Should the late Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore be eulogized or damned?

[BrainGlutton]

Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 through 1990, died March 23. He built and ran a state both prosperous and authoritarian. Western leaders are eulogizing him – Obama called him a “true giant of history” and Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger attended his funeral.

Does he really rate that? His human-rights record was . . . better than it could have been, but not exemplary. I’m sure the public caning of Michael Fay in 1994 probably had a lot of Americans wishing that could be done to punks here, but you have to look at a bigger picture. It’s more than a strict penal system; Lee stifled democracy, put down organized labor, muzzled the press, muzzled all free public debate, relentlessly and ruthlessly crushed all his opponents, including fellow founding fathers of independent Singapore, and ruled by fear.

Patrick L. Smith writes:

No machine-gun murders in public squares for Lee. No stadiums full of dissidents awaiting their turn to be tortured, no political prisoners thrown into the ocean from helicopters. All of Lee’s opponents kept their fingernails.

I watched Lee up close and very personal for many years, and more about this in a minute. His tactics always reminded me of the guard who beats his charges with a bag of oranges so the organs are ruined but the bruises do not show. In the custody of Lee’s goons, you stood naked in front of an air-conditioner set to max cool while they doused you with ice water all night. You spent your life eating lychee nuts on an outer island while your children grew up without you a ferryboat’s ride away.

<snip>

By the time I arrived in Singapore, in 1981, Lee had intimidated, coerced, blackmailed, imprisoned, co-opted or exiled all but the most quixotic of his political adversaries. I used to visit a doctor named Lee Siew Choh, a Barisan Socialis founder and a veteran of many wars with the prime minister, who kept a quiet practice next to the American embassy. From this Lee, a delightfully bemused old man, I got vitamin B shots and history lessons. Internal security goons followed me to and fro whenever I went to see him.

But the game had changed by then. The bare-knuckles battles with those opposed to an increasingly right-wing regime had given way to the Cold War social contract in effect in every one of Washington East Asian satellites. You, citizen, will get an air conditioner, a refrigerator, a television and maybe a small car and a subsidized apartment. In exchange you will forego your voice and leave all the politics to us.

“Shut up and change the channel” was my shorthand for this arrangement when visitors came. This is how the Cold War was fought in East Asia and it held for decades—utterly cynical but never any surprise in cultures of poverty.

Lee’s Singapore was an especially interesting case. Having demolished any semblance of independent labor unions, put the press on a very short leash and commandeered education to turn out graduates the way GM turns out parts, the task was psychological—how to keep an increasingly affluent elite in line when they grew restless with the bribe at the heart of it all.

The preferred instrument was a kind of totalized fear by the time I took up residence. The PAP, the ruling party then as now, thought nothing of ruining careers in business, politics or any other sphere. Nothing was infra-dig, and everyone had their stories. I knew a senior labor official who went silent when police detectives tailed him and then threatened to inform his wife of his late-night peccadilloes. He had three children and no choice.

Jim Sleeper writes:

Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee certainly had truths to impart to liberals: Because democracy is messy, its public virtues and beliefs do need assiduous cultivation. “You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools,” Lee said in an interview for Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas. He might have added, rightly enough, that most people even want some authority in their lives. Beyond that, a little island with no natural resources has scant wiggle room. Unlike the sprawling U.S., Singapore certainly has had no blunder room. That makes Lee’s iron grip seem admirable.

But Lee also had many truths to disguise, and, for that, he needed apologists. Thomas Plate, the journalist who became a Distinguished Scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of the Giants Of Asia book series, of whom Lee Kuan Yew was the first, assured readers of his long account of the man’s thinking in the Straits Times newspaper that Lee “hated… uninformed debate,” because he preferred “free, frank speech” among leaders who are well informed and able to debate and govern, over the idea that everyone has a right to speak, no matter how ignorantly or dishonestly.

