Singaporeans have witnessed 41 years of unbridled autocracy
which through legalistic wrangling of laws and enforcements has
brought about a compliant press and a compliant people who have
lost their faculty of reasoning.
That is why when Malaysians reacted strongly to racist remarks by
MM Lee, Singaporeans are rather muted and tame with no opinions on
such matter.
The final outcome of an autocratic and authoritarian system of
government : people have under the fear of penalites been cowered
into believing all government policies and have largely lost their
own reasoning power.
They have given up their rights as citizens ong long ago. Every
single complaint whether it is about perpetual cost increases or
elitist job protectionalism for the people connected to the party
has been ignored with some propaganda, hypocrisy or legalistic
wrangling of laws and regulations.
That is why the people could not do anything about high costs due
to double charging on lands and corporatization of essential
government services to allow government to charge higher fees and
recover all costs even though citizens have paid for such services
through the taxes.
A lot of citizens' hardship and problems have been largely
ignored.
Such an apathy of the people has placed a extra burden on the few
elites or thinking people that are left who will find it harder to
put up alternative solutions because their own fellow citizens do
not even care or listen to their independent views and feedbacks
dismissing them often as complaints and grouses of the
unhappy.
Elites however have been largely bought over by being absorbed into
sinecure high-paying jobs in the public sector. These elites too
have lost their fire or passion to air any views on unfair
government policies and practices resulting in government going
into business to compete against citizens for an economic pie,
importing of foreigners to lower costs when costs are increased by
government's own actions.
Without an active group of elites and citizens who could see and
point out unfairness and inequities in government policies there
would be only more cover-up of many problems as happened in NKF
problems and posted under "20 Major government policy
errors".
If democracy process is duly observed, press reports news
truthfully and fairly and government practises accountable
governance, does it mean we will end up like Thailand or Indonesia
?
Sadly, citizens have been brainwashed into believing their
ministers and the press propaganda believing the by observing
democratic election and accountable governance, it will lead to
chaos.
Assumptions are made that any liberalising of press control, will
lead to many irresponsible journalists writing all the inflammatory
articles against the government called crusading journalism.
But isn't it more serious that without objective and truthful
reporting of facts on Temasek's system of investing public taxes on
Shin Corp there would be greater problems at the end leading to
instability and chaos eventually which will be seen in street
protests one day.
So it is wrong to talk about the danger of democratic practices or
granting of press freedoms being the cause of instability and
problems.
People have simply been hookwinked into believing untruths and
half-truths as truths without any reasoning power dished out daily
by the compliant press.
Given this state of apathy among the people and the elites, the
government will only continue to put out their propaganda for
brainwashing of the average joe and many of the ordinary citizens
will tend to agree with whatever the government is saying.
This is why while Korea is catching up with Japan, Singapore
leaders are able to put the blame for our lack of progress on
people's lack of skills or some external factors.
