Alfian Sa'at: For SG50, PAP may try and write their own version of history

Start already. As Singapore turns 50 next year, the government will try to exert control over the national narrative--and we'll see The Singapore Story version 2.0. The previous Singapore Story, launched as the National Education project in 1997, focused on a few key themes: Singapore's 'economic miracle' under a 'stable' government (so one equates economic growth with single-party rule), a dash of victimhood (deserted by the British during the Japanese invasion, 'kicked out' of Malaysia) and small-country/city-state exceptionalism (vulnerability, survivalism, pragmatism, siege mentality--thus policies like minimal welfare, maximal defence, and where liberal democracy is seen as a 'luxury').

What will TSS 2.0 look like? My guess is that there will be an increasing emphasis on the finer points of history, specifically regarding the government's brutal treatment of what they term the 'Communist United Front'. What accounts for the government's increasing anxiety about how Singapore history will be told?

1) There is also a growing stream of (to borrow Lee Hsien Loong's awkward phrase) 'counter-books' to The Singapore Story. These include those published by Function 8, like 'Youth on Trial', 'Beyond The Blue Gate', 'Smokescreen and Mirrors' and 'Escape From The Lion's Paw'. Also the titles from SIRD: 'The May 13 Generation', 'The Fajar Generation', 'The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore'. The memoirs and testimonies are emerging. More crucially, they are inspiring current generations of artists and filmmakers. Once something makes that leap from what the government sees as obscure and niche publications to something like film or theatre, then a process of mainstreaming and popularisation has begun. And thus the bans, since only the orthodox and official party-line history is permitted. (Also a shout out is due to websites like The Online Citizen, which has helped to publicise these histories.)

2) Recent declassification of British archival records have shed new light on Singapore's history. Lee Hsien Loong calls the work of historians drawing on these sources as 'revisionist', and he means this as a pejorative term. (He also makes a childish crack that historians who perform such 'contrarian' work do so just to obtain PhD's.) But of course assumptions are revised when new evidence is uncovered: one does this in science, and no less in the discipline of history. We're very lucky that we have historians who are not subject to the self-censorship practised by many in local academia. Our public intellectuals have been drawn from disciplines like architecture (Tay Kheng Soon and William Lim), literature (Catherine Lim and Gopal Baratham), theatre (Kuo Pao Kun and T. Sasitharan), journalism (Cherian George), civil society (Alex Au) and more recently economics (Sudir Thomas Vadaketh and Donald Low). [Fine I'll throw in the ones from the civil service and think-tanks too: Tommy Koh, Arun Mahizhnan, Devadas Krishnadas, Kishore Mahbubani.] I think the moment is ripe for the historians, like Hong Lysa, Kah Seng and Pingtjin Thum.