As I was reading an article published in Newswav titled “Muhyiddin only waited for things to fall on his lap” which was a rebuttal to my previous article titled “It's too late for Muhyiddin”, I came across a line where the writer of the article, Abd Rahim Md Nor, would disagree to my contention that Muhyiddin is not a man of action, by saying that he believes that “Muhyiddin would make a better Prime Minister - with his magic wand - than one who breaks promises and takes the voters for a ride.”
For what he means by “magic wand”, I hope you will read his article, and as for the phrase “the one who breaks promises and takes voters for a ride,” I believe that he is referring to PMX Anwar.
Many of Anwar’s detractors have long accused him of being a liar or an oath breaker. “Chameleon” is also a favourite term that his opponents have often used against him.
Muhyiddin has recently called Anwar a liar. Mahathir recently accused Anwar of not only being a liar, but a pathological liar.
Personally, I feel that Mahathir accusing Anwar of lying has no value. All we can determine from Mahathir’s accusation is that Mahathir has a big problem with Anwar. Because Mahathir has such a big problem with Anwar, we can never be sure whether Mahathir's accusation against Anwar is factual or personal. The only thing we can be sure about what Mahathir says about Anwar is that they are all said with the intention of harming Anwar.
Muhyiddin’s accusation of Anwar, however, is not something that is as easily dismissible.
Even if we were to brush aside Muhyiddin’s accusation as something that politicians say or a case of a pot calling the kettle black, the fact of the matter is that Anwar’s reputation as a liar is not something that is limited in the political circle.
Even people like Abd Rahim Md Nor seem to think so. Abd Rahim, I am also quite sure, is not the only person who thinks so.
I am not a little boy who doesn’t understand that this world we live in is also an arena of contest, and in an arena, lying to your opponents does not necessarily impinge upon your integrity.
If you are the striker of your team and I am the defender of the opponent team, to indicate to me that you are going right before abruptly going left is not a case of you lying to me. It is just a case of you playing the game.
In the same way, in the field of politics, when a politician says one thing before doing something else, they are not necessarily lying. Politics, outside of war, is the highest field of competition that humanity knows. In such a heightened field of contest, you have to be foolish to expect everyone to say what they mean or mean what they say.
I have no illusions about what Anwar is dealing with either. Even Anwar has recently said that corrupt forces are conspiring against him. In the cesspool of Malaysian politics, we know that Anwar is swimming with sharks. Under the circumstances, you cannot expect him to be a person who can be straightforward with his intentions and expressions. "A straight tree is always the first to be cut."
But as much as I feel that lying, especially in such a heightened field of contest like politics, is a necessary and inevitable evil, I must also say that I hope that Anwar will practise some restraint in the amount of lies that he tells.
No one is as lost as those who cannot trust themselves. You will only stop trusting yourself if you lie to yourself one too many times. If you lie to others one too many times, you will start to lie to yourself too. Once you lie to yourself for so long that even you cannot tell whether you are lying to yourself or being honest with yourself, that is when you are completely lost.
There is no point in gaining the world if you lose yourself in the process.
Anwar has frequently claimed that Malaysian politics has gone to the gutter, and unless it is reformed very soonest, the future of Malaysia is bleak.
I understand that to get us out of the gutter, Anwar has to go down into the gutter to clean it up.
I also understand that to enter the gutter, Anwar will have to engage in lies, deceit and conspiracies.
But I also know, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
While I hope that Anwar cleans the gutter and reforms Malaysia, I also hope that he doesn’t turn into a monster.
I truly believe that Anwar is Malaysia’s last hope. If he strays too deep into the dark, it is all downhill for us.
Nehru Sathiamoorthy is a columnist at FMT, a mathematics teacher in the Klang Valley and a seeker of the meaning of life. So far, there are three things that he holds to be unequivocally true. The first is that the purpose of life is to pursue happiness, the second is that you cannot be happy unless you carry your fair share of the world's weight and the third is that you can never underestimate your ability to take your own side.
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