Can It Happen Here?

 One of the more difficult things about being a “dissident” in Singapore is the fact that on the surface, things appear to be darn good in Singapore. I’ve seen it on so many occasions. Whenever a Singaporean says something about Singapore being less than perfect, they will get their American and European friends looking at them like “What the heck are you complaining about?” Then there are the friends from less well-off places who would happily remind you that its often much worse elsewhere.

Sure, I don’t disagree with the sentiment that Singapore’s physical infrastructure is pretty sound, especially when you compare it to a few other places in our neighbourhood. As I finished writing a piece about Singapore’s vendetta against “Smiley” 😊 emoji’s, a friend of mine who is based in Myanmar got in touch with me and shared some photos of what was going on.

Whatever is happening in Singapore, it is inevitably worse in Myanmar. Singaporeans, as the following clip from Al Jazera reports, are not being gunned down in the streets:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/3/un-envoy-says-38-dead-in-bloodiest-day-since-coup-hit-myanmar

In fairness to Singapore’s government, our boys in blue have not, for example, taken particular visible joy at shooting people in the same way that the guys from Myanmar have:

 

So, yes, no matter how bad things get in Singapore, they seem much worse elsewhere. Our government does not shoot people on the streets. The people outside of Singapore will inevitably remind us that nobody starves and nobody gets shot on the streets.

Sure, Singapore is not just clean, green and rich, it is also peaceful. One can argue that this is the basics of what a nation should be and one cannot possibly ask for more. However, looking at what happens elsewhere and thinking that its still best in Singapore is not correct either.

Start with the obvious. The idea of looking at elsewhere and telling yourself that no matter how bad it is elsewhere so you should be grateful with what you have also works both ways. If one expects a citizen to look to the government and be grateful for the one that they have, surely the same logic should be applied when the government looks at its citizens. Our citizens protest by standing there with a smiley😊 face, they don’t take to the streets.

 

Copyright – ABC News

The second point is that we have to ask ourselves how societies end up with people on the streets. In Singapore the strategy of keeping people off the streets has been based on a combination of making things comfortable enough for people not to want to risk what they have and at the same time using fear an intimidation. The government, for example is obsessed with ensuring that foreign investors keep their money in Singapore. At the time, Singaporeans are reminded that the government can be heavy handed if its power is every challenged as can be seen by the vendetta against smiley faces 😊

However, there comes a point when people lose their fear of heavy-handed treatment and start thinking about something other than themselves. One has to look at places like Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 when the people took to the streets to get rid of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak respectively. Both Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were quite open in using brutality to keep the people down and its worked for decades. Then things reached a stage where things were so bad that people lost their fear at the risk of being shot in the streets.

One can argue that its not going to happen in Singapore. Our government is obsessed with keeping on the right side of the international business community and it understands that shooting people on the streets is going to make people with money flee the country. However, just because today’s government is at least self-interested enough not to instigate mass shootings, who is to say that a future government might not resort to those methods.

Myanmar was a brutal military dictatorship for many years. Then in 2011 they decided to open up, freed the opposition leader Ms. Ang San Suu Kyi and the foreign investors poured into the country and began to build things up for the better. Ms. Ang was willing to accommodate the military and went as far as to throw away her reputation for saintliness and turned a blind eye to their slaughter of the “Rohingya” community.

You would have imagined that the military would have quietly stayed in the background and enjoyed the fruits of the growing prosperity. That was the “logical” thought but then, the military decided that this was not the way to go and they’ve been happy to shoot people protesting against their illegal take over.

 

It’s not just the humans that the military have decided to go after. Even the dogs have not been spared.

 

Top-down systems can work. If the guy at the top is super competent and the fruits of his or her actions benefit the governed things work. However, as societies, economic and social systems become more complex no leader can claim to have the perfect solution to every problem. The governing and governed need to have a constant dialogue. You cannot have a dialogue if you see threats in 😊 because it’s a sign that you’re not interested in listening. If you constantly treat people who have smiley faces 😊 in jail for disrupting public order, you set up the stage for a situation where people will no longer care about public order because you may have made normal life too unbearable for them