By Azly Rahman
There is an ongoing and intensifying war between Barisan Nasional and the Pakatan Rakyat. And the country is watching. It can both be a healthy and an unhealthy educational process. The war is to win the hearts, minds, and souls of Malaysians as we await another ritual of Malaysian democracy: the 13th. General Elections. Like the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians it has been a long 50-year war between Malaysia’s forces of hegemony and of counter-hegemony.
Hegemony, borrowing the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci who wrote on the Fascist government of Mussolini, is a condition of subtle and total control — of the mind, media, machinery, and materials projected as a form of “intellectual and moral leadership” of the ruling party whose developmentalist agenda follows that of the Fordist paradigm of post-industrial revolution.
Malaysia’s ruling regime, particularly in the time of its fourth Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, has survived on hegemony and the language of vision and utopianism its developmentalist agenda fuelled by informational and communication technologies, architectured through physical installations such as Cyberjaya, Putrajaya, and the Petronas Twin Towers – all these are iconic/signs-symbols-signifiers of ultra-exclusive-Malay ideological dominance.
Continue reading “Multimedia Super Corridor vs. Multicultural Supra Conquistadora”