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"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
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208686221008588&set=a.1206445396945.2031621.1102965071&type=3&theater]
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.
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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:
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Thomas Sowell
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2006/08/23/the_left_and_crime/page/full
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.
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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.
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/921995]
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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.
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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
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/743597]
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