By Dean Johns | Malaysiakini

The late Teoh Beng Hock is a living symbol of the dilemma facing the millions of bright young expatriate Malaysians that Najib Razak is attempting to attract back home with his latest cynical political ploy, Talent Corp.

On the one hand many of them would dearly love to contribute their energy and skills to the growth and development of their homeland, and to enjoy its rich culture and fabulous food in the company of their families and old friends.

And on the other hand, most seem totally alienated by witnessing the plight of their contemporaries who, through courageous choice or force of circumstances, elect to stay in Malaysia under the deadly BN regime.

Admittedly the case of Teoh is an extreme example of the fate that awaits the best and the brightest in BN’s Malaysia. But his highly suspicious death while in the custody of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), and the coroner’s bizarre finding that his demise was neither suicide nor homicide, are entirely symptomatic of the BN system.

Everything, from racial and religious profiling at birth, through an education system riddled with racist teachers and propagandist textbooks, to grossly iniquitous awarding of scholarships and universities run by poorly-qualified political cronies, appears designed to strangle or suffocate all signs of youthful initiative, individuality or idealism.

And if all that isn’t sufficiently fatal to youthful dreams of playing a part in improving society, the Universities and University Colleges Act is in place to ensure students’ political passivity.

That any young Malaysian intellectually survives and even thrives in this killing environment, as millions evidently and amazingly do, is testament to their resilience and intelligence. Plus, of course, to the typical inefficiency of the BN regime in its efforts to pervert the education system for its partisan political purposes.

Brain-washing by mainstream media

But for all those kids and youths not rendered entirely ignorant by BN-style education, and not willing or able to escape overseas down the brain drain, BN has a further brain-death experience in store: life-long brain-washing by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media: a massive array of government-owned or controlled newspapers, radio stations and TV channels all dedicated to killing inconvenient stories about the powers that be and assassinating the reputations of opponents.

Of course the freedom of the Internet is increasingly liberating Malaysians from the poisoning of their minds by ‘mainstream’ media operating under BN’s pernicious Printing Presses and Publications Act.

But the fact remains that the body politic remains moribund, with millions rendered too cynical, apathetic or alienated to be bothered to try and vote themselves out of BN’s death-grip.

It’s hard to blame people for despairing, considering the dire state of the nation’s electoral system. Electorates are so gruesomely gerrymandered that votes in some are worth 10 or more times those in others.

And the Election Commission is routinely blind to blatant pork-barrelling and outright bribery by the BN regime, as infamously illustrated by Najib Razak’s “I help you, you help me” offer in the Sibu buy-election.

Then there’s the scandalous situation in which so-called ‘postal’ votes by members of the armed forces and others often mysteriously sway the results, as notoriously appeared to be the case in Khairy Jamaluddin ‘winning’ the seat of Rembau.

Talent graveyard

As important to BN as postal voting apparently is, however, this right is mysteriously unavailable to Malaysians living overseas.

So that the very Malaysians that Najib claims he is keen to attract back home with his much-vaunted Talent Corp initiative are unjustly denied a voice in the nation’s affairs.

Not that it would do them much good, considering that, to get back to the case of Teoh, the name of the game in BN’s Malaysia is more a case of Talent Corpse, through the agency of its talented cops.

And highly selectively talented cops at that. The anti-corruption cops at the MACC, for example, can achieve the apparently impossible: the death of a young man who is not even a suspect but just a witness, in circumstances that are officially deemed neither suicidal nor homicidal.

As miraculously as the MACC has performed in the case of Teoh’s demise, however, it appears almost completely hopeless in its primary appointed task, the investigation of the high-level corruption that’s killing the country.

The same goes for the talented cops in the police force.

They’re conspicuously unsuccessful in their campaign against everything from snatch theft and burglary to organised crime, and utterly incompetent in enforcing traffic rules and stemming Malaysia’s terrifying road toll, but supremely talented when it comes to shooting ‘suspects’ dead on dark nights and beating allegations of abuse and killing many of those unfortunates who survive to be taken into custody.

Yet the BN politician in charge of these criminals, be they uniformed, plainclothed or, even more suspiciously, so-called ‘auxilliary’ police that recently threatened to throw press photographer Hairul Nizam Bahrin off the roof of the Bandar Tasik Selatan Integrated Bus Terminal, do nothing to deter them.

As in this case remaining deathly silent so far, or defending them as Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein routinely does, stating in an earlier case that “instead of constantly attacking the police, the public must support the force, as it (is) one of the institutional pillars that form the spine of the country”.

In other words, as I take this to mean, having corrupted Malaysia and its civil institutions to the core, now BN sees the police as its political security corps.

And invents apparently well-intentioned initiatives like Talent Corp to cover-up the reality that BN’s Malaysia is actually a talent graveyard, and that any resident or returnee who crosses the cops could well, like Teoh, end up as a talented corpse.