They stood firm on their convictions despite the odds. Some paid a heavy toll for their beliefs – deprivations, long prison terms, lonely lives in self-imposed exile. But they never broke. Some will say the unflinching attitude of these dissidents against what they perceived as coercive authority has been an exercise in futility. Yet other say the course of Singapore’s history might have been altered if their will had prevailed. Their stories need to be told. The first of it’s kind, this book will inform and educate. Rather than to glorify their tough stance, these memoirs are a record of human endurance. It exemplifies the extremes sacrifices some people will make in pursuit of their ideals. Written by veteran journalist and author Clement Mesenas, this book chronicles the lives of twenty of this country’s leading dissidents – including Lim Chin Siong, David Marshall and Ong Eng Guan, among many others. Clement Mesenas started his career in The Straits Times in 1968, cutting his teeth in journalism as a young crime reporter before moving on to the sub-editors desk and then to the field of magazine publishing. He was branch union chairman and secretary-general of the Singapore National Union of Journalists. He also co-founded the Asean Confederation of journalists. He left Singapore in 1979 to become managing editor of the Kuwait Times, where he worked for 10 years before moving to the Gulf News in Dubai, where he served 10 years as its deputy editor. He returned to Singapore in 2000 to join MediaCorp’s TODAY newspaper as one of its pioneering editors and retired in 2011. He now publishes a number of community publications and is working towards establishing a global network through digital media platforms.
Based on extensive interviews and archival material, The First Wave tells the story of the opposition in Singapore in its critical first thirty years in Parliament. Democratisation has been described to occur in waves. The first wave of a democratic awakening in post-independence Singapore began with J. B. Jeyaretnam’s victory in the Anson by-election of 1981. That built up to the 1984 general election, the first of many to be called a “watershed”, in which Chiam See Tong was also elected in Potong Pasir. After their successes in 1991, the opposition began dreaming of forming the government. But their euphoria was short-lived. Serious fault lines in the leading Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) rose to the surface almost immediately after the opposition victories of 1991, and the party was wiped out of Parliament by 1997. The opposition spent the next decade experimenting with coalition arrangements, to work their way back to victory.
This book provides a detailed analysis of how governance in Singapore has evolved since independence to become what it is today, and what its prospects might be in a post-Lee Kuan Yew future. Firstly, it discusses the question of political leadership, electoral dominance and legislative monopoly in Singapore’s one-party dominant system and the system’s durability. Secondly, it tracks developments in Singapore’s public administration, critically analysing the formation and transformation of meritocracy and pragmatism, two key components of the state ideology. Thirdly, it discusses developments within civil society, focusing in particular on issues related to patriarchy and feminism, hetero-normativity and gay activism, immigration and migrant worker exploitation, and the contest over history and national narratives in academia, the media and the arts. Fourthly, it discusses the PAP government’s efforts to connect with the public, including its national public engagement exercises that can be interpreted as a subtler approach to social and political control. In increasingly complex conditions, the state struggles to maintain its hegemony while securing a pre-eminent position in the global economic order. Tan demonstrates how trends in these four areas converge in ways that signal plausible futures for a post-LKY Singapore.
“Revisionist” or “alternative” historians have increasingly questioned elements of the Singapore Story — the master narrative of the nation’s political and socioeconomic development since its founding by the British in 1819. Much criticism focuses especially on one defining episode of the Story: the internal security dragnet mounted on 2 February 1963 against Communist United Front elements on the island, known to posterity as Operation Coldstore. The revisionists claim that Coldstore was mounted for political rather than security reasons and actually destroyed a legitimate Progressive Left opposition — personalized by the charismatic figure of Lim Chin Siong — rather than a dangerous Communist network as the conventional wisdom holds. Relying on both declassified and some previously unseen classified sources, this book challenges revisionist claims, reiterating the historic importance of Coldstore in helping pave the way for Singapore’s remarkable journey from Third World status to First in a single generation.
Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical project via their aesthetic project. Positing an interdisciplinary approach as necessary for understanding the historiographical as aesthetic, Retrospective considers not only historical and aesthetic perspectives, but also the philosophical, by way of ontology, in order to broaden its exposition beyond the convention of historical and contextual interpretation of art. Yet, in associating these artworks with a historiographical aesthetic, this exposition may be regarded as a historiographical exercise in itself, affirming the significance of these artworks for the history of Singapore and Malaysia. In short, which history rarely is, Retrospective is about the art of historicisation and the historicisation of art.
