Torn in Manila is a friend of James Gomez - the Singapore opposition activist currently being threatened with criminal charges by Singapore authorities. He offers a must-read essay on the insanity of the Lee dynasty’s crusade against the opposition, which contains an impressive anecdote about Gomez..:
I knew James when we were both postgraduate students in London in the mid-1990s. He’s a likeable and friendly sort of guy, who hardly fitted the stereotype of an exiled agitator. But then, as we know, it doesn’t take much to be a radical in the island republic.
I remember one story James told me that sums up his homeland quite well. He was president of the student union at the National University of Singapore (which is, by the way, quite one of the scariest tertiary institutions in the world – with hordes of fresh students all dressed exactly like little adults, wearing white shirts and black pants). James felt that such a huge university (it currently has over 30,000 students) should have at least one bar and set about persuading the university administration to let him establish one. After many lengthy meetings, the union finally wrung a concession out of the administrators: the cafeteria would serve beer for three hours on Fridays. The committee members of the student union traipsed down on the first Friday to witness the refreshment of their thirsty fellow students, as they were to do for the remaining Fridays that term. And do you know many of NUS’s tens of thousands of students took advantage of this new facility? Nada, wala, zilch. Fewer than 10 students dared to be seen associating with such a radical move. A better example of the famous Singapore “policeman in the head” it would be hard to find.
The greatest irony is that the “crime” James Gomez is accused of perpetrating is “criminal intimidation” of the election department. For the bullying Singapore government to accuse a single opposition candidate of “intimidation” – that’s just hilarious.
Whatever one’s feelings about the Worker’s Party, any man who can get beer sold on a stuffy campus like NUS is deserving of support.
Also see Torn’s comment on Singapore’s Marxist Conspiracy.
Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, freejamesgomez, singapore, southeast asia
May 12th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Imagethief has spent some time on the NUS campus and can report that NUS is not entirely black slacks and white shirts. However he can also report that it is not quite the freakshow that his own, beloved University of California, Santa Cruz was.
He is also inclined to think that the low patronage of the NUS bar was probably not due to sinister, puritannical student groupthink so much as the ruinous sin taxes in Singapore, which put most “adult beverages” squarely out of reach of your impoverished freshman (and a fair few professionals as well).
None of this excuses the usual navel-gazing paranoia-fest that is a Singapore general election, though.