A veteran Singaporean government manager told me that he considers this distinction “cringe worthy” because Lee had no use for free, frank speech even among his peers. Remember, he crushed his fellow founding fathers. A Singaporean studying at Yale e-mailed me that “Plate is too uncritical about a supposed zero-sum game between ‘truth-telling’ and ‘equal’ speech. Liberal democracy believes in the wisdom of crowds, that people refine their political thinking through the act of participating in politics. But the crowds are going to remain dumb if they don’t speak. (Funny how dumb has that double meaning).”

It’s not so funny. Elites in the United States and at Davos, unnerved by the western civic decay that they themselves have caused, are dancing desperately up Singapore’s garden paths seeking elegant reassurance from Lee Kuan Yew’s achievements that ultimately, “the people” can and must be ruled. But global elites can barely rule themselves.

Let’s hope that they’ll grasp the point of the joke about Lee that tells of two dogs swimming in the waters between Singapore and Borneo, but in opposite directions. The dog headed towards Borneo asks the other one why he’s swimming to Singapore. The answer: “Ah, the shopping, the housing, the air-conditioning, the health care, the schools. But why are you going to Borneo?” The dog swimming away from Singapore answers: “Oh, I just want to bark.”

[The_Joker_and_the_Thief]

It seems that the debate over Lee’s legacy, to a greater extent than most other political debates here, revolves around ideals and not facts, and thus the two sides are going to be even more split than usual.

But personally, I don’t really consider democracy or free speech a virtue in and of itself, merely a means to an end. It’s a composite value for the things that really matter–safety, prosperity and wellbeing, or as Lee puts it, “homes, medicine, jobs, schools”. These values can usually best be accomplished by democracy and free speech, but if they can be reached without them, that’s fine too. So I think he’s a great statesmen, because he made life better for most people, and life worse only for the small subset of those who strongly disagreed with him. But at the same time, I recognize that someone else could hold a very different view of him without being wrong.

If he is to be damned, though, he’s probably pretty far down the list. There are many more brutal dictators out there who won’t even be remembered because they weren’t competent enough to be build a civilization worth anything, so it’d be a pretty perverse irony if Lee goes down in the history books as a dictator.

[PhillyGuy]

@BrainGlutton

Western leaders are eulogizing him – Obama called him a “true giant of history” and Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger attended his funeral.

I’m not going to criticize them for staying positive after the man dies. But I still can’t believe Joe Biden called him, last year, the wisest man in the Orient. And then the gaffe was supposed to be the word orient, and not the over the top praise of an authoritarian ruler.

For people in charge, in countries that don’t have it, multiparty wide-franchise democracy is risky. Hardly anyone at the US Constitutional Convention (only Franklin, AFAIK) was willing to risk it. And the powers that be, in most of the countries in LKY’s region, haven’t been willing to risk it either. Expecting Lee to turn Singapore fully democratic, overnight, would be so unrealistic an expectation that I wouldn’t criticize him on that. However, I do judge reformist strongmen on how clearly they put their country on the road to a Westminister-like system.

Lee’s main excuse seems to have been, first, that Singapore was too small for multi-party rotation in office, and, second, that there was too big of an Islamic minority. Maybe someone from Singapore can explain to me that I’ve missed some other excuses. But if these are the biggest excuses, they actually aren’t very good. And I say that as someone who might grudgingly accept such excuses if the population was, say, 50,000, or if the country was evenly divided between two hostile religions. But it is not.

I suppose that Singapore will become an multi-party democracy in the next 20 years. But there no good reason why it is politically 30 years or so behind Taiwan and South Korea, other than this one man who was overly afraid of his own people.

[BrainGlutton]

@The_Joker_and_the_Thief

But personally, I don’t really consider democracy or free speech a virtue in and of itself, merely a means to an end. It’s a composite value for the things that really matter–safety, prosperity and wellbeing, or as Lee puts it, “homes, medicine, jobs, schools”. These values can usually best be accomplished by democracy and free speech, but if they can be reached without them, that’s fine too. So I think he’s a great statesmen, because he made life better for most people, and life worse only for the small subset of those who strongly disagreed with him. But at the same time, I recognize that someone else could hold a very different view of him without being wrong.

