50 Years of PAP - on the idea of 'Foreign Interference in Internal Affairs'

What’s this ‘interference in internal affairs’ that the plebs keep going on about with regards to Lee’s visit to Malaysia and his comments on their local situation?

When ‘foreigners’ criticise the singaporean government on their undemocratic or inhumane actions, the local population is tri-divided between those whom opine that these ‘foreigners ought to mind their own business’; those who welcome ‘foreign interference’ with regards to the said issue; and the larger population who are too preoccupied with ‘4D’ (lottery results) to thus not bother to develop the ability to have an opinion.  When his Lordship, the former PM Lee, now turned ‘Minister Mentor’ in singapore’s official ‘House of Lords’, goes to Malaysia and comments on local socio-political phenomena, some amongst the opposition wonder why he’s ‘interfering in the other nation’s internal affairs’. 

When the government wanted to introduce the American, Michael Fay, to the searing side of the cane for vandalism, American remonstrations were taken as ‘foreign interference’ and thus reason enough to discount all reasonable arguments against it.  When the government wanted to have a drug-carrier from Vietnam strangled for his efforts in the local prison, ‘foreign’ critique on humanitarian grounds were rejected as reason enough.  I recall a local taxi driver at that time stating, ‘How dare they interfere!  He broke our law!  So he must be punished!’  He wasn’t interested in the sociological or psychological basis which we contribute to for the emergence of crime, or the definition of ‘punishment’.  And when he said that the poor boy deserved it, well, that was the final straw for me, and I told him that if taxi-driving was all he ever did as opposed to thinking, empathizing and engaging in personal studies, he should leave the opining to adults.’  As I’ve been saying to ‘professionals’ around me for a couple of years now, ‘your success in being able to feed, clothe, house, and reproduce yourself in the course of a 5 minute effort during ad-breaks does not render the relatively expert opinions out there to ‘opinion’ simply because you can open your mouth and say ‘ahhh’.

Anyway, ‘foreign interference’ is an archaic concept and could only exist up to the midst of the colonial era.  With the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, international economic groups, multinational corporations, the UN Security Council, the World Bank, amongst a host of others, ‘foreign interference’ has long been a reality.  Culture is one of the last arenas wherein ‘sovereignty’ is exercised so that people the world over might remain fragmented enough for the international bodies mentioned above to do their best for the transnational elite.  So, in this context, ‘foreign interference’ is synonymous with ‘foreign cultural imposition’.  I suppose, where a people are acutely acculturalised, as it is the case in ‘asian democracies’, the people become obtuse enough to overstate the language of ‘foreign interference’, whilst the culture serves as ‘stored value’ in a cultural mindset that automatically discounts ‘foreign’ information real-time unless it fits well with the perspectival status quo. 

What goes unrealized is that the objective consideration of issues requires the definition of ‘irrelevance’ to be confined to variables that aren’t relevant to the issue at hand.  When ‘irrelevance’ is identified in terms of sentience, that fundamentally evicts objectivity from the consideration of issues and opens up a continuum of relevance and irrelevance based on perceptions of who has a right to an opinion and who doesn’t.  When this happens, the powers that be will only have to tweak the ‘perceptions’ variable via a whole host of indoctrinational means and methods that are at their disposal in order to dictate, within the collective subconscious, the degree of reason that can rule any debate.  When this nonsensical ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy is allowed predominance over pure reason, ‘us’ becomes ‘reason’ enough.  Hence, you’ll soon find, as it has already been the case for quite a while now, that the ‘us vs. them’ can take on a whole range of variations, be it, ‘us’ the men despite women; ‘us’ the race-based majority despite the thus-defined minority; ‘us’ the able-bodied despite the physically/etc-challenged; ‘us’ the ‘gays’ despite individual rights movements; ‘us’ the opposition despite those who seek to improve the opposition via critique; ‘us’ the wealthy despite you peasants; and the list can go on beyond the thousand-word limit I’ve imposed on this perspective. 

‘Interference’ is a rude interjection in what one has no reason to involve oneself in.  For myself, ‘interference’ ceases to be so when one has reason enough to involve oneself in another’s affairs simply because one is capable of reasoning.  This gives us enough ‘reasonable doubt’ to acquit on the charge of ‘interference’.

For myself, the only ‘us’ I’m partial to is, on a time-based continuum, the ‘us’ as we are now, and the ‘them’ we can be in the future if we appreciate reason in itself despite the illusory sense of familialarity we have been indoctrinated to confine within self-serving borders. 

Ed