SARAH PALIN!

OK, now that I've got your attention...

I started my off-and-on series of posts about Malaysian politics with a look at how the blogosphere was influential in shattering the decades-old power lock of the ruling Barisan National Coalition, and it's fitting that I end it with a look at how badly the ruling party has reacted to this shift:

Malaysia's leading political blog was being blocked yesterday in
what was seen as a crackdown on internet websites credited with
contributing to government losses in this year's general election. The
move came as former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was being sworn
in as the new opposition leader following a by-election victory this
week that returned him to parliament for the first time in a decade...The
Malaysia Today website was blocked by state-owned Telekom Malaysia, the
country's leading internet service provider, on the orders of the
Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, which said comments
posted on it were "insensitive, bordering on incitement".

This censorship comes even as bloggers are getting themselves elected to Malaysia's parliament (something we in the West haven't quite managed yet). It's also a symbol of how this fascinating, fractious, and turbulent country is handling a major change in its structure, even as it celebrates 51 years of independence:

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said the country could lose its independence if the Barisan government loses power. "If we do not safeguard the nation's independence, we will only be
left yearning for it if we lose power," he said on Saturday in his home
state of Pahang. Anwar is banking on Barisan MPs from the eastern states of Sabah
and Sarawak on Borneo. The two resource-rich states have complained
that their grouses have often been overlooked by the federal government. In a major setback to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, several
of his MPs from the two states have refused to sign a petition launched
last week pledging support for him.

Anwar has pledged that Malaysia should belong to all races, though he himself has dipped into the anti-Semitic well when it's convenient. Given that he himself is under the gun from Malaysia's usage of DNA testing as a political tool due to his ongoing sodomy criminal case, should his coalition build a majority, one of the first things he should do is prove that Malaysia belongs to all viewpoints as well--and that means providing protection for critics of the government from the government.

This should also stand as a strong argument for Internet freedom and net neutrality. Critics of net neutrality like to paint it as heavy-handed regulation of the Internet, but as the Malaysian situation indicates, without protections to prevent governments OR corporations from manipulating "the tubes" as they see fit, new avenues of innovation, discussion, and creativity can be easily choked off. Censorship is wrong, no matter who does it, and the ability of the Malay blogosphere to rally so strongly around people like blogger-turned-parliamentarian Jeff Ooi and Raja Petra has completely reoriented the country's political landscape. Things might have gone very differently had such an avenue been inaccessible, or available only to those willing to say nice things about people in power.

People like Anwar, Ooi, and Petra are inheriting a nation in economic flux and undergoing rapid social change. Ooi notes that (like many of his Western counterparts) he is criticized for engaging in direct political action rather than staying on the outside, and his move has cost him financially, but he believes it's the right thing to do:

Ooi has no regrets about his career switch from IT consultant. “The
keyboard is mightier than the sword…. Even a blogger can no longer
tolerate the quality of governance that the country is having now,” he
says...Ooi claims to be uninterested in climbing the party hierarchy and says
he earns less now than in the private sector. “What I find exciting is
to experiment with political thinking,” he says.

It will behoove us here in the West to watch this experiment take shape. We could learn a lot from it, I think.

(Thanks to Techdirt for turning me on to this story.)