But, don’t you think the price might have been too high? Smith again:

First, while Singapore’s material progress is beyond question, the argument that democracy and economic advances are mutually exclusive rests on paper-thin logic of the kind Lee did all he could to promote. One finds the damage wrought by this thinking more or less everywhere in Asia.

The true point here cannot be spoken plainly but must be. It is democracy and neoliberal capitalism that cancel one another out. And you cannot ask for a balder example than Singapore: Lee disemboweled political parties and democratic trade unions in large part to make Singapore attractive to foreign investors.

Second, there is the invisible violence noted above. Pervasive fear has produced a society marked by a pathology. At the risk of generality, the Singaporean character is malformed. Realizing one’s humanity with any wholeness is next to impossible. At bottom the condition is one of social psychology.

<snip>

A fitting coda to the life of LKY arrived over the weekend. One Amos Yee, a 17-year-old Singaporean, posted a YouTube video titled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead.” In it Yee dressed down the great statesman as power-hungry, malicious, and deceptive, “a horrible person because everyone is afraid that if they say something they will get in trouble.”

Yee was reported to the police by a fellow student Saturday and by Sunday the video segment was erased and Yee was under arrest. Under Singapore’s penal code he could face three years’ imprisonment if the case goes to trial.

“Lee was a dictator but managed to fool most of the world into thinking he was democratic… by granting Singaporeans the opportunity to vote to make it seem like we have freedom of choice,” the video concluded. Well said, Amos. Be brave, and you will have an easier time looking yourself in the mirror, even if it is on an outer island.

[BrainGlutton]

@PhillyGuy

Lee’s main excuse seems to have been, first, that Singapore was too small for multi-party rotation in office . . .

How does that make any sense? Many functional republics, and practically all of them before the United States, have been much smaller. In fact, the United States was a radical experiment when it started out because it was the first big republic in all of human history (unless you count the Roman Republic, which was really only a republic to citizens who lived close enough to Rome to attend the assemblies).

@PhillyGuy

. . . and, second, that there was too big of an Islamic minority.

:rolleyes: And Apartheid South Africa had too big of a black majority.

[Hector_St_Clare]

Singapore is essentially a city-state, not a normal size country. (It has a significant population, but it’s still a city-state). It’s not possible for a large country to model its economy after Singapore, simply because the kind of sectors that contribute heavily to Singapore’s economy aren’t scalable. Singapore is probably a nice place to live, but it isn’t particularly useful as a model for, say, Malaysia or Indonesia.

Beyond that, probably Singapore’s biggest problem is that they have the world’s lowest fertility rate after Hong Kong. (Their second biggest is that they have higher economic inequality than America, which is like saying you have more executions than North Korea). As nice as Singapore may be to live in, in a few generations there aren’t going to be many Singaporeans around.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

I’m not sure Lee Kuan Yew should be described as a “neoliberal” of any sort-Singapore has a fairly good welfare state including extensive public housing and universal health care as well as extensive state support towards economic development, if anything he’s best described as a neo-Bismarckian paternalist. Incidentally the same can be said of most other Asian conservative parties such as the LDP, Saenuri, and Kuomintang which generally have less of an ideological obsession with unfettered capitalism than its Anglosphere or European counterparts. Nor is Singapore particularly alone in this-Japan has had LDP dominance for decades while Venezuela obviously is a similar dominant party state.

[the_diego]

He was a success as far as as Singapore is concerned. But he likes to snipe at other countries, mainly about issues already known to everyone. He was a doddering fool as far as I’m concerned. My country had someone like him before, Ferdinand Marcos. And south Korea had Park Chung Hee, and Indonesia had Soeharto. Fvck dictators.

