The bogeyman is among us | Mindblogging Stuff

Singapore Democrats ran an interesting article on how Lee Kuan Yew destroyed Lim Chin Siong with the help of the British. Some excerpts:

“Lee [Kuan Yew] is probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind all this a very personal aspect… he claims he wishes to put back in detention the very people who were released at his insistence – people who are intimate acquaintances, who have served in his government, and with whom there is a strong sense of political rivalry which transcends ideological differences.”
– Lord Selkirk, British Commissioner to Singapore

“Lee [Kuan Yew] wanted an elected government but not one that could be blamed for suppressing its own citizens.”
– Simon Ball, historian

“Repeated [British] intervention to ensure Lee Kuan Yew’s political survival confirmed the feeling that Lee was by now Britain’s chosen man for Singapore.”
– T J S George, writer

“After 1959, Lee Kuan Yew had urged the necessity of defeating the radical left through open democratic argument, whilst trying to provoke them into extra-legal action. The left, however, had not been deflected from constitutional struggle. Therefore, from mid-1962 at least, Lee concluded that this confrontation could only be resolved by resort to special powers that lay beyond the democratic process. This merely exposed the extent to which the crisis, as the British argued, a political one, and not a security one.”
– Tim Harper, University Lecturer in History, Centre of South Asian Studies