The issue Ben Bland takes up against Ong Weichong here, is an understandable one. Ben hasn’t responded in depth yet, but it is clear from this preliminary entry that he is disturbed by how Ong argued the lack of awareness of the country’s history is due to the general apathy among young people. Not so much what Ben had argued — that “Singapore’s historical narrative had for too long been dominated by the People’s Action Party and its chief figurehead Lee Kuan Yew because of direct and indirect control by the state over schools, universities and the mass media.”

Let me just say the obvious: the general apathy among young people is a product of the PAP’s direct and indirect controls -  so yes, Ben is right on this count. But for what it’s worth, I think Ben has not fully understood the substance of Ong’s response – Ong is “saying” much more in that commentary. If you read beyond the first few paragraphs, he rejects the absoluteness of Ben’s claim by pointing out how history has been used as a tool for nation building by other Western regimes – so the issue at hand is how any history is being used for nation building in an uncritical manner and not whether it is being used exclusively by the Singapore PAP government for nation building purposes.

Ong also seems to imply that national education in Singapore embraces critical historiography – something I am quite sceptical about because I think there’s always room for improvement in something like that in Singapore. I mean, look at how many young Singaporeans knew who Dr Goh Keng Swee or S. Rajaretnam were and the crucial roles they played in Singapore’s foundational days as an independent nation, before their deaths hit the local headlines. An important caveat though: I could be wrong here, so I would appreciate anybody in the know to challenge or back me up on this.

But it is fair to surmise the subtext to Ong’s commentary is his issue with how Ben seems to imply that ALL Singaporeans are incapable of critical history – consider how much Ong talks about the ready availability of alternate histories in his piece and how Singaporeans can choose to access them if they so wish.

Ben is not explicit on this, but the way I see it, it is not whether they are readily available, but whether the bulk of the Singaporean public have the critical capacity to process these alternatives. I have no doubt there is a sizeable group of Singaporeans who are able to do so – the Singapore government did invest a ton of money in our education after all – but the question for Singaporeans is what and how we choose to “react” to such critical knowledge.

Do we use it to empower us in our everyday political discourse? Or do we choose to work around what we know, to benefit our economic well-being? To be frank, both options are “smart” ones in that they are decisions based on such critical knowledge – among the college-educated people I know, at least. The flip side of not conducting our historical discourse in such a polemical fashion, as Ong said, is that people can hide behind the veneer of any “nuanced” approach.

But whether that in itself is “bad” or “good” is a judgement call, necessarily conditioned on the political traditions one is socialized in. Consider the number of people who are avowedly “political” in Singapore  – the probable result of Ben’s original, overarching point – and then consider how the language of politics in Singapore, as with most of the emergent economies in the world today, is an overtly economical one.

Ben talks about how “Singaporeans need to develop a better understanding of their own history not so much to ‘fully appreciate’ what the PAP has done for them but to understand the limitations of their rigid political system and how they can improve it”. But I think we could all start by appreciating the current material reality in Singapore. We – certainly I do – understand the merits of liberal democracy and all that, but to be fair, the issue is how do we work towards those goals from our current situation.

However Singaporeans choose to do that, I think all of us could all start by acknowledging that not everything “good” about Lee Kuan Yew is “uncritical” or “bad” – because a critical appreciation of Singapore’s history is really more than being anti-PAP. The tricky thing about being critical about Singapore’s history is establishing what praise for PAP is legitimate and what is not – which is problematic because in the absence of a public “instititional” ideological realm, everything becomes easily cast as being for or against the government because there are no markers of what’s left, right, libertarian or whatnot.