[elbows]

Universal health care? Um, no.
Public housing? Um, no again.

The government was responsible for tearing down the old slums and replacing them with modern housing estates, yes. And there was a time when you could only get access to a flat if married, but those days are long passed. Buying a flat only entitles you to 99yrs of ownership, not complete ownership. And you do have to pay, no welfare state I’m afraid.

In 50 yrs he took his nation from an average income of $500 to an average income of $50k, so not too shabby. His country has little resources beyond a port, is a small city state and even depends on its neighbour for fresh water. Yet he has always run a surplus budget, has four official languages, three distinct religions and ethnicities, who all live in peace with each other. It is modern, prosperous, clean and crime free. The people educated and content, enjoying a standard of living that makes them the envy of their neighbours.

It’s not for us to judge LKY, it’s for the S’poreans, and they just spent a week eulogizing him. I’m going with their opinion.

No form of government is perfect or without flaws. His governance is to be admired in my eyes.

(Yes, his democracy differs from prototypical American democracy. But then, so does his culture and his country! )

[PhillyGuy]

@BrainGlutton

How does that make any sense? Many functional republics, and practically all of them before the United States, have been much smaller. . . .

I agree with you on the too small. This short book is my source for what I call Lee’s excuses for single-party rule:

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the...

As for the United States, I’d agree with calling it a mature multi-party democracy today (with flaws). But I don’t want it to look like we’re saying America’s system is the greatest, or anything close to that. Probably you would agree.

The US Constitution is rife with distrust-the-masses thinking, and is an attempt to stave off democracy. It sets up a powerful president who gets selected by an elite, riff-raff free electoral college. The branch closest to being democratic in the original US Constitution, the House of Representatives, is arguably the least powerful (cannot confirm nominees, try impeachments, or ratify treaties). If America today gives those with alternative viewpoints a bigger seat at the government table than does Singapore, it’s only because we’ve rejected some of the distrust of the people seen in founders of both the US and Singapore.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@elbows

Universal health care? Um, no.
Public housing? Um, no again.

The government was responsible for tearing down the old slums and replacing them with modern housing estates, yes. And there was a time when you could only get access to a flat if married, but those days are long passed. Buying a flat only entitles you to 99yrs of ownership, not complete ownership. And you do have to pay, no welfare state I’m afraid.

Erhm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore#Overvie

Singapore has a non-modified universal healthcare system where the government ensures affordability of healthcare within the public health system, largely through a system of compulsory savings, subsidies, and price controls. Singapore’s system uses a combination of compulsory savings from payroll deductions to provide subsidies within a nationalised health insurance plan known as Medisave. Within Medisave, each citizen accumulates funds that are individually tracked, and such funds can be pooled within and across an entire extended family. The vast majority of Singapore citizens have substantial savings in this scheme. One of three levels of subsidy is chosen by the patient at the time of the healthcare episode.

A key principle of Singapore’s national health scheme is that no medical service is provided free of charge, regardless of the level of subsidy, even within the public healthcare system. This mechanism is intended to reduce the over-utilisation of healthcare services, a phenomenon often seen in fully subsidised universal health insurance systems.[citation needed] Out-of-pocket charges vary considerably for each service and level of subsidy. At the highest level of subsidy, although each out-of-pocket expense is typically small, costs can accumulate and become substantial for patients and families. At the lowest level, the subsidy is in effect nonexistent, and patients are treated like private patients, even within the public system.

A welfare state doesn’t imply “free of charge”-most government social programs in the US as well as in Europe require its users to pay something as is the case with Social Security, Medicare, or even subsidized housing.

[elbows]

Regardless of what you believe, that ‘forced savings’ they are forced to use when ill, doubles as retirement funding. Insurance providers are as ruthless as in America and as expensive. So people do go bankrupt to cover medical costs for family, or use up their entire retirement savings.

Sorry, that ain’t universal healthcare, by any measure.

