Once upon a time in Singapore
Sunday, 23 August 2009, 1:00 pm | 56 views
KJ
Fulfilling the ideals of the Pledge that we hold so dearly is also a brazen act of high treason. No wonder then, we dare not pledge ourselves too seriously.
There was a time not too long ago, when we clenched our fists upon our hearts, and pledged ourselves as one united people. Regardless of race, place, and united by Time, 8:22 was a rousing moment towards the sublime. Across the country, a fusillade of imagined community. An image so rare, of Singaporean unity. Imagine, a nation. An imagination. An image, a magic, coming true at 8:22.
But Singapore won’t make it, a wise man said. And he duly rose up from his living grave, to bring his highfalutin flock back down to earth. And how swiftly that vertiginous paradise disappeared. The tenets of our Pledge, the wise man said, are grandiose ideals that, if undemolished, would demolish Singapore.
And from the highest office of the land came this lowest living lie. That a democratic nation would destroy Singapore. It was a wonderment how a nation’s founding father would fight so forcefully against the founding of a nation.
***
There was a time when people said that Singapore won’t make it. But we did.
***
When we think of nations, Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation often comes to mind, where a nation is a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ that only exists in a people’s collective imagination.[1] Nations as imagined communities. Might MM Lee be right that our nation is really a fantasy.
But Anderson’s treatise is not the final word. Nations are European inventions, one of many forms of political organizations, of creating communities. But what about us?, the political theorist Partha Chatterjee wondered – the once-colonized, the bastard children of Empire who have no choice of nations other than from those bequeathed by Europe – what do we have left to imagine? Europe has already written for us our colonial and postcolonial scripts of victory and failure, resistance and destiny. ‘Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.’[2]
A nation, conjured by one’s imagination. More important for a nation, the freedom of imagination. And freedom, in PAP parlance, an abomination. Unsurprisingly, we remain colonized subjects. It’s Empire once more.
***
It is this connection between nations and the freedom of imagination that allows us to understand MM Lee’s outburst. It has little to do with the Constitutional sanctity of the Malays’ indigenous rights.
Examine closely MM Lee’s well-documented eugenicist views on the ‘superiority’ of the Chinese ‘race’, his political intervention in the Association of Muslim Professionals’ (AMP) in 2000, as well as the various frank academic writings about the Malay community, and we’ll notice how his supposed Constitutional considerations evaporate. In any case, parliamentary dominance ensures that the Constitution can be arbitrarily amended, as it has been. And we wonder if Singapore really has a ‘Constitution’. We might well pay MM Lee a backhanded compliment when we say that he is above parliamentary and Constitutional powers, but that’s merely typical of tyrants and their regimes. Can there be harmony in the race between freedom and tyranny?
Rather, the true Pledge of our nation, as desired by NMP Viswa Sadasivan, strike right into the heart of the PAP’s strategy of divide and rule. The sociologist Chua Beng-Huat offers a perceptive reading: instituting multi-racialism enables, no – compels, the Singapore state to ‘set itself structurally above race’, giving the state enormous political leverage. A multi-racial Singapore would then necessitate the enactment and enforcement of racial harmony. This is a masterstroke that corrals Singaporeans into the paradoxical logic of deterrence: ‘it is because of deterrence that misdeeds are kept low, if not entirely erased – thus, deterrence must continue; however, since deterrence is never lifted, the validity of the assumption that, if lifted, misdeeds will indeed break out is never tested – thus deterrence continues.’[3]
‘Racial harmony’, like most other PAP political strategies, serves two simultaneous functions. First, a regime of power surveilling a compartmentalized citizenry. Its elaborate walls surreptitiously woven into discriminatory legislation, housing quotas, NS deployment, education trajectories and traps – the major institutions that govern the state, control the populace, and shape our assorted fates. Second, every strategy, invariably self-serving, cumulatively strengthens and entrenches its political dominance. That we don’t even notice how the necessity of ‘racial harmony’ conveniently requires a GRC system, is testament to MM Lee’s brilliance. ‘Racial harmony’ is not just that. It institutionalizes gerrymandering, legitimates control, and perpetuates a Chinese-dominated political party/-country/-nation.[4] Thus, to pledge a Singaporean identity regardless of race is already to position oneself politically against the state.
