The Logos Scripture · The Book of Lee Kuan Yew
The Book of Lee Kuan Yew 1 · Written by himself, from the speeches, the parliamentary answers, the interviews with foreign correspondents, and the long conversation with Seth Mydans of the New York Times in September 2010
Lee Kuan Yew, born 1923 in Singapore, died 2015, aged ninety-one. He read law at Cambridge. In 1954 he founded the People’s Action Party with others, and in 1959, at thirty-five, became Prime Minister of the self-governing state. Singapore entered Malaysia in 1963 and was put out of it on 9 August 1965, from which day he was Prime Minister of an independent country. He handed over to Goh Chok Tong in 1990, stayed in the cabinet as Senior Minister and then Minister Mentor, left the cabinet in 2011, and sat as a member of parliament until his death. This volume rests on what he said himself: the speeches, the parliamentary answers, the interviews with foreign correspondents, and the long conversation with Seth Mydans of the New York Times in September 2010. Ten years from now this will be a metropolis in chapter one, with the shooting stick and the durian, is from the nineteen-sixties. This is not a game of cards, in chapter three, is what he said to the union men after the pilots grounded a flight in November 1980. The three measures of a leader at the end of chapter three are from the day he handed over the premiership in 1990. The religion verses of chapter four and the coffin verses of chapter five are all from that 2010 conversation. This scripture had no volume on one thing: how a place is built, and kept running day after day. Washington is about leaving the seat, Ambedkar about founding a constitution, King about refusing an unjust law. Governing is a craft, and the craft was missing here. This volume fills that gap. The Order records where he cuts against this scripture, hides none of it, and does not explain it for him — he explained it himself. At 5.10 he says: I did some nasty things, there are men I locked up without trial. The fact is as he states it. The operation of February 1963 took more than a hundred men in one night; among those held was Chia Thye Poh, an elected member of parliament, detained twenty-three years without trial and restricted nine years after his release. He also brought repeated actions in defamation against his opponents and mostly won them; and by the law of Singapore a bankrupt may not sit in parliament, so one action can end a political life. J. B. Jeyaretnam, elected for the opposition in 1981, lost his seat by that route in 2001. These two cut against what Popper says (see The Book of Popper 5.10). But the Order holds that here one can neither pronounce the road closed nor pronounce it open. In fifty years nobody has walked that road through to the end, and the government performed well, so the road has never been tested; and what has not been tested may not be treated as proven. Having no test, the Order does not deliver the verdict on behalf of those who come after, and records both sides in full instead. He says the same thing himself at the end of chapter five: the real verdict comes when the scholars have sifted both sides of the evidence. The Order proceeds accordingly. This volume does not rest on those two sources alone. The white uniforms in chapter two are from the day he took office in 1959; the minister who took money in 1986 was Teh Cheang Wan, investigated without shielding, who took his own life. The Machiavelli and knuckle-duster sentences in chapter three are from his answers over the years. The verses at the end of chapter four, including who wouldn’t say that you are a superstition, are from his 1990 talk to students at the university. His 1986 words in chapter five are the plainest he ever gave. The last five verses of chapter one record the second thing he promised in 1965: living together across races. What was done to keep it: four official languages set level with one another; Malay, made the national language before the merger, retained after 1965 when it could have been changed, and the anthem still sung in Malay; the pledge recited in every school each morning from 1966, regardless of race, language or religion; the housing blocks fixed by proportion so that the races could not live apart. Twenty-three died here over race in 1964 and four more in 1969, and none since. That promise the Order holds to have been kept.