Famous Dictators I Have Known
Years ago, when I first looked at the local history syllabus after a long while, I was somewhat surprised.
Modern history, apparently, began in 1939. Any prologue to that had to do with the rise of Hitler, the rise of Stalin, or the rise of Mao; Churchill and Roosevelt were parodied and/or left out as key figures of the period. If you fast-forwarded 20 years, you were exposed to the far more benignly-represented rise of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's strongman and unabashedly hard-hitting political leader. It does make you realise that Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Richard Dawkins is an atheist; to classify them as members of their respective (prospective) classes would be to take away the inherent power of their class definitions.
To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the government has brought a fair amount of peace and prosperity; unhappiness has come in the wake of the latter, as the large middle-class finds itself much poorer than the top 1%. With ancestors who mostly came to Singapore to make money, everyone has a fine-tuned monetary instinct. This causes economic unhappiness to be the main unpleasantness here.
To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the governing party has been returned to power voluntarily by the people. Of course, the fact that the opposition is fractious (and fairly often staffed by odd clowns at critical times in the national narrative) tends to help. It is certainly nowhere near the kind of police state that the former USSR was so good at maintaining.
No, Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Dawkins is an atheist. But wait a minute, you say, isn't Dawkins an atheist?
Well, yes, sort of. An atheist doesn't believe in god or God, singular, distributed, parallel or multiple. But Dawkins is a prostituted atheist; he loves to talk, make money, sell his own brand and ram it down other people's throats. Instead of merely not believing in god (God, sing., dist., para., or mult.) he believes he should make other people not believe, and it has become a religion to him. It is a game, an entertainment, and he isn't doing it as a charitable service or philosophical discourse.
It's a fad these days to do all that. You can see it by walking around some place like Borders and looking at the book displays. Meanwhile, God continues to work in mysterious ways, as the Hierophant points out.
You might wonder why I launched into this post. Well, it's yet another one of those mysterious things. I was musing on how a lot of very reactionary students in one particular educational institution were aggrandizing their current regime with labels like 'Stalinist' or 'Hitlerian' (contradictory in most ways except authoritarianism, I suppose). I don't think they're right. I would choose a lesser dictator, a man of many dimensions and talents who always thought he was an aesthete, an almost-religious and accomplished man... one like Nicolae Ceauşescu, perhaps.
Modern history, apparently, began in 1939. Any prologue to that had to do with the rise of Hitler, the rise of Stalin, or the rise of Mao; Churchill and Roosevelt were parodied and/or left out as key figures of the period. If you fast-forwarded 20 years, you were exposed to the far more benignly-represented rise of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's strongman and unabashedly hard-hitting political leader. It does make you realise that Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Richard Dawkins is an atheist; to classify them as members of their respective (prospective) classes would be to take away the inherent power of their class definitions.
To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the government has brought a fair amount of peace and prosperity; unhappiness has come in the wake of the latter, as the large middle-class finds itself much poorer than the top 1%. With ancestors who mostly came to Singapore to make money, everyone has a fine-tuned monetary instinct. This causes economic unhappiness to be the main unpleasantness here.
To call Singapore a dictatorship is to forget that the governing party has been returned to power voluntarily by the people. Of course, the fact that the opposition is fractious (and fairly often staffed by odd clowns at critical times in the national narrative) tends to help. It is certainly nowhere near the kind of police state that the former USSR was so good at maintaining.
No, Singapore is as much a dictatorship as Dawkins is an atheist. But wait a minute, you say, isn't Dawkins an atheist?
Well, yes, sort of. An atheist doesn't believe in god or God, singular, distributed, parallel or multiple. But Dawkins is a prostituted atheist; he loves to talk, make money, sell his own brand and ram it down other people's throats. Instead of merely not believing in god (God, sing., dist., para., or mult.) he believes he should make other people not believe, and it has become a religion to him. It is a game, an entertainment, and he isn't doing it as a charitable service or philosophical discourse.
It's a fad these days to do all that. You can see it by walking around some place like Borders and looking at the book displays. Meanwhile, God continues to work in mysterious ways, as the Hierophant points out.
You might wonder why I launched into this post. Well, it's yet another one of those mysterious things. I was musing on how a lot of very reactionary students in one particular educational institution were aggrandizing their current regime with labels like 'Stalinist' or 'Hitlerian' (contradictory in most ways except authoritarianism, I suppose). I don't think they're right. I would choose a lesser dictator, a man of many dimensions and talents who always thought he was an aesthete, an almost-religious and accomplished man... one like Nicolae Ceauşescu, perhaps.
Labels: Atheism, Authority, Dictatorship, History
etched with acid at 3:00:00 pm
4 Comments:
All I will say is that I'm thankful East Asian governments did not let the IMF/WB mess around with our economic systems in the 1980s, unlike what they did with Latin America and Africa.
Secondly, to further the topic, the Christian man holds a different epistemological and ontological position from the Democratic man. To make it all simple, it is easier to be a liberal and a democrat when you are an atheist. More on that on my site, when I have the time.
It should not be overlooked, I think, that the demographics that were most affluent and powerful in the colonial era are still the most powerful today. Is the Singapore really responsible for having brought about a fair amount of prosperity, or was it always in Singapore's fate?
I just realised I meant to say "Singapore government," oops. But "government" I also note, has always been a convenient sort of catch-label, for it ignores the fact that those who govern are not indivisible.
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