Why always LKY?

Why do you often reference Lee Kuan Yew? One person mentioned this in our recent reader survey, echoing occasional comments since Jom was founded. It’s an understandable sentiment. The mythology around one man has dominated Singapore for so long that many believe we should just move on, or even erase bits of it.

For sure, we need to resist the temptation to chart our own great man theory of history. No, Lee didn’t do it all. Everybody from Munshi Abdullah (1795-1854), the scribe to Stamford Raffles and narrator of early colonial Singapore, to Sit Kim Ping (born 1941), a biochemist whose research into metabolism in cancer cells confounded widely held global beliefs, deserve more credit for their contributions to Singapore. It often seems like they are just cosmic dust in the Galaxy of Lee.

Ironically, Lee the iconoclast would probably be horrified by how the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) continues to venerate him: seemingly eager to preserve his house, which he wanted destroyed, and now on the cusp of celebrating his 100th birth anniversary on September 16th 2023 by, among other things, minting a commemorative coin. You will soon be able to carry an image of Lee—a likeness surely more “benevolent” than “dictator”—in your purse.

Separately, even from a purely artistic and literary perspective, it can all seem a bit nauseating. The apparent obsession with Lee not only robs artists of our precious time but possibly affects our mental frameworks and understanding of Singapore in a way that limits our imaginations.

It’s unsurprising, then, that many Singaporeans, of all political stripes, would rather not hear about Lee. This school of thought suggests that we should, for example, discuss racism as it exists today, or public housing policies and the way forward, without any mention of Lee.

Yet this would be a grave mistake, one that ignores fundamental power dynamics in Singapore’s marketplace of ideas. Those who seek to downplay Lee’s actions and words play, on one level, into the hands of the PAP, and on another, the forces of global capitalism that fostered, and approved of, Lee’s post-independence vision for Singaporean society. They would rather you forget, that you not question the alternative realities of what it could mean to be Singaporean. In this, Jom is quite steadfast in our need to resist.

Consider A History of the People’s Action Party 1985 - 2021, written by Shashi Jayakumar, the head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). Jayakumar was given privileged access to party members and internal documents, some from the National Archives.

In the book he discusses 1987’s Operation Spectrum, when Lee’s government detained 22 activists, church members, social workers, opposition volunteers and other do-gooders, claiming they were “Marxist conspirators” plotting to overthrow the state. One detainee spent over three years in jail.

Just two years before the Berlin Wall fell, and with the Communist Party of Malaya defanged and about to sign a peace treaty with Malaysia and Thailand, it was an outlandish claim. The government has never charged the 22 with a crime and, aside from their torture-induced confessions (many later recanted), has yet to offer conclusive proof of the plot.

Rather than interrogate the machinations that occurred behind the scenes, all Jayakumar offers the reader are irrelevant internal conversations in an attempt to defend the arrests. “According to Shashi the government found evidence of the connection between the 22 detainees and the Communist Party of Malaya,” Tommy Koh, Singapore’s ambassador-at-large, said on Facebook. “However, we are not shown this evidence.”

(Jayakumar was probably in a bind, given that his own father, a former PAP minister, was in the cabinet at the time. It’s a bit like asking Hunter Biden to write A History of Barack’s Presidency. The incestuousness of Singapore’s elite is a big impediment to a deeper understanding of ourselves.)

Though it has scholars doing good work, RSIS is vulnerable to propagating PAP falsehoods. There are likely structural reasons for this, given that the government funds the organisation and effectively controls its parent university, NTU.

For instance, in “Defending Singapore Against Foreign Interference”, Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman repeated two PAP allegations that have never been proven. “In the 1970s, the Eastern Sun newspaper had received funding from Chinese Communist elements to publish articles to shape the political attitudes in Singapore. The Singapore Herald newspaper had received funding from Southeast Asian elements to campaign against National Service.”

By stating them as fact, an academic institution had magically transformed apparent political skulduggery—Lee was in the middle of shutting down newspapers in Singapore—into gospel truth. Among the scholars who had previously cast doubt on these PAP allegations are Mary Turnbull, Jothie Rajah and Cherian George.

