe in this race-based social Darwinism. This is coming from me having just read a China science fiction novel that’s really about how the Chinese people need to learn to be tough and manly again or risk being wiped out by western foes 😌
i only know Singaporeans like to say things such as : FroM zEro tO hErO… as if the 3 other Asian Tigers didn’t start from zero… Japan literally had two suns rising from two cities, Korea was dirt poor, Taiwan was under martial law and had a facist government for many decades.
Yea, their myth of being a poor kampung, a tiny red dot etc etc, totally depends on one having historical amnesia about their centrality as a trading port and eventually British colony as well as an important proxy in the Pacific theatre of the Cold War.
isn’t there a saying that loud people are loud because they’re covering up something related?
