“This is true. We have had to adjust, to deviate temporarily from ideals and norms. This is a heavy price. We have over a hundred political detainees, men against whom we are unable to prove anything in a court of law. Nearly 50 of them are men who gave us a great deal of anxiety during the years of Confrontation because they were Malay extremists. Your life and this dinner would not be what it is if my colleagues and I had decided to play it according to the rules of the game.
(Speech to the Singapore Advocates and Solicitors Society, March 18, 1967; text on page 414)
No end to violence
Whatever the justification, however, Lee’s tough stance would attract criticism from liberal commentators abroad. They portrayed Singapore as an Orwellian state, with Lee cast as Big Brother, ever-ready to hector and punish his people into compliance with its all encompassing laws. Singapore, the joke goes, is a “fine” city. Others harped about it being “squeaky clean”.
Lee was unmoved by these barbs. His confidence that he had taken the right course of action was bolstered perhaps by his experience of societies riven by violence and lawlessness abroad.
The rising cycle of violence was not limited to developing countries, but was a mounting problem in developed ones as well.
“Violence is part of the daily ration in the underdeveloped world. But it has spread now to the established, developed world. Violence has also become a daily recurrence.
“It is said that the Americans always had that streak of violence in their historical makeup. It was part of the saga of their Wild West. Now, in addition to Vietnam, there are riots, burnings, shootings and bombings in American cities. I was at Harvard last October. The SDS, Students for Democratic Society, bombed the Harvard International Centre. Why? I did not know. I do not think the mad bombers really know why they perpetrated this mad act of destruction. A booster dose of violence has been injected into the veins of American society as the two million American draftees have gone and returned from Vietnam.
“The blacks coming back from frontline combat duties in Vietnam are militant. Having learned how to fight with M16s, hand-grenades, mortars, tanks and helicopters, they exploit these techniques and tactics in America’s cities in their battle for equality. The whites also are now prone to violence. The result is mad bombings in New York and other big American cities.
“I attended the 25th anniversary of the United Nations last October. It was bedlam. Every head of mission had a security squad clamped on him. And when President Nixon came down to speak at the UN, 3,000 Secret Service agents descended on New York from all over America and covered the whole of the UN building and its precincts. This was not a joke. Bombs could have exploded.
“Strange, but perhaps unavoidable, with instant television through communication satellites and other mass media, this mood for violence has been transmitted across the Atlantic into Britain. Twenty-five years ago, when I learned British constitutional law, my lecturers used to tell me how different, how tolerant and non-violent British society was. The British brought about change peacefully, unlike the French, who always sought change through violence and revolution. Hence, British laws were liberal and made sacrosanct the rights and liberties of the individual.
“How different Britain is today. It is the right of the government to govern that sadly needs protection. …
“We also have some who espouse the compassionate line, but for mercenary reasons. When we introduced the Bill to abolish the jury, one lawyer in the Bar Council delegation said to the select committee that since juries were reluctant to convict a person of murder, we should abolish the death penalty but not abolish the jury! There was a sad imbalance in his sense of moral priorities, a distortion of one’s distinction between right and wrong.”
(National Day event, August 30, 1971)
Which way to safe streets?
For Lee then, the art of government, which included maintaining law and order in society, was a question of balancing the interests of individuals with the collective good of society. This sometimes required compromises and deviations from liberal ideals, he argued in an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, in 1995.
“Good governance, even today, requires a balance between competing claims by upholding fundamental truths: that there is right and wrong, good and evil. If everyone gets pornography on a satellite dish the size of a saucer, then governments around the world will have to do something about it, or we will destroy our young and with them human civilisation. …
“The ideas of individual supremacy and the right to free expression, when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. Those who work a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model.”
Instead, Lee believed that the alternative approach he espoused, where governments laid down clear laws and enforced them firmly but fairly, was better designed to help achieve a stable society, as well as go some way towards moulding a responsible citizenry. Singapore’s experience was telling.
“I am surprised that people are surprised that it works. Why should you be surprised that it works? The other way, we would still be where we were.
“Today, I’m not saying we’re litter-free. Especially in areas like the public corridors in housing estates where nobody can see them, they just throw away the litter. But in the public places where they can be seen and fined, they’ve stopped. Now, there’s no reason why they can’t also stop for their own passageways, but they don’t, right? We haven’t reached that stage yet.
“I would hope, one day, standards reach that point where, instead of punishing one in 100, you may have to punish one in 10,000. But I would not dare to make such a prediction when this will be, because it depends upon how the policy evolves and whether it is pursued with vigour and with subtlety, so that each generation is able to produce better results with their children.”
The first prime minister of independent Singapore, swamped by reporters as he leaves the Governor’s Residence soon after the PAP won the 1959 elections.
