MCLC: Singapore's history wars

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Singapore's history wars
************************************************************

Source: East Asia Forum (4/30/14):
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2014/04/30/singapores-history-wars/#more-41521

Singapore’s history wars
By Geoff Wade, ANU

As we move towards 2015, a year that will mark Singapore’s 50th
anniversary as a nation, a battle over the past of that country is slowly
gaining steam.

The increasingly frail health of Lee Kuan Yew, the man depicted in the
establishment histories as the ‘father of Singapore’, is making this
battle more important for both sides.

The People’s Action Party (PAP) is heavily invested in ensuring that their
story remains the story of Singapore. And key to that story has been the
framework provided by the two-volume autobiography penned by Lee Kuan Yew,
prime minister from 1965 to 1990 and still today a member of the Singapore
Parliament. The Singapore Story and From Third World to First established
the base for the story, upon which have been laid down layer upon layer of
hagiographic books such as Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on
China, the United States, and the World and One Man’s View of the World,
together with Lee’s ‘collected works’ — The Papers of Lee Kuan Yew:
Speeches, Interviews and Dialogues 1950–1990 and 1990–2011.

The Singapore press — entirely state-controlled — has been a necessary
participant in this exercise, giving these histories acres of attention,
calculated to leave Singapore and the world with a very positive image of
a man who has in fact enjoyed a rather chequered reputation both
domestically and regionally. Further, as with Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Deng
Xiaoping, the history presented in Lee’s collected works is intended not
only to perpetuate memory of the individual but also to bolster the
legitimacy of the party that he led. Cadre histories such as Men in White
have cemented the PAP into this story.

However, the history as presented by the PAP party-state is now being
subject to unprecedented querying and interrogation <http://s-pores.com/>.
In part this has been facilitated by a weakening of the absolute power of
the PAP, while the imminent demise of Lee is not unrelated. Civil society
groups are also re-emerging from the destruction wrought upon them by the
PAP in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, a new generation of Singapore
historians <http://sogang.academia.edu/KahSengLoh> is beginning to sieve
archival and oral history materials, finding stories
<http://www.nus.edu.sg/nuspress/subjects/politics/978-9971-69-692-4.html>
that do not gel with the accounts fed to them through state history. New
alternative histories
<http://books.google.com.au/books?id=VQyX-pExxvMC&printsec=frontcover&sourc
e=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false> are thereby emerging,
alongside more critical blogs <http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/?s=history>.

One of the most sensitive of the issues recently brought to prominence
through this new history is Operation Coldstore, a police action
conducted in 1963 prior to the creation of Malaysia, a state within which
Singapore was soon to be incorporated. This action — planned jointly by
the decolonising British and Lee Kuan Yew — eviscerated the Singapore Left
through the arrest and detention of more than 130 individuals and allowed
Lee to dominate politics on the island.

A recent set of volumes
<http://gbgerakbudaya.com/bookshop/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&pr
oducts_id=1959> in English and Chinese, edited by some of the Coldstore
detainees, reveals the degree to which this was as much an effort to
remove Lee’s political opponents as a security operation. The volumes’
suggestion that the PAP under Lee could only survive through British
assistance in eliminating his opposition brings into question much about
PAP rule over the last 50 years. Responses from some establishment
defenders 
<http://www.ipscommons.sg/index.php/categories/featured/159-revising-the-re
visionists-operation-coldstore-in-history> have been scathing of the
volumes and their conclusions, while state-controlled media has simply
ignored the books and associated launch activities.

The 1987 round of detentions of ‘Marxist’ Singaporeans through Operation
Spectrum under the Internal Security Act has also attracted renewed
historical attention, with detainees such as Teo Soh Lung penning an
account of her detention and continuing to write of her experiences
<http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/04/back-at-whitley-26-years-ago-on-19
-april-1988/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feedper%20
cent3A+theonlinecitizen+per%20cent28theonlinecitizenper%20cent29>.
In response to the new histories being penned on the Left, the PAP is
employing state media and particularly television to depict the threats
<http://www.channelnewsasia.com/tv/tvshows/daysofrage/hock-lee-bus-riots/96
8850.html> which it says the Singapore state faced. Responses from the
revisionist historians <http://minimyna.wordpress.com/> suggest that the
PAP is simply using these programmes to validate its actions against the
Left over this period.

Perhaps most threatening to the PAP story is a suggestion, now gaining
traction, that Lee Kuan Yew deceived all of the people of Singapore in
1957. While in most administrations a lying politician would not warrant
even a yawn, the PAP is demanding more from its parliamentarians, with the
current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong asserting
<http://news.asiaone.com/print/News/Latestper%20cent2BNews/Singapore/Story/
A1Story20130713-436915.html> that he would dismiss from the parliament
anyone who had lied to the Singaporean people.

It appears now, from recently revealed documents, that Lee Senior ought to
be subject to this sanction. Australian and British documents
<http://www.eastasiaforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/1957-archives.pdf>
 both affirm that during his visit to London in April 1957 Lee Kuan Yew
colluded with the British in arrangements to preclude detained Leftists of
his party from competing in upcoming elections. After returning to
Singapore, Lee publicly stated
<http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19570600.pdf> that
these restraints were imposed by Britain, that he was opposed to them, and
that the PAP must fight to counter them. Such apparent chicanery does not
sit well with PAP history of itself as a squeaky clean party.

The PAP’s reticence in terms of revealing its historical cabinet decisions
is also attracting some attention. Following urging by the opposition
Workers’ Party chief Low Thia Khiang that the Singapore government should
release to the public
<http://m.todayonline.com/singapore/release-all-past-cabinet-records-may-no
t-lead-better-outcomes-lawrence-wong> cabinet records 30 years old or
more, Lawrence Wong, Senior Minister of State for Ministry of
Communications and Information, closed off the discussion by stating that
‘such an open policy may not necessarily lead to better outcomes’. Again,
the power that derives from maintaining a monopoly on key historical
sources has been underlined.

History has always been a sensitive topic in this island republic, and
been almost fully controlled by the PAP. The alternative history writing
now occurring reflects the resurgent influence and appeal of the Left
within Singapore, represented in Parliament by the new seats won by the
Workers’ Party. This new history is proving to be a key tool by which the
monolith of PAP narrative and thereby the party’s arrogated legitimacy is
being queried. Such questioning will prove to be an essential element of
the political pluralism towards which Singapore is now moving, even if
this direction is not everyone’s idea
<http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110406-
271953.html> of a good thing.

Geoff Wade is a Visiting Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy at
The Australian National University.