On being under seige

Yesterday, I talked about giving, today we will talk about of a siege mentality. A siege mentality is when we faced a crisis, and hunker down and beat all odds to survive. How did that dawn on me- because it dawned on me that a lot of Singapore's success is built on this siege mentality that the government have helped cultivated over the years to ensure the people's survivability and success over the years.

The main critique of having a siege mentality is that it is perceived rather than real. In order to maintain a siege mentality we must be constantly vigilant because we have been surrounded on all sides and the only way to move forward is to gather our resources and work together to ensure that the siege from external forces can be adequately dealt with.

This is the narration that Singaporeans have been fed with over the years: we are a small nation with no resources to rely on and surrounded by Muslim countries in a Chinese-majority polity. We are thus a recipe for disaster if we are not aware of our external threats and exploit our opportunities. It would be easy to break down whether these are facts that we have to deal with and hence analyse whether is this a government-constructed narrative or is this a reality that we have to deal with.

The idea of a resource rich country having an easy time economically and politically might be a falsehood as we have seen many countries with resources squandering their resources and landing themselves into debt and plunging their countries into crisis. Take for example several African countries, Myanmar and Indonesia.

What is real in this case, is not whether we have resources, but whether we can work together, effectively and efficiently to ensure the survivability of the country. If the government decides to couch our political and economic environment in dire context, it is only to reflect the reality that they faced rather than to forced it's people to work together.

Recently the Home Affairs Minister deemed the ISIS group as "evil", this is as extreme as it can get in labelling a group as non-human. But bearing in mind that these people have families as well and could be simply disillusioned and looking for some form of salvation, would it be fair to dehumanize them. How would the families- who might not be terrorist- feel in being associated with someone "evil"

This I believed is not trying dehumanize a group, it is announce to the world and it's people in no uncertain terms that these people must be avoided at all cost and no leeway will be given whatsoever.

I read yesterday a book I bought a few years after I graduated when I was still fresh with anti-establishment ideas- that politicians twist their words in order to suit their argument. Take for example words such as "war on terror". It is already biased in the sense that it is really tautological argument. Terror is already bad and hence of course we have to waged a war on something bad. What argument is there in waging a war on "terror". It is bad therefore we must eliminate it. There were some proponents against the war and if I am not wrong, it is against the Iraq war and I believed that the author is alluding that there were no discussions whether the war is justified hence he had a beef against the sound-bite argument.

Moving closer to home in Singapore, our more staid government is not so PR savvy and our health minister recently waged a "war against diabetes". Of course, this war in this case does not conjures images of glory and sacrifice and much less glamourous but as our pragmatic government goes, it is obvious in no uncertain terms that diabetes is bad and we must eliminate it at all cost. We are under siege from diabetes.

Whether we are under siege can depends on wordings of the word, we could couch it in terms that we are in danger but we could work in cooperation with our neighbours and ensure nothing untoward happen to us. This would not have same impact of hunkering down and ensuring our survivability. This would be against the prevailing government pragmatic ideology and realist foreign policies.

It would not be fair to constantly doubt the words of government and accusing them of false propaganda, but I believe that different countries have different personalities and ideologies in running their countries and therefore couched their policies in different terms. What is false is not whether they say in a different manner but rather whether it was done in good faith and with the best interest of it's citizens at heart.