What’s Dr M talking about Melayu?
WRITTEN BY HELEN TING, CPI
Introduction by Dr Lim Teck Ghee
Dr Mahathir Mohamad has recently been giving distorted history lessons on minority populations. To top these rants, he even sounded almost regretful when he opined that the Holocaust had ostensibly “failed” in its ‘Final Solution’ to reduce the ‘Jewish problem’ beyond the six million loss of life.
On January 28 in his reflections on Malaysian minorities, he claimed in the same regretful tone that “one million outsiders were given citizenships” during Independence.
Awareness of history is always illuminating. However, instead of getting our knowledge of what really happened in our history from Mahathir and the propagandists of the Biro Tatanegara, Malaysians should take the opportunity to learn from reputed local and foreign scholars.
This is not only because these researchers are more accurate and objective in their writings – having spent much of their lives studying and verifying the key historical events and developments, and going through the process of the results of their scholarly work being peer reviewed by other scholars.
It is also because unlike Dr Mahathir and other propagandists of the official history, they do not have the same political agenda and racial bias that Dr Mahathir and his subordinates bring to the subject matter. With these scholars, we can be confident that our worry about the distortions that are being bandied about by Mahathir – based on either ignorance or more likely opportunism if not blatant prejudice – are at least not present.
