Wednesday, March 23, 2016

REMEMBERING LEE KUAN YEW (16 SEPTEMBER 1923 TO 23 MARCH 2015)

 
"In criminal law legislation, our priority is the security and well being of law-abiding citizens rather than the rights of the criminal to be protected from incriminating evidence." – Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew CH GCMG SPMJ (16 September 1923 – 23 March 2015), commonly referred to by his initials LKY, was the first Prime Minister of Singapore, governing for three decades. Lee is recognised as the nation's founding father, with the country described as transitioning from the "third world to first world in a single generation" under his leadership.
After attending the London School of Economics, Lee graduated from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, with double starred-first-class honours in law. In 1950, he became a barrister of the Middle Temple and practised law until 1959. Lee co-founded the People's Action Party (PAP) in 1954 and was its first secretary-general until 1992, leading the party to eight consecutive victories. After Lee chose to step down as Prime Minister in 1990, he served as Senior Minister under his successor, Goh Chok Tong until 2004, then as Minister Mentor (an advisory post) until 2011, under his son Lee Hsien Loong. In total, Lee held successive ministerial positions for 56 years. He continued to serve his Tanjong Pagar constituency for nearly 60 years as a Member of Parliament until his death in 2015. From 1991, he helmed the 5-member Tanjong Pagar GRC, and was returned unopposed for a record five elections.
Lee campaigned for Britain to relinquish its colonial rule, and eventually attained through a national referendum to merge with other former British territories to form Malaysia in 1963. But racial strife and ideological differences led to its separation to become a sovereign city-state two years later. With overwhelming parliamentary control at every election, Lee oversaw Singapore's transformation from a stagnant British crown colony with a natural deep harbour to an Asian Tiger economy. In the process, he forged a system of meritocratic, highly effective and incorrupt government and civil service. Many of his policies are now taught at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
Lee eschewed populist policies in favor of pragmatic long-term social and economic measures. With meritocracy and multiracialism as governing principles, Lee made English the common language to integrate its immigrant society and to facilitate trade with the West, whilst mandating bilingualism in schools to preserve students' mother tongue and ethnic identity.





            In loving memory of one of Singapore’s Founding Fathers, Lee Kuan Yew (16 September 1923 to 23 March 2015), we the comrades of Unit 1012, will post two articles written by Thomas Sowell on him:

  

Thomas Sowell
                                                                                                                                 
The Left and crime
8/23/2006 12:01:00 AM - Thomas Sowell

The general mindset of the political left is similar from country to country and even from century to century.

The softness toward dangerous criminals found in such 18th century writers as William Godwin and Condorcet has its echo today among those who hold protest vigils at the executions of murderers and who complain that we are not being nice enough to the cutthroats imprisoned at Guantanamo.

The specific issues change from place to place and from time to time but the mindset remains remarkably similar. What is also different from country to country and from one era to another is the amount of resistance encountered by the left, which determines how far they can go in practice.
The United States has always been more resistant to the left than most European countries have been. Often we can see where the American left is headed by seeing where the European left has arrived.

A new book on crime in Britain shows what happens when the mindset of the left prevails throughout the criminal justice system. That book is titled "A Land Fit for Criminals" by David Fraser.

Within living memory, Britain was one of the most law-abiding nations on the face of the earth. When Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew visited London right after World War II, he was so impressed with the honesty of the British and their respect for law and order that he returned home determined to make Singapore the same way.

Today it is Singapore that is one of the most law-abiding nations in the world while Britain's crime rate has risen to the point where, for the first time, it now exceeds the crime rate in the United States.

What happened in the intervening years was the rise of the British left's dogmas about crime to complete domination of the country's legal system and its political and media elites.

Today, a burglar caught in the act by the police in Britain is almost certain to get a warning. If he has previous burglary convictions, he may get a sterner warning. But he is unlikely to face anything so draconian as being put behind bars.

Burglary has been described as a "minor" offense by leaders of both the Conservative and Labor parties in Britain. Rare cases where burglars are put in prison are criticized by the media.

The left's ideology on crime, including their disdain for property crimes, has spread across the political spectrum to all who wish to be considered up to date. That ideology is essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic but in Britain it has achieved far greater unchallenged dominance.

