Malaysia From Now On.......

Something I wrote before but was never published. I submitted it to Malaysian Insider, guess its not good enough to be there, but its good enough to be in my own blog hahahaha...

Malaysia From Now On.......
Theodore Roosovelt once said, " People ask the difference between a leader and a boss…The leader works in the open,and the boss in covert. The leader leads,and the boss drives." When the rakyat took to the polls in 08-Mar-08, the rakyat exercise their roles as the boss and gave BN leaders a jolt they never see coming in 5 states and the voice for change reverberated across the nation. BN leaders must understand that the wind of change was not only evident in Malaysia but many other countries across Asia such as Taiwan and Thailand. The bosses has finally spoken.

If BN still have an inkling of hope to win back the support of the masses, it needs to go through a tremendous reinvigoration in strategy to fix whatever is lacking in them. With the increasing penetration rate of Internet, more and more people will have unlimited access to news without censorship. In a way, the old school media will have a tough time racing against time and of course to up the ante against the new media. Media revolution has certainly transformed the landscape of politics in Malaysia, and even in the US, the Obama team did a credible job in reaching the Americans using a combination onslaught of phone messaging services and the internet.

It needs to be foretold that BN do not longer hold absolute control over the media because with the coming of the digital age, there is a new carved segment in media which can be deemed as a no man's land. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in his book "Media Control" on US invasion in Vietnam, " It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. That's worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across." With BN losing its grip on the media, the people have found a new stream of unsanctioned unrestricted information which opens up a wholly new world with the flow of information so rapid and seamless, information is finding its way into the deep heartlands, into the kampung and new villages via print outs and words of mouth.

The more censorship BN puts on the internet, the further they drift away from convincing the masses that BN is in it for the long haul. With liberalization policies promised by the new alliance, Pakatan Rakyat, the hope of a new dawn is more enticing than BN's archaic policies. Malaysia could make history with a change in government at the federal level but the question now is at what cost? With the world economy in turnmoil and prices of oil heading south, Malaysians might be running out of time and wits to save the country. Can Malaysia afford to wait for the next white knight in shinning armour? Only time will tell.


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