Thanks to the bloody war against Nazi Germany, Britain evolved in the history books from being a global empire that rationalised its conquests with ideas of racism into being the destroyer of racism. ... After the horrors of racism came home to roost in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and tens of millions had died in the process, European mainstream politics could no longer make use of the notion of 'race'. From 1945 onwards, little support could be gained for arguments about purity of blood, and the notion of race in general. 'Race' quickly became a political taboo in the continent of its birth. In sync with the fall of racism and the discrediting of racialism, the empires of the West crumbled like black-and-white domino bricks. Throughout the world, once-inferior groups rose to take the reins of power and to rule themselves. Although these empires easily disintegrated into states, the ethnic mix that commonly populates .... In British Malaya, one may say that the separation of Malaysia and Singapore in 1965 was necessitated by ethnic differences, in keeping with post-colonial trends elsewhere.... In Malaysia, affirmative action in favour of the majority Malays was implemented in 1970 to correct socio-economic imbalances. However, this initiative has been warped to institutionalise racialist thought over the years, and its time limit discarded. The ideology of racial hierarchy, now backed by religious arguments, thus managed to survive in Malaysia, which thus has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the last bastion of a divisive principle of social organisation imported once upon a time into the region by colonial conquerors.