Lee Kuan Yew
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, died early Monday Singapore time at age 91. I had, despite living in Asia (Japan) for three years in the mid-1990s, never heard of him until a fall 1998 Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy class on the “Theory of Statecraft.” Carnes Lord, a double-PhD visiting professor who had worked on Vice President Dan Quayle’s national security staff, taught it.
So by February 22, 1999, when the New York Times landed on the porch of my under-insulated triple-decker in Somerville, Mass., I knew who Lee Kuan Yew was, and I read William Safire’s column that day: Danger: Chinese Tinderbox. I had missed Safire’s column from the previous week, The Dictator Speaks, which would have left me with a more well-rounded view of Safire’s relationship with Lee Kuan Yew, which I know now was at the same time antagonistic and mutually respectful.
Conservatives, Carnes Lord included, tended to like Lee Kuan Yew, and he was indeed a helluva statesman, turning a tiny tip of the Malaysian peninsula, one with no common culture or language, into an English-speaking economic powerhouse with great schools. Safire pulled no punches – ever, really – and took Lee to task for his squelching of the press and rigging elections. Lee parried it all quite elegantly.
At the bottom of the Chinese Tinderbox article was a link to the full text of the interview under www.nytimes.com/international. The Times archive no longer brings up the full text, but it’s out there several places on the Web. Safire had milked a single one-on-one public interview with Lee, done at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 31, 1999, for two columns. Because that’s what a good columnist does.
It was a long interview, and it’s well worth reading top to bottom. Lee had stepped in 1990, but was still an immense figure in Singaporean politics at the time. Imagine Vladimir Putin engaging a critic as Lee did with Safire – or any other ‘dictator’ doing so, really. One could argue that the transcript is itself a refutation of the dictatorial assertion.
William Safire
Anyway, the bit of the interview I remembered most vividly was buried near the middle. Safire is attacking the idea of Singapore’s wanting to clamp down on information flow in the Internet age. “Q” was Safire, “A” Lee:
[blockquote]
A: But that’s a different proposition. The flow of information through the Internet – how many Internet users do we have? About 10 percent of the population? (AIDE: Fifteen.) Fifteen percent. They are the thinking part of the population, fairly well informed, well-exposed. There is this lumpen mass in any society, 30, 40 percent, who never got through junior high school. We don’t want this barrage day after day … the society has got to adjust and evolve step by step.
Q: Now, you’re using Marxian language, with the “lumpen” proletariat.
A: Well, I have been influenced by their vocabulary. They are not able to rise up to the levels of education which the majority has.
Q: But that’s just a function of time, isn’t it?
A: No, it is not. It’s a function of nature.
Q: You mean there is a … somewhere it’s written that 30 percent of the people of a given population will be …
A: Some population …
Q: … maintained in ignorance?
A: Some populations are more talented than others.
Q: I don’t see what you mean by that. Because in a population in a place like Singapore, where you have an elite, you have a middle-class, and you have a lower class, or a people who are not in poverty, but are not well off. Is that fair?
A: Yes. In broad classification, yes.
Q: All right. Now, you’re saying that’s the way it must be?
A: That’s the way it is.
[/blockquote]
So: Lee came out and said that 30 percent of the population – or some population (40 percent?), as “a function of nature,” are a “lumpen mass.” And that’s not just in Singapore (the place with the lofty test scores, by the way), but in “any society.”
So you can look at this and say, well, that Lee Kuan Yew, he sure was an elitist bastard, wasn’t he? But you can also look at this and say, damn, he’s really only saying what no politician in any elected democracy can say. Without getting shellacked, at least. Like Mitt Romney. Remember?
Caught on video and published by Mother Jones:
[blockquote] There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax…”[M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”[/blockquote]
Because Lee realized that the 30 percent (or the 47 percent, or whatever percent) is structural – rather than attitudinal, as Romney and his fellow Republicans seem to believe – Singapore became a society that works pretty well for those on the bottom, despite an apparently stingy welfare system. Maybe if American conservatives, many of whom hold Lee in high regard, considered the “lumpen mass” in the calculating, realist terms that Lee did, Republican social policies would reflect more compassion. We’d certainly be better off – all of us, not just the 30 percent – if they did.
