Robert Kuok's SCMP: Now Funeral is Over We Can CRITICISE Harry Lee

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:


Jake is too kind to insinuate Old Fart might go to heaven
Tutorial assignment for those who wish to be Unsinkified
Read article carefully and enumerate sins he is accused
Of commiting then vote whether should go to hell or not
Better still give own examples such as excessive use of
Instrument of detention without trial and too much fixing


No man is an island: Lee Kuan Yew had help with Singapore

D e mortuis nil nisi bonum, they say, and I largely agree. Say nothing but good about the dead.

But there has to be a limit to it or history would be nothing but a collection of rosy obituaries. Decency says one should wait until after the funeral and then a more objective retrospective is entirely seemly.

I have in mind the scene at the Pearly Gates as Lee Kuan Yew arrives. St Peter enters a check mark into his book, turns to him and says, "Block H, room 4523D. Pick up your keys from the porter."

"Wait a moment," says Mr Lee. "Don't I deserve a few words of praise for all that I have done for Singapore?"

"You do indeed," says St Peter. "But on earth you were already given every word of it. Next."

On a cruise through the Indonesian spice islands last week I chanced across a copy of Singapore's English language newspaper, The Straits Times. It opened to about 20 pages of fulsome tribute to Mr Lee with the little wider news squeezed in at the back.

He himself set the tone for this with his 1998 two volume auto-hagiography - The Singapore Story and From Third World to First - and he had a name for telling foreign politicians how to run their affairs while deeming it improper interference in Singapore's when the shoe was on the other foot. - illustration: sin of hypocisy

The story has it that he once tried telling Deng Xiaoping how to run China and was told, "Thank you, Mr Lee, and when I become mayor of Shanghai I shall ask you for your advice." - my take: lack of humility and appreciation of the vastness of this world! If the story is apocryphal it nonetheless rings true.

But let us give him his due. He claimed credit for Singapore's rise as a wealthy, racially harmonious, meritocratic state and fairly so. This is modern Singapore and he played the key role in it. And now let us pull a leaf or two from these laurels.

Singapore, like Hong Kong, prospers as a parasite economy feeding off its larger neighbours by providing them services, sometimes a little dubious, that they cannot or will not provide for themselves.

Mix in the commercial aptitude characteristic of all expatriate populations, Chinese in this case, add the second half of the 20th century's conditions of global prosperity, technology transfers and foreign investment and Mr Lee had a lot of help. The success was, in fact, attributable to all Singaporeans. No man is an island. - guess what sin is that?

Similarly, Singapore's racial harmony is indeed a great virtue but, having been forced into independence when its overwhelmingly Chinese character was seen as a threat to a Malayan union, Singapore has since never really come under critical racial strain. Mr Lee, however, also made much of thrift, hard work and family loyalty, among other traits, as being Asian values.

Am I therefore to believe that my own grandmothers in the Netherlands, whom I remember for all these values, possessed them by a non-European stroke of luck or that there is no respect for them in America?

The notion that they are specifically Asian is racist. These are human virtues. - question: if Old Fart were alive today and repeated those statements, can I sue him under the Protection from Harassment Act for offending my feelings?

As to Singapore's meritocratic nature, yes, in the matter of promotions within the civil service and ruling party undoubtedly so, but in commerce it is not quite such a collection of the best. A big difference from Hong Kong, for instance, is Singapore's heavy reliance on continuous infusions of foreign investment.

The bureaucrats' own investment record is generally poor. And whoever it was who called the English a nation of shopkeepers had certainly never visited Singapore.

I think our own Martin Lee Chu-ming made a worthwhile point in his summation of Mr Lee's record.

Here was a man whose tight control of the people he governed suggests that he did not really trust them. They may yet pay a price for this now that he has entirely left them to rely on their own devices.

Mr Lee was a man of great energy, initiative and determination at a time when Singapore needed just these strengths in a leader. But he arguably kept his fingers stuck in the pie too long. He might have served his people better with an earlier and fuller retirement of the Lee family from Singapore politics.

http://www.scmp.com/business/economy...help-singapore


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