THERE were and continue to be many critics and doubters of the DAP stance adopted last November to collaborate with long-time adversary UMNO towards making the unity government of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim work.
Given UMNO’s sustained propaganda, disseminated and believed in by the party’s hardcore supporters that DAP is an anti-Malay, anti-Islam and anti-royalty party, this new DAP stance of cooperation has faced a great deal of scepticism from within and without.
The policy’s latest sceptic is UMNO supreme council member Isham Jalil.
In a Facebook comment posted just after the unity government’s victories in two by-elections in Johor last Saturday (Sept 9), this young, highly educated and fairly recent member of UMNO, opined that the party should distance itself from both from Pakatan Harapan (PH) and DAP.
He contended that UMNO ought to collaborate with the unity government but refrain from teaming up with PH and DAP when it is election time.
He justified this stance on the premise that UMNO grassroots are uncomfortable with DAP and PH.
The former UMNO information chief argued that if UMNO wanted to recover support from its Malay grassroots, it ought to keep its distance from its long-time adversaries, the DAP especially.
Isham did not address the issue that the basis of the enmity – that DAP was anti-Malay, anti-Islam and anti-royalty – was really not sustainable, if it ever had been.
This made continued dependence on it a flight from political reality. You know what they say about political reality: When you have a cancerous breast, surgeons will recommend a mastectomy.
In politics, if you subscribe to rank illusions over a long period of time, reality is sure to wheel you into surgery for an ‘illusion-ectomy’. UMNO has had painful ‘illusion-ectomies’ in recent years about who the real adversaries of the Malays are.
These are the corrupt, the inefficient and those who while pretending to be friends are actually plunderers.
The line that separates the honest from the corrupt, industrious from the inefficient, the genuine from frauds, does not run “between states, nor classes, nor political parties – but through every human heart.”
This was the discovery of the great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who disseminated it in his novels based on his long years of suffering in the gulags of Stalinist Russia.
Through its policy of collaboration with UMNO, DAP is hastening the day when the Malays will discover this fundamental truth of human nature. – Sept 12, 2023
