Letters
There are no honest people in Singapore
by Anonymous Reader
In Singapore there are no laws to protect whistleblowers. Even assuming there are, things are not as straightforward as we imagine.
In a society like Singapore, hierarchies are created for the sake of creating them because there are too many cronies to feed. Whatever legal protection you may imagined is adequate to protect you from retribution from the people you are exposing is illusory at best.
You wouldn’t need to whistleblow had your superior been doing an honest or competent job. The more serious the scandal the more levels of people will be involved. It is a formidable gauntlet to run.
In running it, your superiors have plenty of time to determine whether you are just a pesky troublemaker with nothing better to do or a social activist, a do-gooder, with a genuine changing-the-world agenda. How tenacious and resourceful you are will be assessed.
You will be dealt with initially by platitudes. For most do-gooders, this would be enough to soothe his troubled conscience. These platitudes will reaffirm his beliefs in the ‘system’. It may even make him an evangelist preaching the integral honesty of the ‘system’. He will morph into an apologist if not already one.
If platitudes are not doing the job well enough you could always be reassigned to the North Pole to be cooled and removed from further access to the information in question. The very threat of its use is enough to scare off all the flexible conscience whistleblowers.
However, those with resolute genuine conscience are still a problem. When all else fails, there is always the hammer. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The function of a hammer is to nail you to the cross and make you a martyr if necessary. This is a safe option because in Singapore, there is no risk of a martyr sparking riots in the street. Everyone is too busy keeping their head above water. Or, they are too selfish to stick their neck out for anyone. Of course at the top of their mind is a law forbidding five person gathering in one place together at any one time. (This explains why in Singapore no spectators are allowed during a mahjong session: you already have four players and one tea lady who provides refreshments.)
If you persist in whistleblowing, in all likelihood, you will be fired, or prosecuted, on some trumped up charges, which, the usual long investigative process will give plenty of time to contrive. Shouts of referee kelong will be bandied about to muddy the water when you whistle too loudly.
Your life and career will be in ruins.
In reality, if you stumbled upon something, your best bet is to keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life. Of course, this makes you complicit and just as corrupted as your superiors. If you make public what you know hoping public awareness can move the Singapore public to protect you, then you should quickly share your discovery of whatever powerful intoxicating substance you are high on. With a local polity this crazy the Singapore public needs some numbing drug as it seems the usual dumbing effect is wearing out: through no fault of the government, in spite of their best efforts, the public is getting wise to their ways.
In conclusion, there is only one real way of life for an honest person: be a criminal. He will be deemed a criminal who has broken the law sharing ‘military secrets’.
Who wants to be a criminal?
Conclusion? Rather obvious isn’t it. There are no honest people in Singapore!
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