@Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net Apologies for the near month late response.
I usually don’t focus on leaders too much because I personally find reading about any sort of leader is missing the forest for the trees, and a lot of liberal-left types would have their “choice” and “stern” words and “analysis” about them enough to get the general picture.
Maybe in the future I’ll do a write-up, but as of now I think this blogpost will give you a solid idea with what we are working with.
Just to be cheeky, if people are interested on Race and Class in Malaya, please have a look at my comment history and the relatively recent post I made on the news megathread.
Happy (or I guess maybe angry or sad or shocked or vindictive or smug, depends on your background knowledge of race in Southeast Asia) reading!
Tags don’t work in posts, only comments. @Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net
i’ll leave this one quote here though
In the early days, many Malay Singaporeans were not called up for NS. When NS started in 1967, race relations were fragile and tenuous, after the riots of 1964 and separation in 1965. The government could not ignore race tensions, simply recruit all young Malays and Chinese and have them do military training side by side. Israeli instructors would have been involved in the training of Malay/Muslim servicemen at a time of Muslim-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. So we did not recruit every Malay male, unless we were confident his participation in NS would not be a problem. Even then there was no blanket ban against Malays in the SAF. We have progressed as circumstances have changed. By the 1980s, we were confident enough to offer SAF undergraduate awards to Malays.
Perhaps maybe one day I’ll write about the parallels on settler colonial histories of other parts of the Global South and that of Singapore. Although that is personally going to be one heck of an effort.