10
Minding the Media
1968. Richard Nixon had just been elected the 37th president of the United States and was announcing his Cabinet line-up live on television. For Americans, this was not just a significant political event but, at least for some, also the first opportunity to have a go at a new president. It was quintessentially American television, but it would make quite an impact on one Singaporean viewer. Immediately after the announcement, the CBS network rolled in a panel of experts to pronounce on the new Cabinet, with daggers already drawn.
Lee Kuan Yew, then on a visit to the United States, watched the proceedings, both amazed and amused. He would recount the episode often in years to come, including at a talk to pressmen in Singapore in 1972.
“As Mr Nixon presented his first Cabinet, CBS had a panel of very quick, agile and nimble minds, ready to go. The moment Nixon was over, this panel of demolishers came on. They included John Kenneth Galbraith of The Affluent Society. He has a very felicitous turn of phrase which, if turned against you, can be quite waspish.
“He and most of the others began to shoot every one of Nixon’s team down. It made quite an impact on me. The Governor of Massachusetts, a Mr Volpe, was appointed Secretary for Transport. The Governor had been voted for, and had won his election. Most probably he would have beaten Galbraith if ever Galbraith stood for election against him. Galbraith said, ‘As for Governor Volpe, Massachusetts can well do better without him when he goes to Washington.’ I am paraphrasing him. I cannot convey the derisive nuances.
“This panel did not know who would be in Mr Nixon’s team, or what job each member would be doing until it was announced that night. The panel had no time for considered judgements. The attitude was one of showbiz: ‘Right, let’s have some fun.’ They shot the Nixon team down like clay pigeons �
� or so they thought.
“But in the end Mr Nixon won in spite of a hostile press and TV. I was interested to see how Time magazine quickly switched over support from McGovern and hailed the victor.
“Now, if in a developed society they can have such disorders aggravated, if not partly caused by the mass media, commentators and journalists in developing countries should not unthinkingly toss poison and pollution into the pool.”
(Speech to the Singapore Press Club, November 15, 1972; text on page 431)
That spectacle of television theatre was to reinforce Lee’s view of the power of the media to so adroitly and cavalierly mock and debase a political leadership that had just been elected by the people. Who were these pundits to scoff at the people’s chosen leader and his team? On whose authority did they speak? Who gave them the mandate? he wondered.
Reaching for the knuckle-dusters
Over the years, Lee would keep close track of the outpourings of the press, domestic and foreign, watching for such poison being tossed into the political pool in Singapore. He noted the lines they were pushing, the social trends they backed, the causes they upheld.
“Every morning, my task begins with reading five, four now, newspapers. It can be tiresome. I note the scurrilous, the scandalous. I can live with that. But when any newspaper pours a daily dose of language, cultural or religious poison, I put my knuckle-dusters on. Do not believe you can beat the state.”
(Speech to the Singapore Press Club, November 15, 1972; text on page 431)
The knuckle-dusters were to be used not a few times over the years.
Lee’s antipathy to some sections of the press, notably the English-language press, which had backed the British colonial authorities against his fledgling party in the 1950s, was coloured by his early years as an opposition politician. But that notwithstanding, his attitude towards the press was based firmly on the view that, being unelected and bearing no responsibility to the people, journalists, columnists and commentators had neither a role nor the right to lead the country in directions contrary to that envisioned by its elected leaders. This view he formed fairly early on in his political career. It was a belief that was to be reinforced by his experience in dealing with the press, at home and abroad, over the years. Many a time, he would haul journalists or their editors over the coals, or take newspapers to task.
Although this raised eyebrows abroad, he was unapologetic. A fledgling state, he would contend, could not adopt a laissez-faire attitude to the press. Bitter experience had shown what happened when, unwittingly or otherwise, the media had swayed popular sentiment and roused political passions. Issues of race, language and religion, all of which smouldered beneath the surface, especially in Singapore’s early years, were easily stoked. Several times, these had boiled over, spilling blood in the streets.
“In 1950, the publication of a photograph in a Malay newspaper of a Muslim girl in a convent, with the Virgin Mary in the background, caused riots. It was known as the jungle girl case. A Dutch girl, given to a Muslim Malay woman to look after, as the Japanese overran Southeast Asia, was rediscovered by her Dutch mother. She claimed her return. The girl had become a Muslim convert. The court, presided by an English judge, ordered the girl to be sent to a convent pending the outcome of the trial. There were four days of rioting. Some 50 Europeans were slaughtered and many more maimed by Malay and Indian Muslims. Their sin was to be European Christians, like the judge. The police, then mainly Muslims, just looked on.
“And again, on July 21, 1964, a sustained campaign in a Malay language newspaper, falsely alleging the suppression of the rights of the Malay and Muslim minority by the Chinese majority, led to riots in which 36 people were killed and many more injured, during a Prophet Mohammed’s birthday procession. …
“I used to believe that … with higher standards of education, these problems will diminish. But watching Belfast, Brussels and Montreal, rioting over religion and language, I wonder whether such phenomena can ever disappear.”