Perhaps most troublingly, in 2019, when Sudhir Vadaketh, Jom’s editor-in-chief, wrote to RSIS seeking clarification and an amendment, the editor claimed it was merely a difference in opinion. Meanwhile Jayakumar, Ralf Emmers, its dean, and Ong Keng Yong, its executive deputy chairman, ignored the problem. Four years on, the falsehoods remain on RSIS’s site.

Put another way, the reason the PAP wants you to forget some of Lee’s words is because of broken promises. Lee had long assured Singaporeans that their retirement funds, in the form of monies invested in public housing, would be protected. He was wrong.

The PAP adopts a similar ahistorical approach with societal ills, such as racism. One of 2021’s viral videos showed Tan Boon Lee, a senior lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Engineering, publicly admonishing Dave Parkash, of mixed Indian-Filipino ancestry, for dating a Thai-Chinese girl (who was filming them). “I have nothing against Indians, but I think it is racist for an Indian to marry a Chinese girl,” said Tan. He also told Parkash that he was “preying” on a Chinese girl and he should instead “marry an Indian”.

In an interview shortly after the incident, K Shanmugam, the home affairs and law minister, blamed “external developments” and “some things that have been happening within Singapore.”

No mention, unsurprisingly, of his hero Lee. “If your child brings back a boyfriend or a girlfriend of a different race, will you be delighted? I will answer you frankly. I do not think I will,” said Lee in 2004. In the 2011 book Hard Truths, Lee went further, saying that if his daughter wanted to marry a “black African”, he’d tell her, “You’re mad.”

Tan was recently given a S$6,000 fine and sentenced to five weeks in jail. But wasn’t he simply echoing the views of Lee?

Lee had long believed that the Chinese, in both nature and nurture, were intrinsically better than Malays. In 1967, he narrated a delightful hospital anecdote to illustrate that East Asians are genetically superior to South and South-east Asians. In 1965, he expounded on the cultural differences between Chinese and Malays: “One is a product of a civilisation which has gone through all its ups downs, of floods and famine and pestilence, breeding a people with very intense culture, with a belief in high performance, in sustained effort, in thrift and by nature [the Malays] with warm sunshine and bananas and coconuts, and therefore not with the same need to strive so hard. Now, these two societies really move at two different speeds. It’s like the difference between a high-revolution engine and a low-revolution engine.”

These were not shibboleths of the uncertain 1960s. In 1998: “I have said openly that if we were 100 percent Chinese, we would do better. But we are not and never will be, so we live with what we have.” In other words, poor old Lee himself had learned to “live with” his minority colleagues, including Shanmugam, Halimah Yacob, our current president, and Christopher de Souza, a Eurasian member of parliament. Yet, perhaps blinded by power, prestige, and pay, they all still knelt at his altar.

This is why, in numerous Jom essays, including “The Goh Report and the practice of streaming kids” and “Why did Singapore support the US-led invasion of Iraq?”, Lee is mentioned.

We try to keep it to a minimum. By not mentioning Lee, we ignore the historicity of our moment, and we potentially attribute too much to other subsequent actors and circumstances.

Finally, in recent years, journalists have indeed had to grapple with the challenges around the overexposure of right-wing, strong man leaders. The textbook example now is of Donald Trump, not simply in the media’s fascination with his celebrity but, more worryingly, the indulgence of his lies under some false notion of objectivity or bothsidesism. (This applies, to a lesser degree, to Narendra Modi and others too.)

The cult of Lee Kuan Yew is quite different. Singapore has never had a change of government (that might allow the other side to interrogate his legacy). Sure, the Albatross file is soon to be declassified, but these are crumbs thrown to the birds, fairly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, in a society without a Freedom of Information Act. Meanwhile, our media scene, which includes the bountiful spending by the government on advertising, is so heavily weighted in favour of the PAP.

And so while it’s important not to deify Lee, we should guard against the opposite reaction, the understandable desire to simply not talk about him—if we fall into that trap, we cede the narrative ground to a hegemonic power.

This editorial is by Jom’s team.