Singapore. Of mice and men

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Juan Stuart Mill once wrote that a tyrant who subjugates his people produce "dwarfs" and dwarfs are never capable of achieving anything great.

Lee Kuan Yew the Singapore strongman has indeed managed to subjugate his people through fear; fear of arrest, fear of defamation action and fear of bankruptcy.

Today there is not a single person who dares to publicly challenge him or his ruling family. And indeed he has managed to create a society of dwarfs or mice. And being as afraid as mice they are indeed incapable of anything stupendous, because to be stupendous, you need creativity and for creativity, you need an independent mind, which a Singaporean simply cannot have if you always have to tailor your actions according to the Lee Family's tastes.

What Singapore has is a hierarchy, every stratum equally afraid. Those at the top of the hierarchy know they are hurting Singapore by their complicity but they do it nevertheless because of their corruption, receiving huge incomes totally beyond ordinarily acceptable norms of emoluments.

In the middle are the ordinary civil servants and clerks who work for the government. They conform because they for a variety of reasons are unable or incapable of migration to the West.

Then you have the lower strata of society, the ubiquitous food sellers, taxi drivers and office boys. They don't understand their rights under the law because they were never told by the Lee Ruling Family that they had any. So they and their children stay behind and try to make a living one way or the other, since what you do not know cannot really hurt you.

But despite all their trying, the Lee Ruling Family is hurting in more ways than you can imagine. The Lee Kuan Yew model which is no different from the prior Stalinist one party state system worked very well as long as you can continue keeping your citizens in the dark. Vladimir Lenin would never have embarked on a revolution in 1917 had there been the Internet. It would have been impossible to keep the truth under wraps and Izvestia and Pravda would have been laughed at with all that propaganda dished out on a daily basis.

No difference in Lee's case when he thought that by nationalizing and controlling the entire media, he too could dish out that rubbish on a daily basis for the citizens consumption.

But suddenly comes the Internet and all of a sudden, the 6 inch tall Lee Kuan Yew no longer looks the 10 feet superhuman. In fact he looks a buffoon who thinks he can get away with his bullying and the people will just roll over and act dead. Sorry pal, those days are over. This sort of double talk does not work anymore.

We know and the world knows that the Singapore media is nothing short of garbage propaganda, in the same ranking as Sudan. If Singapore don't want to mention it, it does not make a difference. We know.

Second your paying yourself millions and even more under the table is theft, because we know.

Third your courts with their judges are nothing but attack dogs which you use to demolish your opposition. We know that too. And the fact that you pay these judges millions for the dirty work they do, such as that of Belinda Ang Saw Ean to bankrupt and jail Chee Soon Juan is legal abuse. We know that too.

And we also know that these ministers and senior civil servants that you have to serve you and maintain the dictatorship that you impose on your citizens is not only wrong, it is illegal. By the way we know that too.

Which is why you are surrounded and propped up by men who have no scruples, who would do anything for money; the worst sort of human beings that one can imagine, the same sort as Himmler, Hess and Goebbels who supported and propped up Adolf Hitler to continue his barbaric regime.

These disgraceful fact about your regime is not something you can hide through your state controlled press, because those days are gone and today is the Internet age. People know. And when they do it becomes uncomfortable not only to work for you, it becomes so even to live in your Island or bring up families there.

Because of the violence you can inflict upon your people by the attack dog judges and the running dogs police who are willing to carry out your orders, Singaporeans feel helpless to protest. As a result they protest in another way. They pack up and leave. They emigrate. They refuse to marry. They refuse to have children.

You are already aware that the island has the highest rates of outward migration in the world, the lowest rates of fertility and highest rates of aging.

The hundreds and thousands of ignorant Mandarin speaking peasants who are brought in wholesale to make up the numbers are incapable of contributing anything. What is worse, they have no intention of settling in Singapore in fact. Which means the Communist Chinese who have no sense of democracy or the English language will come and go on a revolving basis, doing no good for Singapore.

In order to mitigate the unbearable brain drain, Lee dishes out thousands of scholarships to mainly Communist Chinese students in the hope they will serve the dictatorship after graduation. But unfortunately for Lee, the vast majority of them simply leave for the West when they find out sooner or later that Singapore living is no different than living under the Communist Party in China. If they have an opportunity in the West with an education, why waste your time with this silly fellow and his silly island.

And to make matters worse we have the impending death of the strongman Lee, 90 years old, himself. He is not going to live forever. As to whether he lives next week, your guess is as good as mine.

Fearing the inevitable collapse in confidence that will follow, people have already begun to ship their assets and themselves abroad. There is anecdotal evidence that since the last few years, the numbers leaving the island has taken a sharp hike upwards and more and more people are leaving with their families and their assets. The reasons are obvious. If Lee dies the confidence in the markets, already weak as it is, will take a dive; the currency will lose it's value and the stock market will fall. With the island dangerously dependent on foreign workers, with their leaving, the island to use a German word will simply be "Kaput".

Lee Kuan Yew has not managed to block this blog, Singapore Dissident from being read in the island because of the embarrassment they will face in demanding such action from Google, the host. If they did, they will be reduced to the level of Communist China who block anything on the Internet they do not like. Singapore on the other hands pretends to the outside world that it is a free market of ideas and to continue that pretence, they become helpless to stop the troublesome Gopalan Nair and his Singapore Dissident.

As long as this blog is being read in the island, these articles will continue to be written and even more Singaporeans would be persuaded to leave the island.

I am not sure whether Lee does not realize his model of suppression simply does not work anymore or has he run out of ideas and realizes that any attempt to liberalize would result in his overthrow. Either way as long as he continues by suppressing his people's rights, he continues further and further into the hole which he has dug from which there is simply no escape.

Gopalan Nair
Fremont, CA, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107 or 510 491 4375