proper education

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT AT THE LAUNCHING OF THE MAHATHIR–THATCHER CHAIR IN STATECRAFT AND IN AUGURATION CHAIR LECTURE THEMED THE WORLD NOWADAYS: ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL TURMOIL

UNIVERSITY OF SARAJEVO SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (SSST), 21 JUNE 2023

 

Firstly, I would like to say thank you to the University of Sarajevo School of Science and Technology for naming this chair - Mahathir-Thatcher Chair in Statecraft, with my name as well as that of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher. We were Prime Ministers at the same time and my relation with Margaret Thatcher is one of love-hate I would say. Because initially I was very much opposed to her and we had a problem with Britain, which resulted in Malaysia declaring to Buy British Last. As a result of the policy announcement, Mrs. Thatcher met me in London and subsequently making amends by offering scholarships for Malaysian students in the UK.

But in any case, we did not carry on with the Buy British Last for very long. We established good relations with the UK, which used to be our colonial masters. We were under British rule for quite a long time, and under British rule they introduced English language and English schools so that many of us are able to speak English quite fluently. So even after we became independent, we still make use of English as our second language. So that was how I got to know Mrs. Thatcher. And I think relationship at the end of a period as Prime Minister was good and continues to be good. Now that is about Malaysia and the United Kingdom.

I think you may notice that we live in a world in a state of turmoil of today. Today instead of getting the peace that the Second World War was fought for, the hope that war should not be fought anymore, that people would live in peace. But as you know, we failed. Today there is a war. There is a war between Russia and Ukraine. There are little wars in very many places, some of which were proxy wars. Wars fought not because of the countries involved wanting to fight wars, but because they were urged, they were encouraged to have conflicts with other nations and the result of such conflicts were small wars, proxy wars. And proxy wars are useful for people who sell weapons. So that is the failure of the Second World War.

But today, as I said just now, we live in a state of turmoil. We now have a population; the world population now is 8 billion people. And with so many people on earth, we are finding that governments cannot be effective anymore. People do not accept governance. They challenge the government, they take to the streets, they demonstrate, they have strikes, and sometimes of course there are civil wars fought because people cannot accept governments the way they used to in the past.

We also find that this huge numbers of people and the ease of travel, as well as the porosity of borders, has resulted in many people migrating. Europe is receiving millions of migrants from Arab countries, from African countries, and also from Asian countries. And this has posed many problems for Europe. Where Europe was once a birthplace of the Europeans, it was known as Christendom. But today there are many communities in all the European countries, communities who are of different faith. There are a lot of Muslims living in European countries now. There are a lot of people of other religions including Hindus, Buddhists and the like. In fact, today we have a Hindu Prime Minister of England, of the UK. That was something never expected before. But such is the result of migration that countries now have become multiracial like Malaysia. Malaysia as you know is a multiracial country. The indigenous people were the Malays. They now make up about 60% of the population. 40% of the population is made up of Chinese and Indians and many other races.

So, in the future we see migration taking place to other countries so that most countries would also be multiracial like Malaysia. And this, of course, poses many political problems. That is what has happened because of the increase in population numbers around the world. We have now 8 billion people. That's the first problem.

The next problem is climate change. We are witnessing climate change throughout the world. We see in many places snow falling. In other places the temperature may go up even up to 50 degrees centigrade. These mean that we need to adjust ourselves to climate change. We have tsunamis, a word that was not known before, a Japanese word, now commonly spoken in other languages. And the tsunamis can destroy huge cities. It happened in 2004 when the tsunami hit the island of Sumatra and a little portion of Malaysia. Tsunamis are not the only problems that come with climate change. High temperatures to very low temperatures. We see earthquakes as happened in Turkey and Syria recently with 50,000 people killed in the earthquake. We have a lot of volcanoes now which are erupting in many places in the Canary Islands, Philippines, in Indonesia, and in many other places where before there was stability and no eruption. So, climate change is going to affect a lot of us. It may affect our food supply even, because in many cases the growing of food becomes difficult because of very high temperature or very cold temperature. So, climate change is something that has affected the world, the whole world. And we are not prepared yet to deal with the changes in the climate.

