http://generationpassport.com/2013/...asian-man-to-ever-have-lived-on-planet-earth/
Some criticize him as being a dictator, who trampled human rights and smashed his competition to get his way. Some people think he is the savior of Singapore and kept Singapore from remaining a third-world city-state riddled with poverty. I think he is the funniest Asian man to ever have lived on planet earth.
Before I went to Asia, I had no idea who Lee Kuan Yew was. I learned of him from another traveler when I was in Yangon, Myanmar.
The Australian in Myanmar said to me, “You know Singapore used to look like Yangon, but Lee Kuan Yew cleaned it up.”
This is interesting. Because both Yangon and Singapore were British colonies until roughly after WWII, when the British fled Asia. Yangon, a beautiful city, is filled with beggars and a very poor population scattered in decaying colonial buildings, while Singapore is one of the wealthiest and modern countries in the world. Why did two similar cities take two such divergent paths in the last 50 years?
The answer is in politics and leadership. One man ruled Singapore for over 30 years and turned it from third-world to first-world. Some criticize him as being a dictator, who trampled human rights and smashed his competition to get his way. Some people think he is the savior of Singapore and kept Singapore from remaining a third-world city-state riddled with poverty. I think he is the funniest Asian man to ever have lived on planet earth.
Lee was the Prime Minister of Singapore, an English Speaking city-state in southeast Asia, for 30 years. I’m not going to bore you with all the facts, that is what Wikipedia is for. Lee was a product of British colonialism and grew up speaking English–he only learned Chinese much later. Lee spent time in England and believed he could build a civilized society in Singapore. To compete with the West, Lee realized that Singapore had to adapt the language of their colonial masters–English. To this day, a little local secret is Singaporeans speak their own home language that is a mix of Chinese, Malay and English–can you imagine what that sounds like? The government pushes heavily to not promote this Singlish language. Left: Lee in black before heading off to be educated by his ancestral conquerors in England
I passed through Singapore briefly in 2011. It was one of the most modern and cleanest city-states I have ever been to. It made Chicago, where I am from, look behind the times. Of course, I’m not a local and I don’t know how things really are in Singapore. I do know that on the entry card I was given has a warning that drug smugglers are put to death in Singapore–that’s right–if you’re a drug dealer and you’re found with a certain amount of drugs, the mandatory sentence is death–I believe by hanging too.
I was a little bit worried someone would sneak drugs or something on me when I was there. If someone had it out for me, “hey let’s sneak drugs on that guy and he is dead!” I also threw away a lot of the counterfeit goods I had bought in Thailand.
Certain things like chewing gum are illegal. There are government workers monitoring crowds to make sure no one throws garbage on the ground, which carries a heavy fine. The colonial method of caning people has also been kept alive here. In the 90’s, some little American brat was keying cars in Singapore and got a legal caning from the authorities. Bill Clinton intervened and tried to stop this and Singapore said “go fly” to him. You know your country has balls, when they say go fly to Bill Clinton, even North Korea let him negotiate hostages out of there.
These hard policies are what cranked Singapore from a poverty swampland to a place where wealthy people have enough faith in to throw away their American citizenship. I’m referring to Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook billionaire, who renounced his U.S. citizenship to be a part of Singapore.
Watch the comic genius doing his stand up routine below…
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervene on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what people think.” – Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, Apr 20 1987
“One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government.. Results can be erratic.” - Lee Kuan Yew, Dec 19 1984
“What are our priorities? First, the welfare, the survival of the people. Then, democratic norms and processes which from time to time we have to suspend.” - Lee Kuan Yew, 1986 National Day Rally
“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 started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.”- Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
“If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.” – Lee Kuan Yew evoking the ghost of Deng Xiaoping whilst endorsing the Tiananmen Square massacre, Straits Times, Aug 17, 2004
“If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society…So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.” -Lee Kuan Yew in 1983 National Day Rally
“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.” - Lee Kuan Yew
“If I tell Singaporeans – we are all equal regardless of race, language, religion, culture. Then they will say, ”Look, I’m doing poorly. You are responsible.” But I can show that from British times, certain groups have always done poorly, in mathematics and in science. But I’m not God, I can’t change you. But I can encourage you, give you extra help to make you do, say maybe, 20% better.” - Lee Kuan Yew, Success Stories, 2002
“The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.” – Lee Kuan Yew, from a speech during the 1960s, Success Stories
“We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two… We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.” – Lee Kuan Yew, 1967
Lee is a social Darwinist, a philosophy taught to him by his colonial masters–the English. Now Singapore is doing well economically and England and the West are not. This is the student becoming the leader. Lee has created a society that competes with, and does certain things better than, the West. Is he a tyrant or a hero? Go to Singapore and see for yourself.
