Editing Lee Kuan Yew
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Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee was clever, disciplined, effective, prescient, racist, vicious, vindictive and a control freak. He cleaned the streets and waterways, selected the shade trees, imposed a somewhat robotic examination-driven meritocracy in education, and secured the comforts of investors, and tourists, and tiny Singapore's 70,000 resident millionaires (in U.S. dollars) and 15 billionaires by importing more than 1.5 million virtually rights-less migrant workers to keep wages down and instill fear and cultural sterility in generations of Singaporeans. | Like Giuliani and Stalin, Lee was clever, disciplined, effective, prescient, racist, vicious, vindictive and a control freak. He cleaned the streets and waterways, selected the shade trees, imposed a somewhat robotic examination-driven meritocracy in education, and secured the comforts of investors, and tourists, and tiny Singapore's 70,000 resident millionaires (in U.S. dollars) and 15 billionaires by importing more than 1.5 million virtually rights-less migrant workers to keep wages down and instill fear and cultural sterility in generations of Singaporeans. | ||
But while any New York mayor is curbed by state and federal leaders and an independent judiciary, under a Constitution that was crafted in open debate among brilliant founders - Lee abolished all curbs and virtually wrote and interpreted the constitution by himself: "We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are | But while any New York mayor is curbed by state and federal leaders and an independent judiciary, under a Constitution that was crafted in open debate among brilliant founders - Lee abolished all curbs and virtually wrote and interpreted the constitution by himself: "We have to lock up people, without trial, whether they are [[communist]]s, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins," he said in 1986 while imprisoning and cruelly abusing Catholic Church social-justice workers who were certainly opposed to his practices and whom he also claimed but never proved were Communists. | ||
Like many a silver-tongued anti-colonialist, anti-racist firebrand who turns his colonial masters’ noble rhetoric against them but winds up employing their tactics against those he’s leading, Lee very tellingly foreshadowed his own transformation from tribune of the oppressed to autocrat of the oppressed during a 1956 debate in the colonial assembly by condemning Singapore’s British oppressors a bit too deliciously. | Like many a silver-tongued anti-colonialist, anti-racist firebrand who turns his colonial masters’ noble rhetoric against them but winds up employing their tactics against those he’s leading, Lee very tellingly foreshadowed his own transformation from tribune of the oppressed to autocrat of the oppressed during a 1956 debate in the colonial assembly by condemning Singapore’s British oppressors a bit too deliciously. | ||