keninabu!

Attitudes about Mr. Chee Soon Juan

I was just reading Straits Times forum online, and was mildly amused by the tirade against Mr. Chee Soon Juan.

Basically, this guy/girl was indignant that Mr. Chee called for a boycott of Singapore.

I think he/she is taking Mr. Chee too seriously, for one thing. If anything, Mr. Chee's comments reveal his naivete: given Singapore's relative importance to western powers in Southeast Asia, does he really think that anyone will boycott Singapore? Boycott Singapore and lose the Southeast Asian market. No company is really that dumb.

And if they think Singapore's human rights record is bad, if you look around the world unfortunately it is a lot better than most other places. Like Mr. Bush's home state, for example, which also has the death penalty (funny, I don't hear Mr. Chee saying that you should boycott Texas oil companies like Exxon Mobil...).

The degree of this letter writer's contempt also makes me wonder about this letter writer: is this person a PAP plant, writing letters to the forum just so as to put down Mr. Chee in the guise of "an indignant patriotic Singaporean man in the street", to influence the masses?

Of course, I agree with a sovereign state's right to make laws for itself, etc., but I also happen to agree with Mr. Chee's take on the death penalty. Killing minor drug dealers will not eradicate or lower the drug problem. I'm not smart enough to tell you exactly what is the right thing to do, but I'm smart enough to tell you that death is permanent and irreversible: if you kill someone, you are unable to reform the person. From an economic perspective, it is just ridiculously expensive to execute a person, given the administrative costs and issues concerned. You are also removing all potential future economic value of a reformed member of society, and the opportunity cost of that is often forgotten.

I'm now watching Singapore Rebel by Martyn See on Google videos, which has been banned in Singapore as being a party political video. It sounds ridiculous, given that it is not about the SDP but only about Mr. Chee Soon Juan.

But watching it, the reason for the ban is not as ridiculous: it IS extremely partisan, and extremely unbalanced coverage.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a PAP sucker.

But I do take umbrage at a video that portrays Mr. Chee Soon Juan as the hero of Singapore's opposition, as the sole light of Singapore's democracy movement.

That is complete bollocks: the movie makes no mention of Mr. Chee's political machinations, in which he ousted his own political mentor, Mr. Chiam See Tong from Mr. Chiam's own party. For Mr. Chiam, that must have been extremely upsetting: to be thrown out of the very same party which you founded. There is no mention that Mr. Chiam sued Mr. Chee. Nor any mention of Mr. Chee's ridiculous glucose consumption while "on hunger strike". Nor did it go into any detail about why Mr. Chee was dismissed by NUS (none of the documentation that was produced in court to substantiate his dismissal were shown).

Instead, the portrayal is of a good guy (the film introduces Mr Chee as a family man, with adorable children, much like many other propaganda films), of a fighter for democracy and rights fighting a horrible state apparat, of the sort which would appeal greatly to human rights activists abroad who do not know any better. And that is just as incomplete a picture as the Straits Times lopsided portrayal of a political clown.

Admittedly, there are some good bits of the film: certain footage which I have never seen before, like a live-recording of Mr. Chee's arrest by the police. But overall, the film is really flawed. Not least because the initial narrator has an extremely annoying accent: it's the accent of a Singaporean trying to sound like A Cool Dude... or maybe that of A Cool Dude trying to sound vaguely Singaporean.

I think the scope of the film was too narrow. Why focus exclusively on Mr. Chee Soon Juan? There are so many other characters out there in the opposition who are doing good work, and who are also saying much the same things as he is, but who do not get half the publicity that he gets. If anything, Mr. Chee is an opposition lightning rod who has had the unfortunate effect of causing most Singaporeans to equate political opposition with his sometimes-clownish acts.

This, I would say, is just as harmful for Singapore's fledgling opposition as the State's political monopoly.

posted by keninabu @ 11:13 AM