*I was so delirious from months of travels, I didn’t take enough pictures at certain times. Singapore was one of those times I didn’t get enough, if any, pictures. For more Lee quotes go to http://leewatch.info/quotes/
Some criticize him as being a dictator, who trampled human rights and smashed his competition to get his way. Some people think he is the savior of Singapore and kept Singapore from remaining a third-world city-state riddled with poverty. I think he is the funniest Asian man to ever have lived on planet earth.
Before I went to Asia, I had no idea who Lee Kuan Yew was. I learned of him from another traveler when I was in Yangon, Myanmar.
The Australian in Myanmar said to me, “You know Singapore used to look like Yangon, but Lee Kuan Yew cleaned it up.”
This is interesting. Because both Yangon and Singapore were British colonies until roughly after WWII, when the British fled Asia. Yangon, a beautiful city, is filled with beggars and a very poor population scattered in decaying colonial buildings, while Singapore is one of the wealthiest and modern countries in the world. Why did two similar cities take two such divergent paths in the last 50 years?
The answer is in politics and leadership. One man ruled Singapore for over 30 years and turned it from third-world to first-world. Some criticize him as being a dictator, who trampled human rights and smashed his competition to get his way. Some people think he is the savior of Singapore and kept Singapore from remaining a third-world city-state riddled with poverty. I think he is the funniest Asian man to ever have lived on planet earth.
Lee was the Prime Minister of Singapore, an English Speaking city-state in southeast Asia, for 30 years. I’m not going to bore you with all the facts, that is what Wikipedia is for. Lee was a product of British colonialism and grew up speaking English–he only learned Chinese much later. Lee spent time in England and believed he could build a civilized society in Singapore. To compete with the West, Lee realized that Singapore had to adapt the language of their colonial masters–English. To this day, a little local secret is Singaporeans speak their own home language that is a mix of Chinese, Malay and English–can you imagine what that sounds like? The government pushes heavily to not promote this Singlish language. Left: Lee in black before heading off to be educated by his ancestral conquerors in England
I passed through Singapore briefly in 2011. It was one of the most modern and cleanest city-states I have ever been to. It made Chicago, where I am from, look behind the times. Of course, I’m not a local and I don’t know how things really are in Singapore. I do know that on the entry card I was given has a warning that drug smugglers are put to death in Singapore–that’s right–if you’re a drug dealer and you’re found with a certain amount of drugs, the mandatory sentence is death–I believe by hanging too.
I was a little bit worried someone would sneak drugs or something on me when I was there. If someone had it out for me, “hey let’s sneak drugs on that guy and he is dead!” I also threw away a lot of the counterfeit goods I had bought in Thailand.
Certain things like chewing gum are illegal. There are government workers monitoring crowds to make sure no one throws garbage on the ground, which carries a heavy fine. The colonial method of caning people has also been kept alive here. In the 90’s, some little American brat was keying cars in Singapore and got a legal caning from the authorities. Bill Clinton intervened and tried to stop this and Singapore said “go fly” to him. You know your country has balls, when they say go fly to Bill Clinton, even North Korea let him negotiate hostages out of there.
These hard policies are what cranked Singapore from a poverty swampland to a place where wealthy people have enough faith in to throw away their American citizenship. I’m referring to Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook billionaire, who renounced his U.S. citizenship to be a part of Singapore.
Watch the comic genius doing his stand up routine below…
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervene on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what people think.” – Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, Apr 20 1987
“One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government.. Results can be erratic.” - Lee Kuan Yew, Dec 19 1984
“What are our priorities? First, the welfare, the survival of the people. Then, democratic norms and processes which from time to time we have to suspend.” - Lee Kuan Yew, 1986 National Day Rally
“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 started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.”- Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
“If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.” – Lee Kuan Yew evoking the ghost of Deng Xiaoping whilst endorsing the Tiananmen Square massacre, Straits Times, Aug 17, 2004
“If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society…So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.” -Lee Kuan Yew in 1983 National Day Rally
“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.” - Lee Kuan Yew
“If I tell Singaporeans – we are all equal regardless of race, language, religion, culture. Then they will say, ”Look, I’m doing poorly. You are responsible.” But I can show that from British times, certain groups have always done poorly, in mathematics and in science. But I’m not God, I can’t change you. But I can encourage you, give you extra help to make you do, say maybe, 20% better.” - Lee Kuan Yew, Success Stories, 2002
“The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.” – Lee Kuan Yew, from a speech during the 1960s, Success Stories
“We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two… We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.” – Lee Kuan Yew, 1967
Lee is a social Darwinist, a philosophy taught to him by his colonial masters–the English. Now Singapore is doing well economically and England and the West are not. This is the student becoming the leader. Lee has created a society that competes with, and does certain things better than, the West. Is he a tyrant or a hero? Go to Singapore and see for yourself.
*I was so delirious from months of travels, I didn’t take enough pictures at certain times. Singapore was one of those times I didn’t get enough, if any, pictures. For more Lee quotes go to http://leewatch.info/quotes/
