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Martyn See
March 6 ·
The PAP has a long and nasty record of dishing out personal attacks and name calling. It is a tradition that first began with Lee Kuan Yew labelling his opponents at the Barisan Sosialis "Communists", which resulted in the arrest, detention, torture and stigmatisation of thousands of Singaporeans, in particular Chia Thye Poh who lost 32 years of his life to imprisonment without trial.
Name calling by the PAP is no child's play, especially when the party has full control over the local media. As Francis Seow once noted, "Give a dog a bad name and hang it." It can have devastating effects on families and can break lives.
The late JB Jeyaretnam was called "mangy dog", "skunk" and "street hustler" by LKY, who proceeded to bankrupt and crush him, with full co-operation of the entire system.
Labelled a "Marxist" in 1987, Vincent Cheng was locked up and suffered blows to his abdomen til he coughed blood.
Labelled an "Anti-Christian Chinese Chauvinist", Tang Liang Hong had his assets seized and was exiled, leaving his wife and daughter in mental duress.
Labelled a "political gangster" and "psychopath" by LKY, Chee Soon Juan was prosecuted, bankrupted, mocked and maligned for 20 years of his political and personal life.
During the LKY era, personal attacks were often amplified by the media. When Chee was called a "psychopath", Chua Lee Hoong quoted unnamed medical experts in an entire article to support LKY's diagnosis of the former psychology lecturer.
In the post-LKY era, the dirty work has largely been farmed out to a shadowy brigade of keyboard lynch mobs. Sometimes operating under a shroud of pseudonymity, character assassinations have since taken an even nastier tone.
Recent recipients of such venom include not just opposition politicians (Vincent Wijeysingha, Yaw Shin Leong, Nicole Seah) but lawyers (M. Ravi), bloggers (Roy Ngerng, Kirsten Han), rights activists (Jolovan Wham, Gilbert Goh), website editors (TRS, TOC) and now even parents seeking justice for their dead children.
Next to detention without trial and legal suits, launching personal attacks is PAP's most effective strategy to silence and crush its critics. And it has also worked wonders in perpetuating a culture of self-censorship. No one likes to have his personal life exposed to all and sundry as a consequence for merely challenging the authorities.
But the complete impunity enjoyed during the LKY era is now gone. Politicians who engage in gutter politics are now as vulnerable as the opponents they target. For everytime Chan Chun Sing attacks Chee Soon Juan, the gut reaction of netizens is to reciprocate with even lower blows against the minister. For everytime K. Shanmugam threatens a critic, the subject of his divorce gets another airing. For every Yaw Shin Leong, there is always a Michael Palmer waiting to be found out.
But will the PAP elevate itself from such an-eye-for-an-eye political discourse?
Highly unlikely. Personal attacks and name-calling has proven to serve the PAP very well over the decades. It is very much in the party's DNA. To extricate it from itself, it needs to re-evaluate and denounce LKY's use of such a method to crush opponents. No one is betting on that to happen.