Sunday, 23 August 2009, 1:00 pm | 56 views
KJ
Fulfilling the ideals of the Pledge that we hold so dearly is also a brazen act of high treason. No wonder then, we dare not pledge ourselves too seriously.
There was a time not too long ago, when we clenched our fists upon our hearts, and pledged ourselves as one united people. Regardless of race, place, and united by Time, 8:22 was a rousing moment towards the sublime. Across the country, a fusillade of imagined community. An image so rare, of Singaporean unity. Imagine, a nation. An imagination. An image, a magic, coming true at 8:22.
But Singapore won’t make it, a wise man said. And he duly rose up from his living grave, to bring his highfalutin flock back down to earth. And how swiftly that vertiginous paradise disappeared. The tenets of our Pledge, the wise man said, are grandiose ideals that, if undemolished, would demolish Singapore.
And from the highest office of the land came this lowest living lie. That a democratic nation would destroy Singapore. It was a wonderment how a nation’s founding father would fight so forcefully against the founding of a nation.
***
There was a time when people said that Singapore won’t make it. But we did.
***
When we think of nations, Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation often comes to mind, where a nation is a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ that only exists in a people’s collective imagination.[1] Nations as imagined communities. Might MM Lee be right that our nation is really a fantasy.
But Anderson’s treatise is not the final word. Nations are European inventions, one of many forms of political organizations, of creating communities. But what about us?, the political theorist Partha Chatterjee wondered – the once-colonized, the bastard children of Empire who have no choice of nations other than from those bequeathed by Europe – what do we have left to imagine? Europe has already written for us our colonial and postcolonial scripts of victory and failure, resistance and destiny. ‘Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.’[2]
A nation, conjured by one’s imagination. More important for a nation, the freedom of imagination. And freedom, in PAP parlance, an abomination. Unsurprisingly, we remain colonized subjects. It’s Empire once more.
***
It is this connection between nations and the freedom of imagination that allows us to understand MM Lee’s outburst. It has little to do with the Constitutional sanctity of the Malays’ indigenous rights.
Examine closely MM Lee’s well-documented eugenicist views on the ‘superiority’ of the Chinese ‘race’, his political intervention in the Association of Muslim Professionals’ (AMP) in 2000, as well as the various frank academic writings about the Malay community, and we’ll notice how his supposed Constitutional considerations evaporate. In any case, parliamentary dominance ensures that the Constitution can be arbitrarily amended, as it has been. And we wonder if Singapore really has a ‘Constitution’. We might well pay MM Lee a backhanded compliment when we say that he is above parliamentary and Constitutional powers, but that’s merely typical of tyrants and their regimes. Can there be harmony in the race between freedom and tyranny?
Rather, the true Pledge of our nation, as desired by NMP Viswa Sadasivan, strike right into the heart of the PAP’s strategy of divide and rule. The sociologist Chua Beng-Huat offers a perceptive reading: instituting multi-racialism enables, no – compels, the Singapore state to ‘set itself structurally above race’, giving the state enormous political leverage. A multi-racial Singapore would then necessitate the enactment and enforcement of racial harmony. This is a masterstroke that corrals Singaporeans into the paradoxical logic of deterrence: ‘it is because of deterrence that misdeeds are kept low, if not entirely erased – thus, deterrence must continue; however, since deterrence is never lifted, the validity of the assumption that, if lifted, misdeeds will indeed break out is never tested – thus deterrence continues.’[3]
‘Racial harmony’, like most other PAP political strategies, serves two simultaneous functions. First, a regime of power surveilling a compartmentalized citizenry. Its elaborate walls surreptitiously woven into discriminatory legislation, housing quotas, NS deployment, education trajectories and traps – the major institutions that govern the state, control the populace, and shape our assorted fates. Second, every strategy, invariably self-serving, cumulatively strengthens and entrenches its political dominance. That we don’t even notice how the necessity of ‘racial harmony’ conveniently requires a GRC system, is testament to MM Lee’s brilliance. ‘Racial harmony’ is not just that. It institutionalizes gerrymandering, legitimates control, and perpetuates a Chinese-dominated political party/-country/-nation.[4] Thus, to pledge a Singaporean identity regardless of race is already to position oneself politically against the state.
