Objectively speaking, Umno Youth chief Dr Akmal Saleh’s resolve to “fight DAP to the end” is not without political rationale.
The two most important factors in politics are identity and victory.
Politics, at its core, is simple. It is a field where success is determined by one’s ability to identify with a group of people and, through that identification, mobilise the strength and force necessary to secure victory on behalf of that group. If one succeeds, one is rewarded with authority and power. If one fails, one is discarded, and may even go to ruin.
When identification is achieved, what emerges is unity—a condition in which individuals, from the top to bottom of a group, dissolve the private self and subsume themselves into the collective. This unity—the dissolution of the part into the whole—is what grants an organisation strength.
Contrary to popular belief, achieving is unity is not necessarily a virtuous aim . People do not unite because they wish to be generous, kind, or compassionate. Unity is rarely born of benevolence. More often, it is forged through fear, anger, and hatred.
To unite, a people must fear that they are about to lose something they value—or that they will be permanently denied something they desire. That fear then transforms into anger, and anger crystallises into hatred, directed at whatever is perceived to be the source of the threat. When fear, anger, and hatred reach sufficient intensity, unity is achieved.
This is not a moral judgement; it is a political observation.
It was not only Hitler who unified Germany through fear and hatred of Jews and rival powers. Gandhi, too, mobilised fear, anger, and resentment against British rule to unite the Indian masses. The scale, methods, objective and outcomes differ—but the mechanism is the same.
Whether one is Gandhi or Hitler, Mandela or Genghis Khan, if one wishes to unite a people, fear, anger, and hatred are the glue that binds them together.
As it is written in Genesis 11:3, when building something great, “it is slime that must be used as mortar.”
Be it a nation, a movement or a political party, hatred, anger or fear are often the mortar that humanity uses to build anything great.
Just because unity is achieved through greed, hatred, anger and fear, it is also not necessarily a negative phenomenon. In life, you often have to fight fire with fire. When subjected to such things as abuse, exploitation, oppression, humiliation or injustice, of course, the saints will argue that you should react with love, compassion, understanding and knowledge, but that is for saints. For lesser mortal, most of us tend to turn things around, by harvesting the strength and force, that we garner through unity, hatred, fear and greed.
When Akmal Saleh has thrown down the gauntlet and exclaimed that he will fight DAP to the end, it is within this frame of reference that I am viewing the development.
At the Umno Youth general assembly, Akmal announced that he would resign as a Melaka executive councillor effective next week in order to “fight DAP to the end”. He made clear that he had discussed the matter with Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and Melaka chief minister Ab Rauf Yusoh, and that he would remain as Umno Youth chief—having been advised that “a warrior never deserts his friends”.
“For me, government posts are not important,” Akmal said. “What’s more important is my dignity and the voice of the grassroots.”
This resignation is not merely administrative. It is symbolic. Akmal is deliberately shedding the skin of a government functionary in order to assume the posture of a political combatant—one who claims to speak directly for the grassroots, unencumbered by cabinet discipline or coalition etiquette.
Following the political logic outlined earlier, Akmal’s attempt to invoke anger and hostility toward DAP as a means of uniting the Malays is not without merit.
To unite a people, one must hate someone. In Malaysia’s deeply racialised political landscape, the most readily available object of hatred for one race is either another race or a political party perceived to represent that race. DAP, rightly or wrongly, occupies that symbolic role within Malay political imagination.
Akmal himself made this explicit when he argued that Umno must be honest about who its true enemies are—suggesting that some of them sit within the unity government itself. He accused these “enemies” of repeatedly challenging Malay institutions and religious sensitivities, citing controversies such as the sale of socks bearing the word “Allah” at KK Mart outlets. When Umno fights back, he argued, it is branded extremist.
From Akmal’s perspective, DAP is not merely a coalition partner; it is an existential threat masquerading as an ally.
The real question, however, is not whether fear, anger, and hatred can unite the Malays. History suggests that they can. The real questions are more precise— will it work ?
First, is Akmal correct in identifying DAP as the optimal target around which Malay unity can be consolidated?
Second, is the level of fear and hatred he is invoking proportionate to the degree of unity he needs to generate?
Third, and most crucially, does he possess a viable strategy to translate that unity into political victory?
While it is generally true that fear, anger, and hatred are necessary ingredients for unity, this is far easier to state in theory than to execute in practice.
To say that all one needs to do to unite a people is to invoke fear and hatred is like saying that all one needs to do to win a football match is to score more goals than the opponent. The theory is simple; the execution is not.
Winning requires more than intent. It requires talent, coordination, discipline, timing, and strategy.
At the end of the day, fear, anger, and hatred can indeed forge unity—but unity alone is insufficient.
There must be a clear pathway to channel that unity toward victory. Otherwise, the energy harvested from resentment will have nowhere to go.
If fear and hatred are mobilised indiscriminately, one of three outcomes is likely: the attempt will fail to unite the people; unity will be achieved but collapse into chaos; or unity will succeed only to turn inward and consume its own architects.
Revolutions are known to eat their children.
Hitler’s inability to control the passionate unity he unleashed did not merely destabilise the world; it brought ruin to Germany and Hitler himself. The unity Gandhi mobilised against the British was so overwhelming that once victory against the British was achieved, it turned inward and fractured the subcontinent into India and Pakistan.
Even in Malaysia we can see how the unity that our founding fathers achieved in their struggle against the British and the communist, might have generated too much hate, anger or fear, that within a few years after Merdeka, the residual hatred and enmity they churned, turned inwards and caused racial tension to explode the federation.
It is not an easy thing to conjure unity, and even when it is successfully conjured, it is not an easy beast to control.
Akmal, in Lee Kuan Yew’s words, is now riding the tiger.
He is attempting jg to unleash a powerful force, and if he succeeds,it he might not be able to dismount it without being devoured.
Now that he has invoked mass emotion—especially fear, anger, and hatred—he must be able to feed it and rein it in, less it turns on him.
With his declaration that he will “fight DAP to the end”, he has cast the die and crossed the Rubicon. There is no turning back from this moment.
From here, only a few outcomes remain possible. Either he succeeds in uniting the Malays and personally profits from that unity; or he fails and is ruined by the very forces he unleashed; or worse, he succeeds in generating unity but fails to direct it—thereby contributing to even greater Malay disunity or perhaps even national instability.
Let us see how the cookies crumble.
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