And then of course, is tendency for people to go to war. After the Second World War and the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we thought that people now know that wars can destroy the whole world, not just the warring nations. Apparently, we have not learnt to avoid wars and now we see a war being fought between East and West basically but in the form of war between Ukraine and Russia. There is also an attempt to provoke war in Southeast Asia, in East Asia, between the Chinese and probably the Americans because of Taiwan. So, we are not free from the threat of war and we have to learn how to deal with this problem which has affected our food supply, cost of living, etc.

Of course, now we have a problem with the economies of countries. Many people are suffering today from this economy, partly because of the climate change and the pandemic. The pandemic is another problem that the world is facing. Now for the first time the world has to face attacks by a virus throughout the world. And this virus can easily spread around the world because people nowadays can travel very quickly. At one time before to travel from China to Malaysia would take about three months or even more. And very frequently the ships did not arrive because of storms and other disasters. But today, in three hours you can travel from Kunming to Kuala Lumpur. And because of the speed of travel and the frequency of travels, there were great numbers of tourists crossing borders. If they carry diseases with them, very quickly the disease will spread throughout the world. And this is what happened with the COVID-19 problem. The disease has spread throughout the world. But the world, as I said, is not prepared to deal with these common problems, common to all countries. So we are living in a world that is so connected, so easily accessed, but on the other hand we are not able to control the environment in which we live in so much so that a pandemic like COVID-19 can cause millions of people to die.

And then we have the climate change, and we have the increase in population, which affects all these states, affects the economies and the trade between nations. And without the economy growing, and without trade, countries will all suffer. So, this is what we are seeing happening to the world today.

The United Nations should really be dealing with all the problems of the world. Unfortunately, the United Nations is not able to function properly because five countries have veto powers. And veto powers mean one single veto power can deny the rights of 190 members of the United Nations. So, there is a need now to set up an international organisation, some kind of world organisation that will deal with common problems faced by the world. Of course, internal problems can be dealt with by the countries themselves, but international problems, common problems of the world should be dealt with by a world authority. Maybe a modified version of the United Nations or maybe a world government, a new world government. And all this happened because we are still divided between countries. Some are rich, some are very poor, and because they are poor, they are less able to manage the changes surrounding us as are the rich people. Thus, when the pandemic broke, a vaccine was developed but the poor were not able to get access to vaccine for a long time and this means that control or attempts to reduce the spread of the disease was not very successful.

So, we are living in a very troubled world and we need to learn how to live together. We are all neighbours. For example, Bosnia-Herzegovina may be thousands of miles away from Malaysia. We used to think of Europe as very far from Malaysia, but the speed of travel and the ease of travel has made us actually our near neighbours. And as neighbours, what happens to one country may affect the neighbouring countries as well. And that is why we have a need to have better organisation, better understanding between the countries of the world so that when we have common problems, we can solve the common problems together with the wealth of the rich reaching out also to the poor countries.

So that is what I see after being involved in politics in Malaysia for the past 70 years and I think we have not learned much from our experience and failures. There is a saying by an American philosopher, George Santayana, who says that - those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat their mistakes over and over again. And we see today we have not learned from the disasters caused by two world wars which killed millions of people. We are still preparing for wars and fighting wars. And we don't see the powerful nations learning any lesson from the past. They still wish to dominate and they sometimes get very violent and use their military strength to oppress other countries. Thus, we saw what happened to Iraq for example, because the Iraqis were not democratic America decided to change the regime by invading Iraq, by killing Saddam Hussein. But yet after a war which lasted only three months, it has gone to ten years and still the problems of Iraq are not over yet. So war is not a solution to the conflicts that we see in this world. We need to build up forces that will advocate war as a crime and that we should avoid wars because wars have not solved any of our problems that assail many parts of the world. So I think I will stop there. I believe there will be questions? Thank you.

