Singapore Democrats

Younger PAP leaders had better perk up. You probably have unwittingly gone in, in good faith, trusting an official party line, as Vincent himself did.

Remaining there, pleading innocence of ignorance, will no longer do, with such voices as Vincent's being aired and new evidences having cropped up with the release of classified documents in London pertaining to those older detainees as Lim Hock Siew.

You have the choice to either risk being contaminated via upholding possibly an unjust, indeed very cruel past, or renew the investigation in order either to vindicate LKY and the Party you support, or admit and undo past wrongs.

You now have the power to do it, and therefore the moral obligation to do so.

Well spoken and well done, Mr Vincent Cheng.....

Justice and vindication are on the way for you and your fellow Catholic do-gooders who were tortured and imprisoned for trying to help the poor and disavantaged in 1985-87....just because the then ruthless PM LKY became afraid suddenly of Catholic power and influence which just overthrew Marcos in 1986.

When the then ISD thugs assaulted you till you had to "confess", they were doing so on behalf of their supreme master PM LKY and not on behalf of society as would be the case of heinous criminals like murderers and rapists.

Have patience brother Vincent ......payback time is coming. I dunno what form it will take but I assure you it will come sooner than later. Have patience.

Genesis 9:6

"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man."

Let it be clear that Lee Kuan Yew and all those who have perpetrated this and other injustice under the ISA will be held accountable for their gross misdeeds.

No amount of justification will win favor or forgiveness with the People who are simply fed with the lies and more lies.

I might add the observation that attempting to silence them, such as banning the Lim Hock Siew tape and perhaps also Vincent's here, would only aggravate the risk of younger PAP leaders' being contaminated by association with those possibly past evils.

For it would be act of actively colluding, by concealment, in order to perpetuate rather than resolve the injustice and cruelty, assuming the victims were really innocent, as revelations seem now to show to be a possibilty.

Ex-detainees must be some of the most stigmatized of Singaporeans. Yet, all the ex-detainees who are now speaking out are gravitating towards only one party: the SDP.

That should signal to Singaporeans that the SDP has created a space that is safe enough to be a refuge, as it were, and that being the case, the SDP will create a safe space for all Singaporeans as the future government.

This is also a personal thank you note to Vincent for speaking out; it must have been hard because it is usually very difficult for any person, men in particular, to say, "I have been abused".

Usually, when a person is bullied and just kept quiet and not resist but just comply, it will encourage the bully to try and use even more cruel and sadistic tactics. This is part of the so-called Lucifer effect, so well documented in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://www.prisonexp.org/

Having heard Vincent first hand everyone should now read Teo So Lung's recently released book, "Beyond the Blue Gate".

The fact that they have not been challenged by any of the PAP leaders is very telling.

I suppose LKY would just dismiss their detention as a wrong, but for an 'honourable' purpose. What bloody nonsense!!!

Jufrie,

Agree that that is somewhat "nonsense" and can be, indeed has been, "bloody".

Even having had "honourable" motives would not absolve one's acts from moral blame.

One was also obligated to ensure one's motivated acts, especially when they were to cause so much pain to one's fellows, were applied justly in strict accordance with the facts and truth.

So, if LKY has really meant to concede that some of those ISA detentions were wrong, he is culpable, even with if his motives were right.

And he is the more culpable should he do nothing about it now to redress, since he has the power to do so.

Jufrie is right also to observe that it is telling that government is keeping very quiet.

They have instutionalised the policy of suing in order to "uphold their reputation and integrity".

At stake now, with the statements of Teo, Vincent and others, is the integrity of ISD and government, meaning not organisations but the individual persons who ran ISD and government.

Why aren't they suing?

To sue or not, I guess you have to wait for LKY to decide after he is discharged from SGH.

The PAP, LKY in particular, must now act fast because time is not on his side. If he really thinks that he has wronged so many people he must now come clean, look them or the relatives of those who have departed, in the eye and say sorry.

It must never be forgotten that all those unjustly detained have children and/or relatives who may one day meet up with his children and/or relatives and want to settle old scores.

No matter what your honourable reasons may be the prolonged detention due to differences in ideology and approach cannot be justified. Chia Tai Poh's 32 years detention is worst than a life sentence. Nobody has the devine right to do such a thing to a fellow human being whose "guilt" has not been proven in a court of law. Said Zahari went in for 17 years. Dr Poh Soo Kai, Lim Chin Siong and many others have suffered a similar fate. The word 'sorry' may not entirely heal the wound but it is a good start.

How about a little material compensation too to help in the healing process?

One day, when Singaporeans have achieved greater political maturity - and I can see the day coming - we will see this chapter of Singapore's sordid political history for what it is: it was a proxy attack on individuals who espouse any of the political ideologies of the Left, in an impossible-to achieve bid to extinguish the ideologies of the left iself.

We just have to look at ex-detainees account of why they were detained, and examine the causes they were worked on to see why how anti-thetical it is to fascism's goal of the extreme stratification of society with all power concentrated in the hands of a small group called The Elite/s, with the masses at their mercy. Examples of such causes, such as Michael Fernandez's with trade unions (if I remember the interview correctly) and even Vincent Cheng's work with the disadvantaged are two such causes.

And neither is this without precedent in the history of fascism: Hitler did the same. Like Lee Kuan Yew, Hitler's primary targets were liberals because he believed that liberalism would pave the way for communism to be entrenched.

Communism, with the purported violence that communists espouse, was merely used as a pretext to for fascism to be entrenched in Singapore. But communism is only the extreme left of the political spectrum; fascism, the extreme right with its own violence, is viewed as a preferable form of totalitarianism by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow fascists in history.

Rebox, above all, it is not even pure fascism, it is an extreme form of individual selfishness without any principles. That is why he worked with the Japanese, Communists, Malaysia, British and later betrayed them.

quantum, in all due respect, fascism IS an extreme form of individual selfishness without any principles; it's just not the most academic way to describe the ideology.

Lee Kuan Yew, as your examples illustrate, is also an extreme opportunist with no thought as to how that opportunism might reflect on his integrity or lack thereof.

So how do you prevent future Lee Kuan Yews from appearing?