Self-Deception Part 2 - Losers

Looking through the news reported in MalaysiaKini, I am kinda getting worried at the situation of some leaders in the country. Well, from my experience in chess gameplays, I learnt the following:

- Know the strength and weakness of my opponents
- Admit mistakes and learn from a lost game
- Learn and improve from a won game
- Read books on chess (self improvement)
- Discuss strategies and tactics on other people's games

(Read Part 1)

It seems like certain leaders do not learn of the above!!

The 12th General Election was over. The ruling coalition, National Front, had its worst performance of capturing only 63% of Parliament seats, and lost five northern states to the opposition party, People's Coalition. There are multiple reasons leading to the heavy loss of National Front. Well, National Front was not lost, as it could still form the Federal Government - they only failed to capture two third majority seat, but their supreme leader said so on the night of GE12.

"We've lost, we've lost."
- Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, 9 Mar 2008, 4:12am [here]

The head of the coalition had done a 'study', and said that one of the reason of their loss was their ignorance of the power of Internet; should they be aware of it and used the Internet earlier for their campaign, they would not have lost. My foot! Let me repeat. MY FOOT!! They did not even mention of the actual root cause!! Or, they were still blinded to the root cause. They had totally missed the point. In fact, they tried to deceive themselves, eluding their sight from the voice of the rakyat.

The amazing thing was, they never considered that they had actually disappointed the rakyat so much that the rakyat lost their confidence on them. In Youtube, I heard enough of "you tak suka, you keluar Malaysia" [here], "we are allowing protests... police compromise... police don't fire anybody" while the video showed water-gun launch by the police against demonstrators [here], and some more. We were also suffering from commodity price increase by the authority despite rakyat's objections. They were just too arrogant. They had forgotten that they were who they were because of the votes of the rakyat, our votes that were.

The fact is, Internet has been made free and open-source, so much so that people can tap into almost free information to look at our own country's situation in a outsider's point of view. Of course, while the mainstream media was giving a biased set of information, people would detect its authenticity simply by taking an alternate route of information from internationally recognized sources such as CNN, al-Jazeera, etc. Media is supposed to be neutral, and in Hong Kong, they are named as the Type-3 Courthouse. What does that mean? It means media should be a place where truth and justice are reported in a neutral manner. Our mainstream media has far deviated from this! [here]

Human is created in a way that there is always a conscience, or rather, a hunger to know the truth. And, what if someone deprive them from the truth? They will retaliate and fight for the truth! And, thanks to the democratic nature of our beloved country, we retaliate democratically - by using our voices in the form of our ballot papers. Which is nothing against the universal definition of democracy.

The irony is, we are only allowed to do so during GE campaigns and on GE day itself. We are not allowed to speak publicly for people's rights at any times outside the GE period. Else, we will be detained without trial. What a violation of human rights.

Another ironic point is, the authority tried to threaten the bloggers against the latter's aggression in their weblog posts against them. That was before GE12. After GE12, and after their 'post mortem', they came out saying they will drop the charges against bloggers, and initiated to have a peace dialogue with bloggers. Some of them even became bloggers themselves. What's the point? What's the point of threatening, when you know that the very people you are threatening are the ones giving you the high position in the government - the rakyat? Don't they know that they should fear the people, and not the people fear them? Don't they, at an old ripe age, know that they are elected to serve the people and not to be served? Don't they understand democracy??

At the time of typing, there are people whose rights are directly violated. Untrialed detainee is being deprived of medical needs. Truth-speaking media are being forced to discontinue publication. What the world are they thinking or doing??

The other reason that they mentioned was - they were competing on "not a level playing field" [here], that's why they lost. C'mon, what kind of comment was that? Mainstream daily media had 60% coverage on themselves and 5% on opposition [here], and many rakyats did not have Internet access - they only accessed to news via mainstream media. So, what the heck were they talking about? Are we really that stupid that we deserve such an illogical statement from them?

Self-deception. These guys never played chess. Or rather, these guys are more like being in their fantasyland than in reality. Maybe for them, Bolehland is a fantasyland.

As the Chinese saying goes, never deceive oneself nor deceive others (毋自欺欺人).