Monday, March 29, 2010

The Quiet Desperation of Crumbling Regimes

The evidence suggests that there is a systemic, consistent effort to suppress any efforts to break BN’s hegemony on information and power. ... Instead of banning books or persecuting authors, the police now harass and intimidate bookstores — businesses at the mercy of the authorities — effectively creating a backdoor ban on the books. Due to this pressure, I believe one can barely find copies of Where is Justice? 1FunnyMalaysia, or Politicians Say the Darndest Things Vol. 2 (on the shelves for over a year, mind), in a single Malaysian bookshop anymore, even though it is still 100 per cent legal to sell them.
writes Nathaniel Tan's in Malaysian Insider, one example among many of how alternative voices are being suppressed.

And he concludes :
... the effort put into suppressing the free flow of information and wrongful intimidation of alternative voices indicate more than anything else a crumbling, bankrupt regime.
Nathaniel's book was, of course, one of those "confiscated".

No comments: