Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore and its founding father, died earlier today at age 91. The New York Times:
The nation, reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic.
“We are ideology-free,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”
“The Father of Singapore” as he came to be known, first took power amid a host of problems including a multi-racial and multi-religious society with a history of violent outbursts, inadequate housing, unemployment, a lack of natural resources such as a water supply, and a limited ability to defend itself from potentially hostile neighbours.
Whip-smart, self-assured and unflappable, Lee earned plenty of criticism along the way.
“If someone living in Singapore in the 1950s could have entered a time machine and travelled to the Singapore of today, he would have found the transformations of this island literally unbelievable,” former Singapore president SR Nathan said at a September 2013 conference on the legacy of “LKY”, as he is commonly referred to.
Central to Lee’s vision were the creation of good governance, political stability, a quality infrastructure, and improved living conditions.
I suspect for the average American of a certain age, Singapore just equates to the caning of Michael Fay. In truth, Singapore is much more – transformed from victims during World War II into a First World economy nowadays, they can be viewed as a success story, an alien society, or, as usual, the fetish for which you search. But how many Americans could find it on a map? I couldn’t. I had to go look.