[PhillyGuy]

@elbows

Insurance providers are as ruthless as in America and as expensive.

Ruthless is a pure matter of opinion I can’t address.

As expensive? Really?

Singapore - Health care is 4.7 percent of GNP
US - Health care is 17.9 percent of GNP

Source for above: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS

And at the polyclinics, an average outpatient consultation fee is about S$8

Those 8 Singapore dollars equate to US$6. Compare that to the US$25 copay I pay, for one visit, to my family practice physician, who also receives about US$92 from my insurer. By the way, both my insurer and her employer are non-profit.

MRI’s are rather costly in Singapore. That prevents the overutilization seen in the US, where life expectancy is 4 years lower.

The Singapore political opposition has claimed that Singaporeans are at risk of medical bankruptcy. But according to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, there isn’t a single documented case of such a bankruptcy actually occurring. See pages 2 and 62 here:

AffordableExcellencePDF.pdf

Sorry, that ain’t universal healthcare, by any measure.

I usually don’t make a big thing of vocabulary. But you are totally redefining universal. In the past universal health coverage meant that everyone was covered. It never meant socialized medicine or zero co-pays.

Good medical care is expensive. And if you try to hide that by make it free through taxes, there will be overutilization and long lines. You can’t get around that.

Freedom of speech? Singapore is mediocre. But on health care, it is outstanding. Co-payments are means-tested, so everyone can get good care they can afford. One way or another, though, they are going to pay a significant portion of their income on health care. This in inevitable in a system where everyone actually gets the care.

[BrainGlutton]

"But we either believe in democracy or we don’t. If we do, then, we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from the any democratic processes, other than by the ordinary law of the land, should be allowed… If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought, and no excuse, whether of security, should allow a government to be deterred from doing what it knows to be right, and what it must know to be right… "

“If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law - if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states - then what is it?… If we are to survive as a free democracy, then we must be prepared, in principle, to concede to our enemies - even those who do not subscribe to our views - as much constitutional rights as you concede yourself.”

• Lee Kuan Yew, 1955

“Repression, Sir is a habit that grows. I am told it is like making love-it is always easier the second time! The first time there may be pangs of conscience, a sense of guilt. But once embarked on this course with constant repetition you get more and more brazen in the attack. All you have to do is to dissolve organizations and societies and banish and detain the key political workers in these societies. Then miraculously everything is tranquil on the surface. Then an intimidated press and the government-controlled radio together can regularly sing your praises, and slowly and steadily the people are made to forget the evil things that have already been done, or if these things are referred to again they’re conveniently distorted and distorted with impunity, because there will be no opposition to contradict.”

– Lee Kuan Yew, 1956

“If I were in authority in Singapore indefinitely without having to ask those who are governed whether they like what is being done, then I have not the slightest doubt that I could govern much more effectively in their interests.”

– Lee Kuan Yew, 1960

“Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.”

– Lee Kuan Yew, 1971

“We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins.”

– Lee Kuan Yew, 1986

“I have never been over concerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.”

“Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister…She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac…Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”

– Lee Kuan Yew, 1997

[What_Exit]

Singapore was a nice place to visit. Clean streets and alleys and seemingly happy people and merchants. I went there while in the Navy. It was affordable unlike Japan and so much cleaner and safer than South Korea, Thailand and especially the Philippines as to not even be worthy of comparisons. It was actually nicer than Hong Kong. It seems like the country works and works better than most.

Also what was with the Jim Sleeper quote: “Like Giuliani and Stalin,” Was he really equating Rudy G to Stalin? Or what did I miss?

[PhillyGuy]

@What_Exit

Also what was with the Jim Sleeper quote: “Like Giuliani and Stalin,” Was he really equating Rudy G to Stalin? Or what did I miss?

Yes. Some of his criticisms were on target, but the comparisons with far worse leaders were ridiculous.

For example:

“Lee Kuan Yew was quite a bit more like Stalin than like Roosevelt.”

