Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya's Racial State, 1945–1954

ABSTRACT This article analyses the physical and discursive displacement of Malay Muslim advocates of a cosmopolitan and multiracial form of Malayan citizenship from the arena of “legitimate” national politics between the Second World War and the mid-1950s. It discusses the trajectory of the Malayan Left during this period, with a special focus on the work of Abdullah C. D., a Malay Muslim leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Abdullah's work included helping to build the Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) under the MCP's United Front strategy from 1945, creating the MCP's Department of Malay Work in 1946, and establishing the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in 1949. This work was essential to the MCP's outreach to Malay Muslims after Malaya's failed national revolution, which collapsed into racial conflict without achieving independence for the British colony. The Malayan Emergency was declared in 1948, and its military and social campaigns eliminated or displaced the MCP's leadership and much of the MNLA, including Abdullah and the rest of the Tenth Regiment, to Thailand by 1954. Despite his continued engagement with political movements in Malaya, Abdullah's vision for a new politics for Malay Muslims was effectively displaced into the realm of nostalgia. His ideas, outlined in MNLA pamphlets and periodicals like Tauladan (Exemplar), never made significant inroads in Malaya, whose racial state the Emergency re-established, using race to manage the threat to its interests posed by leftist politics.

Bullets Not Ballots

This book challenges the claim that winning “hearts and minds” is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. The book argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. The book offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions — the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War — to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, the book makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success — and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.

Not the Wars You’re Looking For

This chapter examines support for the compellence theory in three cases: the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, and the Philippines' campaign against the Huk insurgency. In the British campaign in Malaya, 1948–1957, the colonial government defeated a small, isolated Communist insurgency that failed to gain political traction even within the population of impoverished ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers that it targeted as its often-unwilling base of support. In Greece in 1947–1949, the United States backed the repressive, fragile post-World War II Greek government and built its military capacity sufficiently to defeat the Communist and nationalist insurgents. In the Philippines in 1946–1954, the United States backed the Philippine government as a bulwark against Communist expansion in Asia, pressing for major governance reforms while building Philippine security forces. In all three cases, elite accommodation played a significant role in the counterinsurgent's ability to defeat the insurgency militarily, with the type of elite involved varying by case; uses of force included forcefully controlling civilians; and uses of force broke the insurgency before reforms were implemented, if they were implemented at all, as the compellence theory predicts.

The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad

This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir’s films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir’s films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir’s films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.

The Role of Hearts & Minds in Organisational Change

The aims of this paper are as follows: 1. To put Hearts & Minds on the map as a key approach to organisational change. 2. To explain the underlying mechanism of Hearts & Minds. 3. To show that Hearts & Minds can be equally successfully deployed for organisational change in the commercial sector. 4. To explain how Hearts & Minds achieves a higher level of permanence compared with other approaches. The paper traces the military origins of Hearts & Minds from the Malayan Emergency and the Borneo Campaign through to the final version in Operation Storm. The method centres around working within the values of the target audience, focusing on the needs of that audience and mimicking the military model. The results from the commercial adaptation are equally reliable as in the military model and permanence of the transformation is equally present. The key reasons why Hearts & Minds is effective and reliable is as follows: • In an inverted way, fixes problems that are important to the target audience, neither the Administrators nor C-suite • Addresses Needs & Wants of the target audience • Allows the target audience to participate • The target audience are given the skills by a Training Team who chaperone them throughout the task • The Training Team always work within the values of the target audience • Achieves a high level of permanence • Dignity is maintained at all times

Operational Trials of the E.M. 2 Automatic Rifle in Malaya, 1952–1953

This article outlines the little-known field trials carried out with the British E.M. 2 advanced prototype assault rifle during the Malayan Emergency. It introduces the E.M. 2 rifle (accepted for service in 1951 as Rifle, 7 mm, No. 9, Mk. I) and the ‘Operational Trial’ as a part of the period British small arms procurement process. It then outlines the different trials carried out during the period in question and the military units involved, as well introducing some of the key personnel. Surviving examples of the E.M. 2 rifles used in these trials—today held in the Royal Armouries collection—are also identified and their known history elucidated. The implications for the ongoing development of the E.M. 2 after the trials period are then explored.