To be totally honest, I’m not sure why I’m wasting my time and effort in arguing/rebutting begrateful’s pathetic excuse of an article; one where he espouses all the “wonderful” things that LKY has supposedly done for ordinary people.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not in denial and will never oppose the fact that the old fella was instrumental in the early days of Singapore’s development. Whether or not his iron-fisted rule and heavy-handedness was warranted, is a totally different discussion altogether and I’m not here to debate that.
But what gets me all riled-up and hot under the collar is the fact that his supporters (actually, it’s a symptom of most PAP supporters) just keep attributing random achievements to this one person.
Yes, he did create the country that we live in now (for better or for worse), but he didn’t do it alone; he had an entire cabinet and other very qualified experts to assist him. Besides, it wasn’t as if LKY and his band of merry explorers landed on a desolate island and single-handedly turned it into the metropolis that we live in today. No! Before LKY, there was the Malayan government, the Japanese rulers and the British administrators. Heck, even before Raffles landed in 1819, there was some sort of civilisation on the island. Yes, it didn’t have things like (and I quote) - “good public sports facilities”, water that “can be drunk straight out of the tap”, “good transportation”, and the whole country didn’t look “like a garden”. But really, which country back then did?
Attributing the long list of wonderful attributes to one man is simply being deluded and just pure madness. Look at countries all around the world, like say where I live – New Zealand, there’s virtually everything in that list in New Zealand (except maybe MRTs and residential blocks). Yes, LKY may have presided over many of these things that we have in Singapore, but if wasn’t him, another leader would have made sure that Singapore had flushing toilets, abundant food, transport, economic stability, political ties and all the other wonderful things listed. Would that alternate leader that wasn’t LKY have done it differently? Most likely, yes. But it’s not rocket science, and governments from as far back as the Romans knew the importance of these things – the infrastructure that keeps the country going and the people happy. By giving LKY sole credit for all of these basic structures is possibly the best example of putting the cart before the horse.
The last thing you wrote, begrateful, was that Singapore is a paradise, one that came about because of a strong government with sound values that’s led by LKY. If Singapore were indeed the paradise
that you’ve described, then why is it that the majority of people wanting to immigrate into Singapore are from third-world countries? Also, why are these migrants mainly chasing the Permanent Resident status and not citizenship? If Singapore were such a haven for all things amazing and a bastion of progress as you’ve waxed lyrical about, then why aren’t more people from first-world countries clamouring to migrate to Singapore?
BlackandWhite
TRS Contributor