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Weaponised the court system to repress union backed opposition, despite having been engaged with the union movement in his early years (as I understand it) It

• mc32 5mo ago
  Singapore, like other ex-Colonies in SEAsia prove that having been a colony is not an excuse for not doing well. HK, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea were heavily colonized yet after emerging as independent states were able to overcome difficulties, educate their people, take what they learned from their colonizers and have become leading economies of the world. Governance is more important than one’s history when it come to success of a country.
  • ggm 5mo ago
    Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well. Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge. But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
    • itsthecourier 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ggm 5mo ago
        I think this is a bitter pill to swallow for many because a more liberal sense of multiculturalism in AU and UK allowed enclaves to emerge which have now become intensely divisive where a less open "multiculturalism but conform to our norms" might have avoided.
        • mytailorisrich 5mo ago
          Singapore is an enclave that emerged because of multiculturalism in Malaya caused by mass immigration from China, actually.
          • mc32 5mo ago
            In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. This happened mostly in Indonesia Burma and Malaysia and not so much in the Philippine islands. Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chinese from certain sectors of the economy. So it emerged not because of multiculturalism but because they were being virtually locked out of the Malaysian economy.
            • quickthrowman 5mo ago
              > In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?
  • forthworld 5mo ago
    avg western history expert ,colonialism isn't an excuse bro, look at singapore and south Korea. Just govern better. skill issue. HK and singapore weren't traditional colonies, they were literally just offshore vaults the british built to process the wealth they looted from the rest of asia. they inherited global trade infrastructure on day one. and taiwan and korea? japan actually built factories and forced mass literacy / primary education meanwhile the british spent 200 years intentionally destroying pre-existing industries just to kill competition, and then dipped leaving 90% of the population illiterate , zero human capital. also US allowed Taiwan and South Korea access to market , and allow protect their own domestic markets.
  • mytailorisrich 5mo ago
    The issue has never been previous status as colony but society and culture (East Asian countries and Sinpgapore are all part of the sinosphere culturally).
    • ggm 5mo ago
      I don't think that's entirely true. Britain forced colonies to export only when beneficial to the domestic British market and forced them to import to benefit the domestic British market: India may have produced cotton, but under colonialism it had to import cotton goods from the UK. Japan did not view Korea as a place to enrich for anyone's benefit but Japan. The same with their occupation of Taiwan.
  • boelboel 5mo ago
    Most these countries had decent literacy and industry/proto-industrial base before WW2 or before becoming independent states. Singapore itself was richer than Spain in 1960 and one of the richest cities in its region despite the slums. This is why it makes no sense for example to compare China or India, they were just in a fundamentally different spot. Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated. That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.
  • rrvsh 5mo ago
    This is a false dichotomy - the nature of the colony matters a LOT more than you allude to here. Singapore got a heck of a lot better deal as a colony than e.g. African colonies because we didn't get ruthlessly exploited and instead just used for our seaport primarily
• JadeNB 5mo ago
  > Many people would feel safer in Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore than in the USA. Better housing and health policy, less graffiti and street violence. Of all the things wrong with the USA, when picking just two, it seems strange for one of them to be graffiti. I have lived in the USA all my life, in some more and some less urban areas, and even from the people most afraid of cities I have never heard graffiti mentioned as a serious worry or complaint.
  • ggm 5mo ago
    Eh, you're right. It's just a bugbear for me, tagging and social cohesion decline feels like a parallel, but it may be my projection. I'm in Crete right now and it's decaying beauty, no money for streetscape fixes, bad pavements and unending dissatisfaction written all over the marble walls. I may be displaying my age. Feeling safe equates to being on the street, and unafraid. The tagging isn't the problem the social conditions which ignore it, maybe are.
    • watwut 5mo ago
      In some places, graffiti means "gang activity" as local gangs tag their turf. If you are from such place, then it kinda makes sense to be afraid of graffity. But where I am from, there are two kinds of graffity: - Cool elaborate pictures, usually in "legal zones" walls city dedicated to it. They take time to create, hence preference for legal place and are made by artists. - Less cool stuff created by skinny "edgy" teenagers, who are jerks to the owners, but also completely harmless.
      • ggm 5mo ago
        Completely harmless needs contextualising. In gross sense, no: damage to property is not harmless, it has consequences, costs. In personal safety terms sure tagging isn't mugging. If you're down Proudhon's "all property is theft" then graffiti is a kind of tragedy of the commons. Go ahead. Graffiti the Uffitzi, Nelson's column, the Plaka. Stick it to the man!
        • 5mo ago
• vablings 5mo ago
  I think the last part really is why LKYs legacy is eulogized so heavily especially with more left leaning counterparts. In the USA there is no legacy matter for politicians, and they often scupper with one foot in the door and the other halfway out. None of the things that LKY did that made Singapore great are unique to a dictatorship but him being the spiritual head and huge focus on education is critical. Interesting the USA has a good appetite for spending lots of money on students, but the education outcomes are really bad compared to places with half the spending
• jabedude 5mo ago
  > If Powell hadn't been a racist shit, he could have been as effective as Lee Kwan Yew was How do you compare Powell's "racism" and LKY's views on race and intelligence? By nearly all definitions of racism, Yew was a racist as well
  • ggm 5mo ago
    Interesting. I assumed he wasn't. Bad assumption. I don't think he gave a "rivers of blood" speech but that doesn't let him off the hook. Maybe the difference was LKY got to be in control and Powell just got to watch from the sideline.
    • ljsprague 5mo ago
      Have you considered the possibility that Enoch Powell was right?
  • rayiner 5mo ago
    By what definition was LKY “racist?” He presided over growing prosperity for a multi-ethnic country of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. I’d submit that, if LKY fits within your “definitions of racism,” that’s not a useful definition.
    • jabedude 5mo ago
      "The Bell curve is a fact of life. The blacks on average score 85 per cent on IQ and it is accurate, nothing to do with culture. The whites score on average 100. The Orientals score higher" "These are realities that, if you do not accept, will lead to frustration because you will be spending money on wrong assumptions and the results cannot follow. 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." "If you don't reproduce yourself, what happens? Next generation you will have a less capable generation to run the country... We must go closer to the evidence of the experts, which shows that about 80 per cent of a person's makeup is nature, inherited, and only 20 per cent nurture, environment and training."
• rrvsh 5mo ago
  +1, it is absolutely safe but just not that free, which is touted as a requirement for safety