Question from the floor:

Firstly, I want to thank you for the lecture it was very useful and gave us a lot of information about the situation in today's world. Right here, I have your book, New Deal for Malaysia. When I was in high school, I thought the professor had this book, and I asked him to have a copy. So, he couldn't give me the original book, but he gave me this book and I copied that in the copy store. And here, I want to ask you, in the first couple of pages, you said something very important. And for me, this is very beneficial. So maybe I can ask you to explain a little bit what you have written. I don't know when, maybe in 2000, this is published here in Bosnia. So here you wrote that a stable family, a good education, and good religious background is the best standard to build a powerful and sustainable society. And you also here wrote that your mother had a good religious education and she taught you about the Quran. You had a very good religious teacher that came to your home and taught you about religious scriptures and Quran and that helped you in the future and helped you in your career as a doctor and as a politician. So can you explain the connection between religion, economy and building a sustainable society, especially today, because I think today we have a lot of turmoil and we have a lot of hostile attitudes towards religion in the 21st century. And for me, this is very interesting when I read about this.

Answer by Dr Mahathir:

 

Well, education and religion used to shape us all. We follow different religions, of course, and we get education which enables us to tackle many problems that face humanity. And with education, especially in the sciences, we have seen a lot of progress being made. Nowadays, communication is such that one can talk to anyone across the world immediately without any interference with operators and lines being occupied, etc. Just inside our pocket we carry a broadcasting station and a receiving station. Where before to broadcast you need a big establishment with many sophisticated equipment etc. But today with our mobile phone we can talk to anyone, anywhere and we can broadcast. I can broadcast now even to the rest of the world just through my telephone. So, we have made tremendous progress due to education.

All the time there would be research to find new ways of doing things and the absorption, the spread of knowledge has made the world much more progressive, has tackled many problems of the world.

Unfortunately, the stress is now only on acquiring knowledge. Of course, religion in many places has now receded. People no longer have faith in religion. What we see is a collapse of beliefs in religion to the extent where our moral values now have been affected. Not so much among Muslims but among Christians we see the rejection of Christian ethics. For example, in many of the developed countries in the West, marriage is no longer an institution. People do not get married and they can live together without being formally married and they can change as they like without formal divorce, without any legality. So that is the attitude in the West about marriage.

And now, of course, they have gone as far as to have marriages between people of the same sex, men marrying men, women marrying women. Now if this continues at that rate, the population will decrease because men cannot produce children and women needs men to produce children. If this new culture spreads throughout the West, their numbers would decrease. And indeed, the birth rate in many of the Western countries has diminished so much that the growth rate of 1% is normal in the very advanced countries like Sweden. Also, we find it has spread to the east. Korea for example is experiencing zero growth. The number of children being born is less than the number of people dying. So, if it goes on that that way the population will decrease in volume.

We hope that Muslims do not adopt these new ethics because if we do, we too would diminish. We are created in order to procreate the human race. For that there are men and women. God has created us as men and women so we can procreate, we can add to the numbers of people. But if they do not marry, if they live apart, if they have marriages between men and men, women and women, then the procreation process would be diminished and the numbers of new births would be less than the numbers of the people dying. So, if actually this happens, the human race will not grow.

At the moment, as I said just now, there are 8 billion people in this world. But unfortunately, the rich countries are the countries where the growth is minimal. But the poor countries are where most of the growth are taking place. Now you see the world divided into rich and poor. And when there is problems in the poor countries, they would want to migrate to the rich countries. This is what is happening today.

So, we need to rethink about our moral values. We have to rethink about the teachings of religion because religion gives us the value system that enables this world to progress and develop. But without religion, with just being atheists, not believing in any kind of religion, we may face the problem that the population of the rich countries would diminish and they would then become poor and the population of the poor countries would increase and they would migrate to the rich countries. This will result in all countries of the world becoming multiracial and as I said just now, we are not good at dealing with multiracial population.

So, this is why we need to understand to have proper education, not only about acquiring knowledge, but also in the building of the character of the people with the knowledge. If you have knowledge, but know you have your character is wrong, you may abuse the knowledge and as a result society would suffer.

On the other hand, of course if we have the teachings of morals promoted in the schools even in the universities then people will be more balanced and not follow just their own free will, assuming that they want to have freedom all the time, then we will have problem with human society. Thank you.