Singapore's prime minister emeritus stares at 'woke' concepts in America, utterly stupefied at its idiocy
Elon Musk spotted this video on X (Twitter) featuring Lee Hsien Loong, the recently retired prime minister of Singapore, and couldn't help sharing:
Wisdom
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2024
pic.twitter.com/NMbUbutfx1
Wisdom is a good word for it, because left unsaid, it's also about experience.
Who is Lee Hsien Loong? He's the senior, or emeritus, prime minister of Singapore, the third in the nation's history, and the son of Singapore's founding father, the great Lee Kuan Yew. Suffice to say, he had a wise father to start.
But he had his own achievements, and on his watch, from 2004-2024, Singapore seriously prospered -- see here:
This is the man who is behind 🇸🇬 Singapore's incredible growth, who uplifted Singapore from poverty to richest nation in the world.
— Global Index (@TheGlobal_Index) August 21, 2024
🇸🇬 Singapore GDP per capita:
1970: $926
2000: $23,853
2010: $47,237
2022: $82,808
I lived in Singapore from 1996 to 1998 before he became prime minister, and it was plenty prosperous then.
It's now four times wealthier.
Obviously, it's not exactly like our system in that being on a small island, it's kind of a one-party system, it could use a freer press, and it tends to clamp down on dissent. But economically, it's one of the world's freest countries, and it goes out of its way to ensure that all its residents have access to high quality education and opportunities. Heck, it's one of the world's cleanest countries, too, spic and span.
As Lee Hsien Loong discusses wokedom, the idea of racial grievance groups getting offended at every statement and everyone walking on tenterhooks as a result, his disdain is obvious.
That's because Singapore's experience counters that in spades.
Because hard as it is to believe now, Singapore was not always the economically free, prosperous, and sparking clean country it is now.
It actually used to be the opposite -- a stinking port town full of race riots, crime, communists, hookers, trash, and chaos.
It was so bad it got thrown out of the Malayan Federation in 1963 for this reason, and Lee, being the top elected official from Singapore in the Malayan Federation, a post-colonial cobbled nation from the British empire, ended up the country's first prime minister. He wrote in his memoirs that he was absolutely terrified at his city being cut loose by what became Malaysia.
It didn't turn out as bad as he thought it would -- in fact, it was a blessing in disguise, because Singapore had him leading it.
In Singapore, Lee and the others knew all about race chaos, being a tiny nation of about 4 million people with four different cultures, three kinds of Chinese nationalities -- the elegant, educated Teo Chew, the middle-of-the-road Hokkien, and the rough nomadic Hakka (of which Lee was one), the Malays, the Tamil Indians, and the remaining British remnants.
Lee sought to keep a multicultural emphasis as a means of keeping the peace, as Wikipedia notes, but it was accompanied by a hardcore rule of law and equal justice under the law approach, which was the style of Lee, whose education at Cambridge University made him a lawyer.
Lee was all about rule of law and equal treatment under rule of law. Multiculturalism could not work any other way.
Equal opportunity, not equal results, and Singapore is still permeated with this mentality.
Lee started out with a largely Fabian socialist orientation, but died in what we would recognize as a conservative, a veritable soulmate of Ronald Reagan, a close ally whom he openly admired, based on his ferocious fealty to rule of law, which made the kind of multiculturalism seen in Singapore (they did adopt the common language of English to ensure locals could understand each other) possible.
So now that Lee Hsien Loong sees wokery up close, he can see where the problems are, his tone suggests in fact that he's utterly amazed that any nation could be so stupid as to adopt this idea, making a nation "not robust" as he put it. He's pretty well steeped in a country that rejected it.
The U.S. would do well to learn from this intelligent man and take a look at the Singapore experience, which teaches a lot about why wokedom leads to disaster. In the meantime, the video is great.
Image: Twitter screen shot