Nobody Knows Anything: The Umnologists

During the Cold War, Western analysts of Soviet politics found it extraordinarily difficult to track the career trajectories of Communist Party leaders. Who was on his way up? Who was on his way out? With no free press in the USSR, and an immense state security apparatus capable of sophisticated disinformation campaigns, there was no straightforward way to read the shifts in power within the Politburo.

Instead, the Kremlinologists – as the Soviet-watchers were called – had to rely on analysing group photographs of the Politburo in the reviewing stands at the annual May Day military parades.

In the way that you can assess your importance as a guest at a Chinese wedding banquet by seeing how close you’re seated to the main table, Kremlinologists came to all sorts of conclusions about the Soviet government based on where the leaders were standing in relation to the General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Was Andropov closer to Brezhnev this year or farther away? Where were Shevardnadze and Gromyko? Were they on the rise or in disgrace?

The Soviets, of course, were hardly ignorant of the fact that this type of feverish analysis was going on, and they began to play games, releasing doctored photographs of the event, and in all likelihood deliberately assigning important people to stand in unimportant corners to confuse observers.

The net result was that, among Kremlinologists, the old Hollywood maxim applied: Nobody knows anything.

In Malaysia today, trying to understand the goings-on within Umno, if you are not an Umno member of some stature, is fraught with similar difficulties. From the outside, nothing is as it seems.

Would-be Umnologists have to contend with a hugely compromised flow of information: “leaks” designed only to distract; both rumour campaigns of great subtlety and ham-fisted slanders; staunch denials meant to be believed and staunch denials meant to be seen through; poison-pen letters by the hundreds and conspiracy theories by the dozens.

About five years ago I gave up trying to be an Umnologist, after a conversation with a distant relative who was at the time some kind of up-and-comer in the party.

(In the end, I don’t think he upped-and-came. He either downed-and-went or is still sort of hovering. I don’t know him very well, so I don’t inquire too closely. He’s the half-brother of my second cousin. No, I’m not making this up.)

At some family gathering in 2003 he said to me, with a total lack of irony, “You know, nobody likes Pak Lah at all, except for the Umno members and the Malaysian public.”

I stared at him in confusion. “Isn’t that… er, everybody?”

“No, no, no. You don’t understand. They’re nobody. They don’t count. In Umno, what counts are the division leaders, not the… grassroots.” He said this last word with the same delicate disgust with which ordinary Malaysians say politician. “If it were up to the division leaders, Najib would be taking over from Dr. M.”

(I should state for the record that the anonymous opinions of the half-brother of the second cousin of a paunchy liberal may not necessarily reflect the true situation within the United Malays National Organisation. On the other hand, you never know. Which is my point. Umnologists have so little to go on.)

Having established my total ignorance of how things really worked in the party, he then brought up an influential politician who has since developed the unfortunate habit of taking his keris out in mixed company and wiggling it about.

“Do you know the problem with Hishammuddin?” said my second cousin’s half-brother, his voice dripping with disdain. “He didn’t have to spend any money to get where he is! Can you believe it? Dr. M wanted him in, so everybody just had to accept it. He didn’t spend a single cent. Just parachuted in. That’s really wrong.”

I thought: Oh. Like that ah? I found it hard to make conversation for the rest of the evening.

Then and there, I gave up trying to understand Umno. To do so, I realised, would require entering into the twisted logic of their universe and trying to fathom a worldview that I confess I find utterly repugnant.

Why spend so much time peering into the darkness of Umno’s soul, when we could be reshaping Malaysia in a new, positive, joyous way? Why waste energy looking into the ideological cesspool, when we could be inventing a new paradigm?

And so I look upon the rumours now swirling about Pak Lah and Najib, and the Umno succession plan, with a studied lack of interest. It’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nobody knows anything; what’s more, what there is to know is – let us be honest – abhorrent.

Let’s not waste time on Umnology. We’ve got a country to remake.


Copyright © Huzir Sulaiman 2008. All rights reserved.