I don’t know what that means, but I do know it is wrong.

Take Singapore’s controlled media. It’s true they don’t rip into the government. But most world news stories are the same ones you would read in a free country. An example:

Latest World Press Freedom Index shows 'drastic decline'; Singapore ranked at...

And note the wide variety of views in the comments at the bottom of the link immediately above.

In Stalin’s Russia, by contrast, most news stories were twisted to fit the local ideology. And you would never had read anything like this, about Stalin, in Pravda:

The S'pore way: the way to go?

The system of control Lee clamped on the small island city-state was somewhat suffocating. Arts and literature were slow to develop even as the scientific, mathematical and engineering skills soared to exceed the achievement level of almost all nations. Singapore’s per capita income level, greater than even the US and probably Japan, were a testament to the economic success, brilliantly achieved in the flash of a few decades. But there was a downside, a cost, as there is with almost everything. His daughter Wei Ling hints at it (earlier in this book) in her critique of mere materialism as a measure of exemplary national achievement. But asked about it, her father (who like all of us fathers always knows best) is defensive and dismissive. . . .

The achievement was not always pretty. Leaving aside the relentless drumbeat of criticism from foreign human rights groups, mostly those in the US (as if the US hasn’t its own issues in that regard), it is true Singapore had less “freedom” than classically defined. Yes, it has more money, more stability, more social cohesion, more international clout - but not more freedom to… well… bark.

Lee forced Singaporeans to learn English because it is the preeminent world business language. But it is also the preeminent world news language. I think exposure to English language internet news will be looked on as a causative factor when Singapore’s opposition wins.

[BrainGlutton]

@What_Exit

Singapore was a nice place to visit. Clean streets and alleys and seemingly happy people and merchants. I went there while in the Navy. It was affordable unlike Japan and so much cleaner and safer than South Korea, Thailand and especially the Philippines as to not even be worthy of comparisons. It was actually nicer than Hong Kong. It seems like the country works and works better than most.

Also what was with the Jim Sleeper quote: “Like Giuliani and Stalin,” Was he really equating Rudy G to Stalin? Or what did I miss?

2nd and 3rd grafs in the article.

So much for appearances. Lee Kuan Yew was truly quite a bit more like Stalin than like Roosevelt, but, since Singapore is a tiny city-state and world-capitalist entrepot, he also resembled New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, under whom that world city, too – it’s only about 15% larger than Singapore – became cleaner, safer, more prosperous – and more sterile, unequal, and unjust not only for many of its African-American and Latino-American citizens but also for the one-third of its residents who are poor immigrants and whose lives, like those of one-third of Singapore residents, are glimpsed by most of the rest of us only when we see them at work.

Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee was clever, disciplined, effective, prescient, racially divisive, vicious, vindictive, and a control freak. He cleaned the streets and waterways, selected the shade trees, imposed a somewhat robotic examination-driven meritocracy in education, and secured the comforts of investors, and tourists, and tiny Singapore’s 70,000 resident millionaires (in U.S. dollars) and 15 billionaires by importing more than 1.5 million virtually rights-less migrant workers to keep wages down and instill fear and cultural sterility in generations of Singaporeans. And how did he instill it?

[Salvor]

Eulogized. Compared to what Singapore was when he took over, it is light years ahead. Compared to the pre Lee era they are better off, and now that his time is past they can perhaps become even more better off with other reforms.
Do not compare people or countries to utopian states, compare it to what was before. Improvements are almost always welcome.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Eulogized, all in all, but with a clear eye on his faults. He was a usually-benign autocrat who left his country better than he found it.

[Hellestal]

In governing style, the guy was probably the closest ever in history to a real-world Vetinari.

It’s easy to bitch about Vetinari, but what’s the alternative? Most of the time it’s a Winder or a Snapcase. People always judge by their dumb ideals, but it’s more sensible to judge by the probable alternative. Every probable alternative is much worse than what actually happened. Best to call this one a win.