Toppling the Singapore dictatorship by digging their own graves.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The theories of Sun Tzu the great military strategist has been proved correct in many great wars including the great Chinese Revolution, a theory which said, first you have to win hearts and minds of the people, then you surely win the war.

I am sure if he were to be asked today on how to topple this Singapore dictator and his family, he would have said exactly the same; win hearts and minds and then victory is yours.

And that is why today, anyone who knows Singapore knows this dictatorship is crumbling, by the minute and by the day, despite the daily glorious nonsense put out by it's state controlled press.

It would not be wrong to say, the average man in Singapore has no interest in his government just as they have no interest whatsoever in his opinions.

The junta, if you could call it that, comprised of the 88 year old Lee Kuan Yew and his son, the Prime Minister whom the father himself placed in power and a number of scholars and relatives both close and distant of the father, actually run the island.

These men who rule, do anything they want because there is no one to question them.

If you are stupid enough to do that, you would either be sued or arrested and that is the end of that, remember the police and their judiciary will anything the Lee Kuan Yew family desires.

They pay themselves anything they want, which today is $3.7 million dollars a year each and another unknown amount which they siphon out of the various government agencies and wealth funds.

There are many millionaires in the island all of whom have become rich through government connections and running government linked companies.

Not a single one in the island ever got rich without Lee Kuan Yew's patronage.

The ordinary man who has no government connections are there simply to work to enrich Lee Kuan Yew and his relatives and friends at the top.

He does it by being very quiet and concentrating on his work.

Any attempt to think and question government policies is inimical to his health and liberty.

There are numerous laws in place that effectively silences all forms of criticisms.

His police force, which consists today of mostly uneducated Malays, the lowest and most neglected of all the 3 races of Chinese Indian and Malay, are used to terrorize the citizens, with powers to stop and search anyone without cause, to harass and hurt the poor and the disadvantaged and to arrest anyone criticizing the government at their masters orders.

As the judiciary is effectively only a mouthpiece of the Lee Kuan Yew government, the people have no redress to the law courts and don't expect to go to court for anything except when they have been arrested by Lee Kuan Yew's police or to pay fines and penalties for failing to pay their taxes on time.

Since Singapore is a one party state, laws can change anytime without any notice.

There is no public participation for enactment of laws, and even if there is, it is no more than a theatrical exercise with government agents pretending to be members of the public all claiming unanimously that the proposed laws are the best.

Just like in any other dictatorship of which Singapore is no different, the people, unless they are the government themselves, have no say whatsoever on how their lives would be as the government decides how they would live any minute of the day.

It is simply a case of take it or leave it, and in fact many do.

I am not the only Gopalan Nair in or was in Singapore who is unhappy.

There are many like me who are fed up with this life under a dictator and they have all left the island like I have; today they live in countries like Australia and other places in the free world.

They, just like I, have said, it is necessary to not only have material wealth, it is even more important to be free.

Material wealth without a spirit of freedom is not worth all the gold in the world.

And that is why, I, just like all the rest of thinking Singaporeans have told Lee Kuan Yew and his son that he can take all his money and wealth and shove it, you know up where.

And the main forces working against this Lee Kuan Yew dictatorship are not just Dr. Chee soon Juan, the Singapore opposition politician and the many other activists, it is Lee Kuan Yew and his family and friends themselves; it is they who are digging their own graves.

In the 1980s when they went against JB Jeyaretnam and broke every law to destroy and eventually kill him, you could conservatively say that several thousands of educated thinking skilled Singaporeans left the island permanently in disgust, not wanting to live in an island without the rule of law.

Similarly in the 1980s when Lee Kuan Yew brought trumped up professional ethics charges against me just for questioning the then Attorney General of Singapore, about half the lawyer population stopped practicing law there and emigrated to Australia, which is why there are no more than 3,000 lawyers today in that island of 5 million.

Then again in the 1980s they imprisoned 22 democracy activists and some for up to 3 years falsely claiming they were Marxists.

This caused another few more thousands of the best and brightest to emigrate to the West.

Last year, Lee Kuan Yew's handpicked Tamil Minister for Law, K Shanmugam, in a predominantly ethnic Chinese government, who treat him no better than a dog, passed a law, requiring even one peaceful protester to obtain a government permit or else he would be jailed.

This law, which is not only totalitarian but also unconstitutional would have driven another couple more thousand English educated Singaporeans abroad for good.

While it is tolerable for a large country such as the former Soviet Union to lose some thousands of it's population to the West; it is quiet another for a small island which at that time had no more than 3 million to lose it's people at this rate. Simply put, it is suicide.

And then you have either the ignorance or the arrogance of Lee Kuan Yew the dictator which contributes to this unstoppable brain drain.

I get the impression that he thinks, that regardless of how the people are treated, they will continue supporting you as long as you pay them enough.

I don't think this is the normal human strait and this is where the dictator has got it all wrong.

I recall his going to Melbourne and Sydney a few years ago trying to persuade Singaporeans to return home, but was surprised no one wanted to.

He should have been told that Singaporeans who have gone to live in Australia have done so because they want to be free, not because they want a few dollars more.

If Singapore has a problem today, it is a dire shortage of skilled manpower.

