February 6, 2010 - Temasek Review
By Anak Kancil
There has been a recent spate of books on Singapore history.
This is nothing unusual and should be welcomed. The trouble
however, is that these books are written and published at great
expense with one purpose in mind, which is to set down one singular
interpretation of Singapore history, its heroes and its villains.
These books are intended purely to flood out all other accounts or
interpretation of a history.
This is nothing new. Older readers will remember that the first
group of people who were given permission or agreed to undertake
this sort of work were foreign journalists working in Singapore.
For several reasons, many of them have taken on a passion to defend
Singapore against its detractors, even though they are only
temporary sojourners who happened to pass through for one reason or
another.
The first of this was Alex Josey, who wrote voluminous books and
hagiographies of the founders of modern Singapore. The irony is
that after a lifetime of yeoman service, he found himself unable to
continue living in Singapore because the health costs became so
huge that he could not afford to keep up with his treatment, and no
one stepped forward to ensure that his last years was spent with
some reasonable comfort. He therefore had to return to his original
homeland, England, to pass his last days.
After him, other leading foreign journalists took on the task to
continue the efforts of presenting Singapore to Singaporeans and to
the world. Two of them John Drysdale and Dennis Bloodworth were
given extensive access to Singapore’s intelligence records and
other resources. They were also given access to personal interviews
with Singapore leaders. Singapore scholars and researchers were not
given similar privileges. Of course, these foreign journalists also
make some effort to try to contact some opposition figures, so that
they could give some semblance of objectivity to the story they
would eventually write.
After the departure of these foreign journalists, local senior
journalists found that they could now step into their shoes to
produce a more credible account of Singapore’s history. Thus we
have senior man in the Singapore journalist world, who got together
to write The Man and his Ideas, and more recently, The Man in
White.
Both of these books were written and produced at great effort
and expense with extensive access to local sources. They are large
books, each one longer and bigger than the predecessor. Each one of
these books was given extensive publicity. In addition, copious
chunks of abstracts from these books were also serialized and
published in the local press. All these books are well known and
helped to promote the continuing saga of the Singapore story, more
or less on the same theme and along the same lines. Undoubtedly,
these books also gave much publicity to enhance the career of these
senior journalists in their subsequent careers.
Now we are told that more books along these lines are being
prepared in the pipeline. The latest of this was the two volume
biography of S. Rajaratnam which is again written by a local
journalist and a fellow at a research institute. We are told that
other books by scholars are being prepared to give a more
comprehensive account of other leaders in the founding of modern
Singapore.
All these books have been and will be widely promoted and
distributed throughout Singapore, including local institutions,
schools and even the supermarkets. The hope is that a new
generation of educated Singaporeans will develop the reading habit
of going through these volumes to understand the full story of how
Singapore grew and developed as a nation and emerged from abject
poverty to its current status, as a first world country.
The question however, is that whether these publicity drive and
effort at great expense can lead the people of Singapore to accept
and trust the account of the story which is being written and
popularized. Or will the people learn to be more cynical and begin
to ask whether they can learn to trust these journalists and these
scholars.
In a free society, independent journalists and scholars will
invariably emerge to write stories and accounts they honestly
believe. If journalists and scholars only write to confirm one
single version of the Singapore story, how can they expect the
general public to accept their credibility, and to trust their
intellectual objectivity and integrity? Surely the integrity of our
journalists and our scholars are much more important than the need
to tell one single version of what has always been a contested
story. Many different accounts should be allowed to surface and to
be published and given the same access publicity, so that the
people can decide in their wisdom the full complexity of the
Singapore Story.
