By: Li Hui Yi (translated name)
Nanyang Siang Pau, August 15, 2014
From the general elections in 2008 to 2013, Pakatan Rakyat’s biggest weakness is that whoever is in power goes against intellectualism; whoever is without power goes against governing.
Right now, all differences in opinion, estrangement and let-down are caused by the battle on the menteri besar position.
In a democratic society, those in power are capable of following the people’s will; those without power will be serving the people in the name of “having justice served”.
Fine line between saviour and destroyer
The people of Malaysia have been hoping for a “saviour”. Pakatan did play its role as a “saviour” in the past few years and portray themselves as the symbol of “democracy”. However, there is a fine line between “saviour” and “destroyer”.
In the ancient philosophy of liberalism, “liberalism” and “democracy” are distinctive ideas serving different purposes. Therefore, people in 18th and 19th century had never combined the two ideas. “Liberalism” is an “anti-patriarchal” language and concept that is doubtful of any patriarchal idea such as state, government, church and any other obligatory social mechanism.
Therefore, liberalism advocates constitutional and development of political culture to safeguard people’s rights to freedom. “Democracy” is a process of participation in which election is the most important component, followed by other public procedures.
Different concepts of democracy
However, due to the lack of understanding on democracy and liberalism, people with all kinds of imagination could not understand the unexpected situations that exceeded their imagination have become furious, aggressive and extreme. At last, they choose to give up.
Each person has a value system that they choose to believe in. But the people with such belief that trusted the value system in defending the true spirit of democracy has actually forgotten about the different concepts of democracy, democracy is actually lack of subjectivity.
At this moment, we should consider that value system is not only a political stance, and find out what have we learnt from the non-liberal democracy. Should we irrationally ban the social media pages to vent our emotion? Most importantly, we should review and think about whether the value system that we believe in is still worthy of our support with all factors and conditions considered.
Original Source: 意犹未尽：不自由的民主抉择‧李慧易
Malaysian Chinese News 