You hear stories every day of passengers at the Singapore airport not being able to converse with restaurant waitresses because they don't speak a word of English, only Mandarin.

Today you hear of Singaporeans going to government offices, where you would expect English to be spoken, where counter staff are only able to manage broken English and sometimes none at all.

It is all right if you are ethnic Chinese but what about an Indian or Malay Singaporean who knows no Chinese.

I have heard of one hilarious case of a Singaporean Chinese taxi driver taking a passenger to Tan Tock Seng Hospital when he actually wanted to go to Woodlands.

It seems the passenger, an Indian Sikh had just got off at Changi Airport, took a taxi, and began a conversation with the taxi driver who hardly spoke any English.

At one point the passenger thought the driver wanted to know his name to which he replied Santok Singh.

After that the Singaporean Chinese taxi driver did not understand a word of what the passenger said.

The driver on hearing Santok Singh mistakenly thought he heard Tan Tock Seng, and thinking that was where the passenger wanted to go, and promptly took him to Tan Tock Seng Hospital!

By the way for those who do not know Singapore there is a well known hospital there called Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

Of course, Santok Singh had no idea where he was and was naturally surprised that the driver had taken him to a hospital, especially when he was not even sick!

As to whether or not Santok Singh was upset for being taken to the hospital I cannot really say but I can say this much; he must have left Singapore thinking the people do not know English!

You have heard Teo Hean Seng, the Deputy Prime Minister's sad speech in Parliament where he said in the Singapore Police Force, the resignation rate is as high as 40%, requiring ever increasing numbers of totally illiterate policemen who know nothing else but to obey orders, most Malays and illiterate Chinese; that the resignation rate in the Civil Service is high high as 20 percent and across the board there are insufficient skilled Singaporeans to do anything for that matter.

The reason for this dearth in human capital is not because there are insufficient qualified Singaporeans, it is because anyone with any skills worth mentioning has already left or is the process of leaving permanently either to Australia, Canada or New Zealand.

Singapore has in effect become a training city for the Western world, Singapore trains them, and then they leave.

Nurses, aircraft technicians, plumbers, pilots, teachers, doctors, lawyers, you name it, they are all gone.

And in order to run the place this oligarchy with Lee Kuan Yew at the top have no choice but to scrape the barrel.

First they brought in the Malaysian Chinese.

When that supply ran out they tried to import Hong Kong and Taiwan immigrants, who mind you, do not have any English.

Today their only source of migrants are those from Peoples Republic of China with the same fundamental problem, no English.

They do bring in some impoverished Indians but they are only there temporarily, getting some skills to go on to Australia.

And that is why Sun Tzu was right, his theory is spot on even for Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew has successfully managed to alienate every single right thinking Singaporean by his permanently dictatorial form of government.

He has managed to single handedly kick out hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans who would have gladly stayed and worked for Singapore.

He has successfully managed to send chills down the spines of every citizen for criticizing him or his government by jailing them, torturing them or impoverishing them, which is why Singapore has the lowest birth rate in the world and people are not getting married.

Lee Kuan Yew does not understand for some reason that to succeed in government you need the support of the people.

Today he has completely lost it.

And that is why we have to thank him for alienating the people.

We have to thank former Lee Kuan Yew's High Court judge GP Selvam for suspending me from practicing law for 2 years just for criticizing the then Attorney General Tan Boon Teik in 1988, to Judge Belinda Ang Saw Ean for bankrupting Dr. Chee Soon Juan for criticizing Lee Kuan Yew, to TS Sinnathuray, former Lee Kuan Yew judge for unjustly punishing the late JB Jeyaretnam and the list goes on.

It is these people themselves who are digging the grave of the Lee Kuan Yew government, because their unjust actions cause a reaction which hurts them more than anything I or anyone else can do.

Next week, the recently appointed Lee Kuan Yew stooge of a judge Loh Sze On, Quentin, is going to punish the well known British author for writing a book in which he criticized the Singapore judiciary.

By doing that Loh Sze On, Quentin would be doing those who are seeking democracy in Singapore great good by showing once again the lack of freedoms and fundamental human rights in that island.

We should thank him in advance.

Either the Lee Kuan Yew administration does not realize it or they don't want to, I don't know which but this is the truth as Sun Tzu would himself have said.

You don't win support and the right to rule by terrorizing the population, you win it by being nice to them and making them a party to your government.

By treating them like slaves, and instilling fear in them, you not only drive them away, but you cause them to withdraw their co-operation, which every government needs.

As no one with any self respect would want to co-operate with a government such as this.

You can of course get the bootlickers like K Shanmugam, the Tamil Lee Kuan Yew Minister for Law but the mistake that Lee Kuan Yew makes is to think everyone can be bought like him.

Let me say this. Nobody with any self respect wants to live in a country where his opinions do not matter one bit. And that is what life in Singapore is.

Today Singapore is as quiet as a cemetery.

There is not a single worker's strike, not a single protest, not a single whimper, nothing.

It is not because they live in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where they are drugged into a perpetual state of happiness.

No, it is because they are afraid and they remain quiet, like the cemetery.

I do not want to live in a cemetery.

Gopalan Nair
39737 Paseo Padre Parkway, Suite A1
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107
Fax: 510 657 6914
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/

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