Predictably my last post ruffled a few feathers leading some to protest how dare I say such things! Sadly, ignorance comes in many different flavours, so now I'd like to address some of them separately.
One may believe presenting historical facts should be enough but ethnonationalist biases, ego and pride drive many to either misinterpret or misrepresent them to mean something else (so the complainer feels good about himself).
A few of the negative responses I noted were:
1. Colonized locals would/could have done better without the British.
2. The British did nothing for Singapore and should not be remembered.
3. Ah, so the British did more for Singapore than the PAP!
As you can see, these binary positions clearly cannot all be right - but they can (and are) all wrong. Why? Because history is rarely black and white, and it's usually impossible to quantify or measure historical events.
Now, the first point is easily disproved by the fact that the locals (whoever they were) were conquered by the numerically smaller British (Spanish, Dutch, French etc.). It is also supported by another observation that no place in the world which has ever been under colonial power is doing very well under local governance (with Singapore being the only exception - but that is likely due to other factors, more on them in a second).
The 2nd point about how the British were supposedly inconsequential to Singapore's existence and prosperity is really rather comical, particularly coming from descendants of foreign immigrants writing this in English today. You're literally a product of British culture and British politics.
There had been no city, no harbour, no meaningful economic activity on the island for at least 400 years before the British arrival. Nearly all of the landmarks of Singapore, save for a few temples and mosques, are of British heritage (if you have any doubts just walk along the Padang from the Raffles Hotel to Raffles Place).
What exactly makes you so uncomfortable about this? Particularly as your family's roots are in a foreign country anyway?
Finally, the cherry on top - did the British do more for Singapore than the PAP?
Some appear to have taken the opportunity to misrepresent my post and claim that PAP did nothing and only inherited the prosperous harbour from the colonials.
My question to them is - can't both be true? Couldn't PAP have done a good job with an already good place?
Here's a collection of facts that are hard to dispute:
1️⃣ The British founded modern Singapore in 1819.
2️⃣ They developed it into a competitive harbour which attracted thousands of immigrants looking to trade or find work.
3️⃣ By the time they left the city had grown to 1.8 million people and was relatively prosperous vs. the rest of Asia.
4️⃣ Even though it was doing quite well in Asia it doesn't mean it was rich by the standards of the developed world. At US$500 per head in 1963 it may have been one of the best places in the region but the UK proper reported US$1600 and people in London produced US$3600 at the same time (this is the answer to all of those fighting over whether Singapore was rich or just a "fishing village" when the British left - it was kind of both, depending on how you looked at it).
5️⃣ New PAP government took the city-state and guided it to world-leading prosperity and world-class living standards within the next few decades.
Without the British there would be no Singapore and no Singaporeans, since there would have been no place to migrate to in the first place. But without the PAP and LKY there would be no modern day prosperity, wealth, public safety and national security.
We know that this government played a crucial role in this progress since nobody else in Southeast Asia has done anywhere near as well.
More broadly, without global exploration and colonization there would be no international trade and globalization - and, as such, there would be no Singapore and even if there was, it would not be rich, as it would never play such a globally crucial role as it does today.
In other words - we would all have been screwed (globally), with most people still living in poverty, in isolated regions due to limited international exchange of goods, services and ideas.
Without British Singapore there would be no Lee Kuan Yew - an English-speaking Chinese man with a Cambridge law degree. His ancestors would have never migrated to Singapore and his intellect and character would have either been steamrolled by communist apparatchiks of Maoist China or, at most, wasted in Malaysia, where he would not have commanded such an influence as he did over the independent city-state.
And without him and the party he helmed there's no guarantee Singapore would have turned out as well as it did, given the communist influences among the Chinese majority and the ongoing insurgency in peninsular Malaysia.
Without PAP having its ranks purged by LKY (in cooperation with the British) Singapore could have been just another mediocre place in Southeast Asia, rife with crime, corruption, pollution and so on. Assuming it would ever become independent, since it was LKY's determined character that led to the city's expulsion from the federation, as he made many uncomfortable with his strict requirements as to what Malaysia should be.
Now, can anybody reasonably claim to be able to quantify and rank the importance of all of these historical events?
Life is a relay - we pick up where our predecessors left and try to make the most of what we were handed in the situation we were in.
History of Singapore is part British, part Chinese, Malay, Indian, even Arab. Why exactly do some people want to mutilate it now?
Singapore is in its entirety a product of the age of exploration, colonization and globalization, founded by the preeminent global power of the time and made great by waves of industrious immigrants from all over Asia and beyond.
As S Rajarathnam said, "Being a Singaporean is not a matter of ancestry. It is conviction and choice."
It's the mindset, not identity, that makes Singapore great.
And it is a rare exception of a country prosperous after the departure of the former colonials precisely because it never tried to rewrite history or erase its own heritage, opting to build on it instead.
Celebrate it, because without any of the visionary people along the way you wouldn't be here enjoying life in the best place in the world right now.
