The Malaysian Insider
February 11, 2014
Lord Bobo
Ask Lord Bobo is a weekly column by LoyarBurok where all your profound, abstruse, erudite, hermetic, recondite, sagacious, and other thesaurus-described queries are answered. Free Your Mind!
Lord Bobo, why is our police force so impotent and useless? Some thugs can get together and do the most vile and inciteful things towards Teresa Kok because of a silly satire video, and our police are nowhere to be seen. What’s going on? Do you think her video deserves this reaction? (Duit Kopi, via email.)
We’ll deal with the second question first – whether Teresa Kok’s video deserves the outrage some people have expressed towards it.
Lord Bobo is a fan of satire and comedy, and as you may have noticed, we are also strong advocates for freedom of expression. Satire, as a form of political protest, is naturally aimed to provoke and agitate. Teresa Kok has successfully done so and Lord Bobo congratulates her for achieving the intended result.
The Malaysian public may be unfamiliar with this, but the right to freedom of expression allows citizens to criticise politicians. Levelling criticisms against politicians is crucial in any healthy, liberal, democracy – what more when Malaysia the best democracy in the world.
Some people may not have enjoyed the video. Some people may have found it not at all entertaining or funny. That’s their right, of course. They also have the right to express what they think about the video.
However, that does not mean that Teresa Kok loses her right to make and distribute that video, or that the government or the police should step in to censor it or punish her. Continue reading “Malaysia’s impotent, useless police force”