My First Blog Post After a Long Absence
It’s well into the 2nd month of February in 2011 and I’ve decided to start blogging again. This time around I’m blogging from the WordPress app on my iPhone. 5 years ago when I was blogging on Fundamentally Unsound, the idea of blogging on your mobile phone was quite far-fetched.
It’s amazing to say the least how powerful the mobile phone has become. It’s unleashed the power of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, alternative media, and memes, capable of mobilising movements that bring down governments. Tunisia seems to have sparked a fad that carried on into Egypt and as of today has infected Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Jordan. All this empowered by the ubiquitous power of mobile phones.
Malaysia has a mobile phone penetration of over 100%. Could mobile phones be used to start a revolution here? If an SMS was sent out to every mobile phone in the country informing people that a revolution was taking place at every town square in every major city, would Malaysians attend?
Personally, I think the best we as a nation will do in terms of numbers is probably 100,000. Because we don’t have it in us to stay the course. Between needing to go home to take a shit, and breaking for teh tarik; or going from Dataran Merdeka to Kg Baru for nasi lemak, or even just needing to charge our phones, I’m pretty sure any protest would fizzle out after a day or so.
So in the even that a Tahrir Square actually happens in Malaysia, my advice to government is to just let em be. It’ll fizzle out on it’s own. Bring in the FRU and the militar and the tear gas and water cannons and you just fuel their cause even more.
We Malaysians generally aren’t hungry enough, aren’t oppressed enough, aren’t angry enough to sacrifice the relative comforts of our daily routines.
Another difference between protest in Malaysia and the protest in Egypt is the fact that in the latter, the crowd was overwhelmingly middle class as well as the poor while the number of women protesters easily rivalled the men. All the previous protests I’ve seen in KL seemed to consist mainly of men. Protest organisers would be wise to remember that only women and children will stop a bunch of marauding tanks.
I say protest organisers because someone always has to. Someone organised Tahrir Square. Someone paid for the logistics. I mean think about it, people were ferried into Cairo, mobile toilets were set up, screens and projectors to show video, mobile phone chargers to enable people to use their phones, etc.
The million dollar question is who was backing the organisers with the money? My bet is the CIA. It felt weird to see the US being the first major nation to ask Mubarak to step down. Maybe Barack and Langley are tag-teaming… Obama in the open, the CIA in the shadows, Obama and Hillary lull countries with a softer foreign policy while the disinformation boys in the CIA are overthrowing governments.