Streitmatter tells the stories of dissident American publications and press movements of the last two centuries, and of the colorful individuals behind them. From publications that fought for the disenfranchised to those that promoted social reform, Voices of Revolution examines the abolitionist and labor press, black power publications of the 1960s, the crusade against the barbarism of lynching, the women's movement, and antiwar journals. Streitmatter also discusses gay and lesbian publications, contemporary on-line journals, and counterculture papers like The Kudzu and The Berkeley Barb that flourished in the 1960s. Voices of Revolution also identifies and discusses some of the distinctive characteristics shared by the genres of the dissident press that rose to prominence—from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. For far too long, mainstream journalists and even some media scholars have viewed radical, leftist, or progressive periodicals in America as "rags edited by crackpots." However, many of these dissident presses have shaped the way Americans think about social and political issues.
"Singapore ... is a repressive place where the government severely restricts what can be said, published, performed, read, or watched. Those who criticize the government or the judiciary, or publicly discuss race and religion, frequently find themselves facing criminal investigations and charges, or civil defamation suits and crippling damages. Public demonstrations and other peaceful assemblies are severely limited, and failue to comply with detailed restrictions on what can be said and who can participate in public gatherings often leads to arrest. [This report] documents the Singaporean government's use of its overbroad criminal laws, oppressive regulatory restrictions, access to funding, and civil lawsuits to control and limit critical speech or peaceful protest. It provides an in-depth analysis of the laws and regulations used to suppress speech and assembly, including the Public Order Act, the Sedition Act, the Broadcasting Act, various Penal Code provisions, and laws on criminal contempt, and examines how those provisions have been used against peaceful activists. ... Human Rights Watch calls on Singapore's government to drop all pending charges and investigations against those being prosecuted for the exercise of their freedom of expression or their right to participate in peaceful assemblies, and amend or repeal relevant laws to bring them into line with international human rights standards."--Back cover.
Aung San Suu Kyi spoke passionately about non-violence, she wrote involved articles about compatibility of democracy with Buddhism and she won the hearts and minds of so many with her call for the freedom from fear (…) It seemed – for more than two decades – that Suu Kyi was a perfect, non-Western propagator of democracy, human rights, rule of law (…) Yet a deeper analysis reveals that Suu Kyi intellectually, indeed, has been a democrat all along, but a Burmese democrat (…) Suu Kyi understands democracy in a Buddhist way and she reasons about politics using Buddhist ideas, idioms and concepts (…) This Buddhist dominance of her political thought had several consequences, the most important one being that her approach to politics has first and foremost been a moral one (…) her vision of democracy (and of politics in general) is a moral vision. It is something I propose to call “the moral democracy.” The same reason that made her famous and admired worldwide, now contributed to her fall from grace. For too many outside Burma/Myanmar it is impossible to understand how Suu Kyi – yesterday’s global personification of good and morality – can now silently endorse crimes against humanity conducted in her country and accept forced relocation of 700 thousand people. A cynic would quote Bertrand Russell’s words (“we have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach”) and add a commentary that it applies especially to politicians. One, however, may offer a more favourable explanation: that Suu Kyi represents a tragic clash of ideas, including moral ideas, with political reality. Whatever the case, it was morality that made her famous, it was the same moralistic attitude that contributed to her removal from international Olympus and it is this moral understanding of politics that is the hallmark of her political thought, which is here to stay for longer, as political ideas last longer than changing political circumstances and fashions. From the Preface The dramatic fall from grace of Burma's human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi shocked the world. Michał Lubina's magisterial account of Aung San Suu Kyi's political education demystifies the behavior in power of this otherwise enigmatic leader. This is the indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand the mind of one of the world's most controversial women. Prof. Salvatore Babones, University of Sydney Dr. Michał Lubina, known in Poland for portraying Aung San Suu Kyi not as a human rights activist, but as a realist politician in the very footsteps of her father, now comes out with his research to the international audience. Following the example of Mahbubani’s Can Asian Think? Lubina shows the intellectual and philosophical tradition of Myanmar through the case study of Suu Kyi’s political thought. It’s a unique undertaking that presents Suu Kyi from an unexpected angle: as a theoretician and political thinker or sage. Both the scope of research done and the material presented are very impressive and rather unique, even on international scene. Prof. Bogdan Góralczyk, University of Warsaw, Former Ambassador to Myanmar This book is a well-documented and well-constructed, multilayered, complex, analytical work based on very rich research, interviews with Suu Kyi and personal observations of the Author, who displays unquestioned analytical skills. As such the book represents a pioneer work in Burmese studies. Prof. Agnieszka Kuszewska, Jagiellonian University in Cracow None of the numerous books and articles that I have read about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi dissects her political thoughts and background as thoroughly as the book written by Dr. Michał Lubina. He shows the political construction of her character, her struggle, her idealism, her sources of inspiration and her weaknesses. It is a necessary publication to read in order to understand historical and contemporary policymaking in today’s Burma. Dr. Marion Sabrié, University of Rouen Normandy
