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The Power of the Gullible Malays.
By Mihar Dias
(C) Copyright February 2022
The average Malay is gullible. They are easily persuaded to believe in something, particularly from an authority figure or someone whom they look up to.
If you were an English educated, urban middle-class Malays with a high income, reading this do not be alarmed. It’s not about you.
Typically, gullible lives in rural areas. He is not well educated and likely to be from the lower-income group. His urban counterpart is a mirror image except he lives in town but keeps in close touch with his family in the rural areas.
A gullible Malay is not well-read partly because he is competent in only one language, Malay. He is social media savvy but unable to fully access the world wide web of knowledge which is in English. His information about world affairs is only limited to what is available in Bahasa Malaysia. TV1, TV3 and some Malay medium channels are his choices. He does not watch any English programmes except Hollywood movies and is more recently drawn to Korean drama and K-Pop.
His favourite sports are football mostly English Premier League and badminton. Sometimes during EPL and other football games, including Euro team matches like Italian Serie A or La Liga they would stay up all night glued to the big screen at a Mamak restaurant in urban areas or in various warong kopi at small towns of Jengka or outside Batu Pahat, till early dawn.
When a politician comes for a visit or to campaign the question on their lips would be “what’s there for us?” The gullible Malay thrives on the “cargo cult” mentality cultivated by UMNO since independence more than 60 years ago.
It’s no different from the cult that evolved out of the food dropped by Allied planes during the 2nd World War in the Pacific. Islanders lit a fire and aeroplanes would drop supplies. When the war was over the natives continued lighting up fires in the shape of aeroplanes praying for cargoes to drop from the sky. It eventually developed into a religious cult.
UMNO too had developed this dependent mentality syndrome amongst gullible Malays since independence giving them financial aid and other forms of assistance. As a result, they could not be self-reliant and the cargo cult mentality persists.
They are easily persuaded by a UMNO man who proclaims himself and his party as the saviour of the Malays. During GE14 in 2018 when the 1MDB issue took centre stage Tun M campaigned hard, discrediting Najib, to dislodge UMNO in its stronghold of Johor, many gullible Malays cried when they abandoned the Grand Old Party for the opposition.
But this time, four years later the gullible Malays have returned to their old way of thinking.
Najib is already discredited, courts have sentenced him and Zahid would follow suit, but UMNO that party “keramat” must be returned to its former glory.
They would rather choose the devil they knew for 60 years than take their chance with the deep blue sea.
Do not underestimate the power of the gullible Malays.
Mihar Dias is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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