Today, freedom of speech and expression is on the run and the hunter's name is 'Sedition'
Sedition is the perfect tool to throw at your enemies, real, imagined or fantastical because it does not know nor defines itself. Anything is considered within its ambit as far as its enforcers are concerned, so long as the people are royally reminded of their place not to criticize the powers that be.
It was a tool of our colonial masters to suppress discussion to keep us down and remind us of our subservient position as the colonised.
Today, we gleefully (ab) use it to suppress our own rakyat in the name of maintaining peace and harmony, a myth that thinking Bolehlanders don't buy even at a discount.
Nobody is exempt from its reach - lawyers, laymen, professors and politicians.
You could call someone a frog and you might be wise not to direct it at the powers that be. It is okay to say that to a layman. A court has recently ruled that calling someone a frog is not defaming him.
We are not sure whether that applies when we call the authorities a frog or by some other name as a poor facebooker found out when the police took a midnight umbrage at a simian reference to them.
The sedition blitz against all and sundry for uttering or making allegedly seditious remarks or opinions is symptomatic of an administration scared even of its own shadow.
How else could one explain it except by postulating that it knows it has lost the moral legitimacy to rule on a minority vote and is beginning to feel the heat and needs to exert its authority by cowing discourse and hopefully remain in control?
For there is a lot at stake - the long and debilitating years of hegemony it has enjoyed unchallenged until recently.
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