r/malaysia • u/urlocalviewer • 33m ago
Education Concerns about youth radicalization in Malaysia from a student's perspective
With the rise of school violence cases in Malaysia - I have started to grow concerned due to my status as a student and the possible risks I could be facing. Not only that - It was recently discovered within my own school that a boy had attempted and failed to stab another student. Due to this, I have started researching about recent school violence cases; notably the notorious ones such as the Bandar Utama case, and the recent case in Kuching. (may the victims of these cases rest in peace.)
While researching, I found a common denominator in both cases - and it is that both perpetrators engage in a online subculture, nameably the true crime community. If you are unaware, the true crime community is a community that idolizes perpetrators of violent crime and school violence such as Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodgers, and so on. Both of the perpetrators mimic the behaviors of these individuals, writing manifestos and making references to school shooters within the community - and adopting white supremacist ideas such as natural selection.
One of the other main ideas of this community is that majority of the individuals within in engage in western radical extremist ideology such as Neo-Nazism and fascism. The reason that this stood out to me is because of the notable rise that I've observed in students engaging in fascist ideology in my own school; with a student even going as far to set their profile picture as the Nazi swastika, this happened previously - yet I never saw anything being done about it, with the student simply changing their profile picture without any consequences. Not only that, a different student yelled out "All Hail Hitler" in class and nobody showed a visible reaction.
This makes me wonder, what could have caused the rise of the amount of youths being radicalized towards western extremist ideology and thought in Malaysia? Am I overreacting? Has this been happening in classrooms of other students in Malaysia? I would like to hear the opinions of other Malaysians regarding this issue.