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By Farish A. Noor, The Nut Graph MASS hypocrisy season comes and goes in Malaysia with the regularity of the monsoon or the haze.
While we entertain the polite fiction of being a semi-civilised nation with a few shopping malls, we conveniently forget that ours is a political culture mired in the mores and norms of hypocrisy. The public display of normative religiosity on the part of our politicians is pedestrian at best. Often this gets reduced to the level of amateur theatrics, where dressing up in the role of a person of God is good enough to get you elected. Yet, look at how we deal with the issues that touch upon the most intimate and private aspects of our lives, and we will see this hypocrisy laid bare. Despite the efforts of the country's liberal intellectuals, activists and non-governmental organisations, it cannot be denied that the private sphere is slowly but surely shrinking. Issues that should otherwise remain private — be they citizens' dietary habits or their private sex lives — have been brought into the public domain to be discussed, monitored and ultimately policed. As we all know, we are about to witness a second round of sordid revelations, speculation, gossip and disinformation about one particular politician, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Thanks to the allegations of sodomy that have been made against him yet again, we need to brace ourselves for the tide of unsolicited information and private details that would otherwise be dismissed as trivia and nonsense in many other countries. READ MORE HERE
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