Ladies and Gentlemen,
In Singapore if these are the role models, why do we need villains?
Lee Kuan Yew tries hard to hold himself out as the hero of Singapore.
According to him he single handedly brought Singapore from a "backwater fishing village" into a thriving "international first world country".
But did he really? And how did he do it if indeed he did?
We know that he imprisoned Chia Thye Poh for 31 years without trial, longer than Nelson Mandela, for no crime whatsoever; whereas Mandela at least was tried and lawfully convicted.
Who is worse, the apartheid regime of South Africa or Lee Kuan Yew?
Lee also has totally criminalized the free press, owning and controlling the entire media; criminalized the forming of societies which now need permits, criminalized free speech without permits, criminalized peaceful protests without permits, abused the administration of justice by abusing the law to destroy political dissidents, and banishing me from Singapore because I criticized his judge Belinda Ang Saw Ean.
And mind you, having done all this, Lee Kuan Yew is portrayed as Singapore’s greatest hero!
Then we have the judges. A judge who shamelessly abuses the law to punish political opponents, Belinda Ang Saw Ean is portrayed as a great and wise judge when in fact she is a corrupt dishonest woman who advances her career licking Lee's boots.
I recently wrote about a very successful Tamil Singapore lawyer, the 74 year old G.P. Panniselvam, who enjoys great success at the Singapore Bar for himself and his family members, his wife a Tamil Muslim who is his partner in his law firm, his daughter Priya Pannirselvam and her young Tamil lawyer husband who all work in his office.
While he was a judge, he shamelessly disgraced his judicial duty, misusing the law against Tang Liang Hong, a hapless political victim of Lee Kuan Yew, himself a lawyer by an unimaginably unjust verdict, seizing up to $8 million dollars ( Tang’s entire savings), and literally chasing him out of Singapore. Tang now lives in Australia having been dispossessed of everything he once had by this disgraceful judge.
Today this judge who has entered into private practice with his wife Arfat Selvam, in Afrat Selvam Alliance LLC, (www.asalliance.com.sg) and his daughter and son, all enjoying a very lucrative practice thanks to Lee Kuan Yew who continues as his sole generous client providing the constant flow of work from the Singapore government and government listed companies, Lee's cronies and friends.
G.P. Selvam's and his family’s success at the Bar is the reward of the dirty work he did over an entire career for Lee Kuan Yew to destroy his opponents through the law.
And mind you, G.P. Selvam, a thoroughly unscrupulous individual by any standards, is held out in Singapore as one of the leaders of the law.
Then we have K Shanmugam, another Tamil, recently appointed the Minister of Law by Lee.
According to the flowery accolades given to him in the state controlled local press which went on over several days, splashed over the newsprint in headlines, he is one of the greatest legal brains that ever lived within the confines of the island, who had bravely fought several difficult cases and defeating them all, hands down, and so on and so forth. So much drivel there for you.
But the true fact is, he is a card carrying member of the PAP, he was inducted into the inner circles of Lee’s confidence, he has shown a willingness to do anything to please his master, however grotesque, he was given a job in the establishment law firm of Allen and Gledhill, very quickly made a partner, given a few cases all of which he won of course before friendly judges and thereafter immediately made Minister. As to what greatness is in all this is still beyond me.
And recently, in order to show his greatness, in the Singaporean sense, he has illegalized any protest in Singapore unless there is a government permit, he has illegalized the taking of pictures of the police and posting them on the Internet, he has changed the law to permit the police to enter your homes without search warrants at his discretion, and he has made illegal any form of civil political activity.
In other words, he has completely denied all forms of political activity unless it is in support of his master, Lee Kuan Yew. And this man is portrayed as a great hero of Singapore.
Every one of the leaders of this weird hare brained society of Singapore who is called a hero is in fact a crook of the basest kind.
All of them do it because there is no one to challenge anything they do. Lee Kuan Yew controls the police and even the mildest of criticism can result in arrest and imprisonment in the island. Lee Kuan Yew also controls the media which does not permit any publicity for contrarian views. Furthermore at the behest of Lee's minions, they will defame and smear your reputation in its shameful pages with impunity and there is nothing you can do.
In other words Singapore’s heroes are in fact a bunch a gangsters, while the newspapers that Lee owns portray them as heroes.
And in an island like that, if you had independent views and beliefs, you have nowhere to turn. You either accept the miserable life there or you get out of the country. You have no other option.
Of course all this abuse of power and repression is now beginning to hurt them. Educated Singaporeans are leaving the country en masse. There are insufficient entrants to government jobs.
The numbers of English speaking people are declining. The remaining English speaking Singaporeans have become very poor at it, since the best are continuing to leave the island.
The Internet with writings such as mine is hurting them badly and the harm to them is getting worse.
Only yesterday, the government's state controlled newspaper put out a story of the government legal service being in need of additional prosecutors. I will write about this soon.
The fact is, this blatant misuse of the law by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his judges has reduced the law's reputation so low that no one with any self respect wants to be part of it.
The total lawyer population in Singapore is only 3,000 and decreasing by the day, a number totally insufficient for a Singapore population of nearly 5 million.
Lee Kuan yew and his judges have succeeded in progressively discrediting the law in Singapore to what it has become today; simply a disgrace, which had caused the International Bar Association to put out a 72 page report condemning the administration of justice there outright.
If these are Singapore’s heroes, tell me, why do we need villains?
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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2 comments:
To the victor goes the spoils - and the pen to re-write history in his own image. That is, until the Internet Age came along. Today, Lee and his Mafia may have enriched themselves and robbed the people blind but one thing they will never be able to do: they will not ever be able to airbrush away their misdeeds from the record. Your blog is proof enough of that. One day they and/or their heirs will be made to repay the debt with interest.
These people have never had a genuine mandate to govern. All their election 'victories' have been the fruit of electoral gerrymandering and brutality of the crudest and most vicious sort. Condemned goods. The nation's governance is barely distinguishable from that of today's communist China: the same vindictive pursuit of the voices of protest; indifference to suffering; jurisprudence from hell for the weak; legalised killing on the pretext of duty; a yawning gulf between the handful of rich and the masses of poor; vile worship of Mammon to the exclusion of all else. Both have the same shiny glass and concrete souls.
Lee Kuan Yew's record is already cursed beyond redemption. 'Statesman' was a description that used to be bandied about years ago but no longer, not after his triumphalist Asian Values mantra was shown to be nothing more than an euphemism for suppressing dissent. With the most sycophantic will in the world, no Singaporean would ever describe him as a 'hero' without covering their mouths to hide the unbidden smirk.
As for the remainder of his partners in crime, who remembers their good deeds if any? The trashcan of history has already begun to obliterate that memory. But the Internet will always remember Khaw Boon Wan as the Health Minister who sent our elders to die in a foreign land because it was cheaper there, Lim Swee Sway, the workers' traitor par excellence and the notorious Hanging Judge Yong Pung How who admitted in court that an innocent man can be hanged, to name but a few. And who could ever forget the world's highest paid Prime Minister who raised his own salary and GST to 'help the poor' just as soon as the votes were counted? As you said, if these are Singapore’s heroes, tell me, why do we need villains?
So much for meritocracy.
At the end of the day, Singaporeans are the ones who pay.
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