Race the Red Lantern
If all chinese eat mee pok, and I say mee pok taste like crap, does that make me a racist against chinese? According to our local penal code, I think so.
Was doing a brief check on the link to find out what does being seditious mean
http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/non_version/cgi-bin/cgi_getdata.pl?&actno=1964-REVED-290&date=latest&method=whole
and though I'm no lawyer, I guess the recent under-fired dude was probably charged for promoting "feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore".
Which is quite strange. Consider the following premises in the case:-
P1: Made excessively vicious remarks against Islam, which is a religion.
P2: Religion correlated with the Malay race.
P3: Charge for being a racist.
I do agree that that guy ought to be punished for instigating hatred, but it seems like the punishment doesn't quite match the offence. I was at the Something about Melayu play recently, produced by the NUS Malay Society, and one thing that they expressed quite strongly is that not all Muslims are Malays.
In my opinion, racism is a behavior that firstly stems from wrong ideas about a particular enthnic group, and secondly allows that idea to reify into some sort of negative energy.
So if our press continues to use Malay and Muslim interchangeably, and the law continues to reinforce that concept, then it might be sending the wrong signal to a generation of Singaporeans who are already so displaced and disillusioned with the CMIO classification; Chinese who can't write Chinese, Malays who think that they are Malays because they got help from Mendaki, peranakans who are labelled as 'others' in their ICs, Buddhist who believe in Hindu Gods, Englishmen who are into Zen, Fandis marrying Wendies, Chinese selling nasi lemak, Indians making roti prata etc etc.
A friend recently told me this story about how the Burmese government tried to install a traffic light system in a village to control the traffic. Drivers who saw the traffic light for the first time in their lives were so distressed that they actually end up crashing the traffic light! And so the governor removed the traffic light.
What is the morale of the story?
Home security is always an interplay between Order and Law. And sometimes, order is favored over law (removing that darn traffic light to bring back a sense of normacy in the Burmese lives), and sometimes the law becomes a nuisance in itself (i.e. installing the traffic light).
I'm not saying we should remove the sedition act, but we need to redefine it, which by the way has not been enacted for 40 years (some articles say it is 10 years) prior to this case.
posted by astral @ 9:36 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
hmmm looks like so far your post has , for some strange reason, only attracted ads. maybe there's money in this whole racism talk.
but anyway, i noticed in the sedition act you cited, i could also be hauled up by the police for inciting hostility between the "classes" of the population of singapore.
interesting considering how your state elites often tell us that class doesn't exist here, that everyone is middle class, and elitism is an all-encompassing classification. everything seems to lose its meaning when defined that way.
but back to that point on classes. so not only would i be lynched for expressing my utter contempt for mee pok (this is a hypothetical exercise of course. i love my mee pok), but also for telling my friends how sad it is that basic things like education and healthcare differ so greatly depending on which class you belong to. oh won't the lower classes be so unhappy with the rich? and oh wouldn't the rich be so unhappy with me, a humble proletariat?
but isn't that the only obvious thing to say? especially when it gets drilled into our heads everyday that this is a land of equal opportunity. and that even when we aren't at all that well to do, we could always study really hard in our humble neighborhood schools to go against the odds and be like sim wong hoo. or even if we don't (maybe we're not creative enough), we shouldn't be complaining. we could always be like those undergrads who went to sell porridge.
but of course i end up digressing far too much. the thing is, the sedition act (or any act for that matter) is just about vague enough to be used for any purpose against anyone if it so benefits the elite. now, it's used against racist bloggers to 1)instill some fear in the internet community by reminding everyone that big brother's watching, 2)instill more fear in every singaporean, that racial riots are still a very real threat, and 3)cement the ideological notion of race, which itself, despite being a totally problematic concept, is such a powerful tool for the state.
full marks for creative use of obscure acts, zero for progress.
:)
malign oh so malign! Ha thanks for adding some sort of credibility to this spy/bot invested blog. Yeah .. maybe there is economic gains to be made from racial segregation in s'pore; redistributing social justice and benefits and all.
BUt anyhow, spot on down there about the class thing bit! din really notice that cos was sulking over my tasteless mee pok while typing the blog.
with regards to our 24 hr speakers' corner gimmick, shall we just put a bowl of mee pok there?
Eric Khoo wld be happy that we've finally discovered his higher order film strategies.
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