Among the dogmas of the left is that putting people in prison fails to reduce crime and that the social "root causes" of crime must be dealt with to prevent it beforehand and that "rehabilitation" through various programs "in the community" are more effective than locking up criminals.

None of this is new and the rationales for it go back at least two centuries. What is remarkable is how mountains of hard evidence to the contrary have been ignored, evaded, or simply lied about, on both sides of the Atlantic.

David Fraser's book "A Land Fit for Criminals" examines that evidence at length and exposes the fraudulence of the claims used to try to justify continuing to be lenient to criminals as crime rates have soared in Britain.

There are similar mountains of evidence against the left's crime dogmas in the United States and this evidence is similarly ignored, evaded or lied about by those on the left. It is just that the left faces stronger opposition here so that it has not achieved the pervasive dominance that it has in Britain -- yet.

In both countries, ideologues have the support of "practical" politicians and bureaucrats who simply do not want to spend the money needed to build and maintain enough prisons to put career criminals away for many years.

Those weighing costs and benefits define "costs" as government expenditures. But the costs paid by the public, just in economic terms, vastly exceed the cost of more prisons. But that does not count for either the ideologues or the "practical" politicians and criminal justice bureaucrats.

 

I have no regrets. I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There's nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.

It is not often that the leader of a small city-state — in this case, Singapore — gets an international reputation. But no one deserved it more than Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore as an independent country in 1959, and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990. With his death, he leaves behind a legacy valuable not only to Singapore but to the world.

Born in Singapore in 1923, when it was a British colony, Lee Kuan Yew studied at Cambridge University after World War II, and was much impressed by the orderly, law-abiding England of that day. It was a great contrast with the poverty-stricken and crime-ridden Singapore of that era.

Today Singapore has a per capita Gross Domestic Product more than 50 percent higher than that of the United Kingdom and a crime rate a small fraction of that in England. A 2010 study showed more patents and patent applications from the small city-state of Singapore than from Russia. Few places in the world can match Singapore for cleanliness and orderliness.

This remarkable transformation of Singapore took place under the authoritarian rule of Lee Kuan Yew for two decades as prime minister. And it happened despite some very serious handicaps that led to chaos and self-destruction in other countries.

Singapore had little in the way of natural resources. It even had to import drinking water from neighboring Malaysia. Its population consisted of people of different races, languages and religions — the Chinese majority and the sizable Malay and Indian minorities.

At a time when other Third World countries were setting up government-controlled economies and blaming their poverty on "exploitation" by more advanced industrial nations, Lee Kuan Yew promoted a market economy, welcomed foreign investments, and made Singapore's children learn English, to maximize the benefits from Singapore's position as a major port for international commerce.

Singapore's schools also taught the separate native languages of its Chinese, Malay and Indian Tamil peoples. But everyone had to learn English, because it was the language of international commerce, on which the country's economic prosperity depended.

In short, Lee Kuan Yew was pragmatic, rather than ideological. Many observers saw a contradiction between Singapore's free markets and its lack of democracy. But its long-serving prime minister did not deem its people ready for democracy. Instead, he offered a decent government with much less corruption than in other countries in that region of the world.

His example was especially striking in view of many in the West who seem to think that democracy is something that can be exported to countries whose history and traditions are wholly different from those of Western nations that evolved democratic institutions over the centuries.

Even such a champion of freedom as John Stuart Mill said in the 19th century: "The ideally best form of government, it is scarcely necessary to say, does not mean one which is practicable or eligible in all states of civilization."

In other words, democracy has prerequisites, and peoples and places without those prerequisites will not necessarily do well when democratic institutions are created.

The most painful recent example of that is Iraq, where a democratically elected government, set up by expenditure of the blood and treasure of the United States, became one of the obstacles to a united people with the military strength to protect itself from international terrorists.

In many parts of the Third World, post-colonial governments set up democratically made sure that there would be no more democracy that could replace its original leaders. This led to the cynical phrase, "one man, one vote — one time."

Democracy can be wonderful as a principle where it is viable, but disastrous as a fetish where it is not.

Lee Kuan Yew understood the pitfalls and steered around them. If our Western advocates of "nation-building" in other countries would learn that lesson, it could be the most valuable legacy of Lee Kuan Yew.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

   
Even from my sick bed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up. – Lee Kuan Yew


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