Thread by @dweenzers

I was very disturbed by @STcom 's front page spread on Shan's proposed new laws to "tackle foreign meddling in SG's affairs", not just because of its deliberate mischaracterisation of @kixes as a nefarious agent of foreign interests

SG's media climate is such that ST journalists will inexplicably change a headline about the attendance of the climate rally from "thousands" to "hundreds" to "greenies"

https://twitter.com/ecoangelhsu/status/1175466261058220032

And bear in mind that this is a rally that was attended by PAP MPs Louis Ng and Desmond Lee, and that LHL is off talking about climate change, so it really isn't especially controversial stuff.

A more serious example is the cover-up of a fatal outbreak of a Hepatitis C cluster at SGH in 2015. Michael Barr covers this in his Chp 6 of his new book "The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in Singapore's Developmental State"
palgrave.com/gp/book/978981…

Here is an excerpt from that Chp on the Hep C cover-up:

He notes how amazing it is that "in the four months since SGH notified MOH of the outbreak, and the two months since SGH told MOH that the outbreak was unusually large, not a single person relayed any hint of the news to the public" and that

"even when the truth emerged after GE 2015, the government was able to cower the one journalist who bravely asked some politically sensitive questions" (p141)

It is especially in this political climate that we need someone like @kixes who is willing to ask difficult and necessary questions. Even though there are independent-minded journalists in the mainstream media, they are constrained by the institutions.

This is why #IstandwithKirsten and I hope you do too. But it is also important to keep our eye on the context of this mischaracterisation. It goes a long way back, and is ably covered by Jothie Rajah in her book "Authoritarian Rule of Law" cambridge.org/core/books/aut…

In it, she tracks how the PAP slowly dismantled any dissent while trying to retain a veneer of rule of law by introducing laws that were ostensibly about something else (usually national security) and then used to crush legitimate dissent.

Her first case study is the Vandalism Act in 1966 and how it was used to target the Barisan Sosialis, who were protesting the PAP letting the US navy use SG as a base in their war against Vietnam. Barisan used lots of posters because they had been squeezed out of public spaces

She highlights how the Vandalism Act was specifically targeted at the Barisan by describing how the act of tearing up IC cards was initially charged as vandalism (p82)

Next she talks about the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act and says that their main target was the Nanyang Siang Pau for dissenting against the PAP's policies toward the Chinese lang (Chinese education, accreditation of Nantah, etc)

Because the state denied that they were targeting just the Chinese newspaper, they dragged in two English-language papers that they could combine with NYSP to portray as "fronts for hostile foreign interests intent on undermining the nation" (p123).

These two English papers are the same papers that were mentioned today on ST Page 6 - The Singapore Herald and the Eastern Sun

This is absolutely ridiculous because at the time, both newspapers were relatively new, and the Eastern Sun hadn't even published anything critical of the SG govt at that point. "The absence of critique was explained as a sinister waiting game"

It was a crock of shit then. It is a crock of shit today. They didn't have any evidence that either of these papers were part of any attempt to destabilise Singapore, and they were merely a cover for the state's taking down of NYSP.

The rest of the book covers the Amendment of the Legal Profession Act, to stop the Law Society from critiquing the state's treatment of the newspapers; the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act, which was based on the ISA and is incidentally being updated, and the Public Order Act

She notes that these laws and detentions were timed just before elections. The parallels with today are uncanny.

I hope that the state does not resort to detaining @kixes. But at this point they don't have to. They just need to insinuate that she's an agent of foreign influence and the mob will do the work for them.

The attacks on @kixes and Terry from @tocsg are necessary to distract them from what they do - hold the state accountable and ask necessary but difficult questions, especially before an election.