Singapore tiny island will suffer for silencing Internet

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Singapore island, with a tiny population, and equally tiny size, has recently passed legislation to control the Internet which contain criticism of their country. From now on any article in any blog relating to Singapore and which has a readership in the island will be required to register and pay a bond of $50,000.00 to the government. If they don’t like what you write, you may be asked to remove it, apologize and your license to publish revoked. In other words, if you write what they like, you are fine; otherwise no. Although at present it only applies to Singaporean blogs, it has been said they intend to extend it to overseas blogs as well, presumably China style, where it prohibits foreign Internet companies from reaching Singaporeans.

Quite obviously, this latest attempt by tiny, English speaking (or a form of it) Singapore must be the stupidest policy anyone could have imagined. If the Singapore government, principally made up of a cabal of father and son, Lee Kuan Yew, and a few cronies, thought that by preventing Singaporeans from reading what is being said of them, they could continue in power, they could not be more wrong.

If Lee Kuan Yew, his son the Prime Minister and his handful of bootlickers had any brains at all, they would not have come up with this.

Singapore is simply not China. China has one billion people, Mandarin speaking, do not have a history of parliamentary democracy like Singapore has and they could carry on even if a million of their people are offended by their repressive policies. After all they have another 999 million people left to carry on, thank you very much. In any case, being Mandarin speaking does not help vey much either, if you wanted to emigrate to the West.

Singapore has a mere 5 million or so people or so, cramped one on top of the other, out of whom half are foreigners. Why, because the English educated Singaporeans who have an opportunity to move to the West are doing so in the hundreds of thousands. Why, because they don't want to live in an island where 91 year old Lee Kuan Yew who is just about to kick the bucket has his son strutting around like a prize rooster denying his subjects, freedom of speech, expression, assembly or any other normal human right. Father and son simply cannot tolerate any criticism because they are utterly insecure and nervous that if they allowed you to speak your mind, they would be overthrown the next minute.

Although all other media within the island has already been effectively silenced through their attack dog police who take orders from father and son, and their Kangaroo judges who are waiting for orders to polish off the next hapless Singaporean critic by suitably adjusting the law to suit their purpose, the Internet has managed to stay critical and overwhelmingly so, albeit anonymously.

And just like jittery cowards as Lee Kuan Yew and his son are, they now decided it is best to silence the Internet as well, lest the criticism against them becomes so overwhelming that a thousand people have started to barricade their presidential palace and demanding their ouster.  

The fallout from censoring the Internet, is undoubtedly going to hurt Singapore’s father and son government, far more than they ever thought. The small tiny English educated population there has already decided to leave Singapore permanently and move to the West, not wanting to live in an island like zombies. And with this latest stupidity, the tiny Singaporean native population will get even smaller with even more leaving; leaving them a tiny minority among the foreigners.

And the quality of the foreigners you are going to get will naturally be very poor. After all what sort of a foreigner would want to come and live in Singapore and call it home; a place that does not have any human rights at all, and now not even the right to have your say in the Internet; a life completely under the heel of a government controlled by Lee Kuan Yew and his son.

If you are going to get anyone to come and settle there, they would obviously have to be dumb, dull and ignorant people who either know nothing of their rights or simply don’t care for it.

For instance any engineer wanting to work in Singapore will be expected to know at least something about his human rights, or he would be a very poor engineer indeed, since surely a university education should have taught him something; unless of course he has such low moral standards or self respect that he simply does not mind living like a coolie under a dictator. Good immigrants would be expected to have quality skills and a general understanding of the world and some self respect, which is not the sort who would choose an island like this. 

With even greater emigration to the West, with the local population shrinking ever further and being replaced by poor quality immigrants who are spiritless dumb and with a couldn’t care less attitude, Lee Kuan Yew's island is going to slip even further and further down the slippery slope into oblivion.

It will simply become a third rate island with third rate people with a very bad name, almost a comedy place, like some sort of Alice in Wonderland with a dumb father and son coming up with a stream of dumb stupid laws, which makes them and their people look even more stupid than they already are. 

There is another country with equally stupid laws, Dubai. But Dubai is different. It flows with oil money from their oil rich sheik neighbors and no matter how repressive their government is. The 20% of the population which comprises the local millionaire Arabs in Dubai have it so good, they don't care two hoots about the repression suffered by by the 80% of foreigners in their midst.

Local Singaporeans on the other hand almost have next to nothing in wealth and they don't have to tolerate this nonsense from their billionaire dictator Lee Kuan Yew and his son. If they can they will leave. And unlike Dubai's oil rich millionaire neighbors, the only ones who park their money in the Singapore money laundering center are millionaire Indonesian bank cheats and Chinese crooks with stolen money from their Communist China state owned industries.

Although Singapore may continue for a while with some transient temporary workers in banking and finance who work there for short stints as well as poorly paid construction workers from Bangladesh, Lee Kuan Yew's island can never hope to become a country that one can be proud of, with human rights and be considered a proud and upright country with some integrity on par with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Belgium,  Finland or Ireland. It cannot even have the respect that Hong Kong has, despite being under Communist rule.

One can be proud to call Australia home. Only a zombie would be proud of Singapore.

Gopalan Nair 
Attorney at Law 
A Singaporean in Exile 
Fremont, California, USA
Tel: 510 491 4375
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com