(Speech to the International Press Institute, June 9, 1971; text on page 425)
Foreign events, too, he was aware, could tug at the heartstrings of Singaporeans, who still held strong sentiments for their ethnic kin in their countries of origin. To him, denying this was sheer folly. These passions would have to be managed, and the ethnic communities in Singapore made aware that their lot lay with Singapore, not elsewhere.
“12,000 Sikhs from Punjab form one of the smallest communities in Singapore. They are split into contending factions, reflecting the contest between contending groups in the Punjab, of which they have heard on radio and have read in Punjabi language news-sheets. A recent fast to death by a Sikh leader in the Punjab to get Chandigarh given to the Sikhs generated tension among Sikhs in Singapore. True, nearly 60 per cent of the adult Sikhs were born and bred in the Punjab and emigrated to Singapore after their cultural values were settled. I believe, and hope, the second generation Sikh will be different.”
(Speech to the International Press Institute, June 9, 1971; text on page 425)
No free market of ideas
Given the potent mix of race, language and religion in Singapore, Lee believed that the Western notion of the press as an independent “fourth estate” to check and balance the government, and operating in a free market of ideas, could not be applied to this country.
“From British times, the Singapore press was never the fourth estate. And in Singapore’s experience, because of our volatile racial and religious mix, the American concept of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, instead of producing harmonious enlightenment, has time and again led to riots and bloodshed.”
(Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 14, 1988; text on page 438)
The media’s role
Lee in Helsinki for the 20th Assembly of the International Press Institute in 1971, joining other world leaders in discussing the role of the mass media.
Lee has always been very concerned about the media’s role in shaping popular attitudes, especially in developing countries. At the International Press Institute in Helsinki in 1971, he set out the essence of his approach in dealing with the press in Singapore.
“We want the mass media to reinforce, not to undermine, the cultural values and social attitudes being inculcated in our schools and universities. The mass media can create a mood in which people become keen to acquire the knowledge, skills and disciplines of advanced countries. Without these, we can never hope to raise the standards of living of our people.
“If they are to develop, people in new countries cannot afford to imitate the fads and fetishes of the contemporary West. The strange behaviour of demonstration and violence-prone young men and women in wealthy America, seen on TV and the newspapers, are not relevant to the social and economic circumstances of new underdeveloped countries. The importance of education, the need of stability and work discipline, the acquisition of skills and expertise, sufficient men trained in the sciences and technology, and their ability to adapt this knowledge and techniques to fit the conditions of their country – these are vital factors for progress. But when the puritan ethics of hard work, thrift and discipline are at a discount in America, and generally in the West, the mass media reflecting this malaise can, and does, confuse the young in new countries.
“We have this problem in a particularly acute form in Singapore. We are an international junction for ships, aircraft and telecommunications by cable and satellite. People from the richer countries of the West, their magazines, newspapers, television and films, all come in. … It is impossible to insulate Singaporeans from the outside world. One consoling thought is Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that crossroads like the Lebanon benefit from the stimulation of ideas and inventions from abroad.
“Western investments in industries in Singapore mean importing Western machinery. With the machinery come Western engineers and managers, and their families. They live in Singapore, reinforcing by personal contact the impact of Western mass media. To
take in Western science, technology and industry, we find that we cannot completely exclude the undesirable ethos of the contemporary West. This ethos flakes off on Singaporeans. So we must educate Singaporeans not to imitate the more erratic behaviour of the West.
“Few viewers and readers of the mass media in new countries know of the torment amongst Western intellectuals. Some Americans question where their bureaucratised science and technology, their military-industrial complex, are leading them. Even fewer read of the torment of American intellectuals who question the wisdom of exporting this science and technology to the impoverished people of the underdeveloped world, when it has wrought such havoc on America, dehumanising an opulent society. But the underdeveloped have no choice. Whatever the side effects of importing Western science and technology, not to do so will be worse.
(International Press Institute, June 9, 1971; text on page 425)
As he saw it, the press could also be manipulated by foreign powers out to influence developments in the country. The ideological and strategic contests among the major powers in the region resulted in their being prepared to spend time and money to gain influence in countries throughout the region. To do so, they were not averse to whipping up passions over the airwaves, or to setting up newspapers through proxies, to stir up sentiments over issues of culture, language and ideology. He would not brook this.
“My colleagues and I have the responsibility to neutralise their intentions. In such a situation, freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primary purposes of an elected government. The government has taken, and will from time to time have to take, firm measures to ensure that, despite divisive forces of different cultural values and lifestyles, there is enough unity of purpose to carry the people of Singapore forward to higher standards of life, without which the mass media cannot thrive.”
Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas Page 27