Lee Kuan Yew on Tiannamen Square Massacre

[Tycoon101]

I agree with Lee Kuan Yew; If this must be done to save the country, then so be it.

 

[Dann]

It's one thing to agree with the general idea, it's another to actually say it out loud.

And LKY is a statesman, not a commoner like us. You'd think he'd know better.

 

[Phlegmak]

If you want to do the maths, the deaths of a few thousands is not worth
the deaths of maybe millions in a 100 years of chaos. The bottom line is
that we cannot judge a place like China with our Western morals.

Interesting. You just said that as long as order is maintained, the deaths of the disorderly people is a good thing. You just rationalized tyrannical dictatorship (I'm not referring to China here, but dictatorship in general).

 

[Shaihulud]

You just rationalized tyrannical dictatorship (I'm not referring to China here, but dictatorship in general).

Im of the thought that if the reasons were true, than the ends justify the means. Just because dictatorship uses it as an excuse doesn't mean that it isn't applicable legitimately.

 

[Tycoon101]

Interesting. You just said that as long as order is maintained, the deaths of the disorderly people is a good thing. You just rationalized tyrannical dictatorship (I'm not referring to China here, but dictatorship in general).

What makes the deaths of 2,000,000 people morally justifiable when you had the chance to kill 200,000, and save the country from disorder?

That logic of yours is faulty.

 

[bathsheba666]

What makes the deaths of 2,000,000 people morally justifiable when you had the chance to kill 200,000, and save the country from disorder?

That logic of yours is faulty.

Compared to your logic, which has suddenly invented the deaths of 2,000,000 people as the alternative, I'd say his logic is just fine.

 

[Phlegmak]

Though of course this raises the question of whether Tiannamen would have resulted in the slide into instability anyway. This is where I find Chinese and Western perspective diverges with them taking opposite views (Chinese: yes, instability, war; Western: no, democratic reforms).

Let's start there. You don't know if it would have caused instability. The communists, the current government, caused quite a bit of instability with the Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution. Let's not have that again.

The regime in Beijing is more stable than any alternative government that can be formed in China. Let us assume that the students had carried the day at Tiananmen and they had formed a government. The same students who were at Tiananmen went to France and America. They've been quarreling with each other ever since. What kind of China would they have today? Something worse than the Soviet Union. China is a vast, disparate country; there is no alternative to strong central power.

That's crazy. You can't assume the students would have a democidal government based on this flimsy evidence.

I would think yes. We have been used to a strong and firm government for all of our history. Any 'weakness' soon leads to chaos and then regime change. It would take a supreme effort and virtually the total transformation of society in order for Western style democracy to become the preferred system. Taiwan may be used as a counter-argument to this but it should be noted that they are now having trouble with the system as well. Note the recent extra-constitutional moves to oust Chen Shui Bian.

Chaos like the Cultural Revolution?

My country would die for to have a leader like Lee. The rate of development in Singapore since it is separated from Malaysia speaks for itself.

Yes the people of your country would die.

Im of the thought that if the reasons were true, than the ends justify the means. Just because dictatorship uses it as an excuse doesn't mean that it isn't applicable legitimately.

Wow. The ends justify the means.

I'm quite amazed at the praise for autocrats in this thread.

Basically, what I see in this thread, is there could be chaos for 100 years if the students weren't massacred. In other words, X number of people could have died over a period of Y years if Z number of people weren't murdered. That means that some of you are actually supporting the massacre of the students. Unbelievable! Well, if we're going to invent make believe scenarios which need to be prevented by massacring dissenters, then...

* You must support the Iraq war. Saddam could have caused some damage in the future, killing more than 1,000,000 people. He could have been a threat to the US in the future.
* You must support the deaths of 80,000,000 Soviet citizens. There were approximately 300,000,000 Soviet citizens at the end of the Soviet Union's existance. Therefore, those 80,000,000 people were worth killing to save the lives of 300,000,000 citizens, because those 80,000,000 could have caused some chaos in the USSR. Hallelujah for dead Soviets!
* You must support the deaths of approximately 60,000,000 Chinese citizens. See above for the reasons why.
* You must support the deaths of over a million precolonial native Americans caused by the United States. Thank god for Andrew Jackson's policies and centuries of antiIndian American policies!
* Thank god for the Spanish conquest of South America. Those evil Incas could have caused millions of deaths in the future.
* God bless Pol Pot!

There are obviously an infinite number of examples.

Seriously, you supporters of the massacre should be ashamed of yourselves.

 

[Tycoon101]

Seriously, you supporters of the massacre should be ashamed of yourselves.

The haters of massacres should find a stable argument.

Humans are expendable, if they must be destroyed for the greater good, so be it. If I am in the way of my country's future, then let me die. My death will benefit many others.

 

[Dann]

Chaos like the Cultural Revolution?

Yes, precisely. The Cultural Revolution started out as a particularly vile political move by Mao to ged rid of all challengers to his power, but very quickly spiralled out of control. That is government 'weakness' somewhere in the chain. In the end the army was required to restore order. Now I'm certain there were massacres of students then too, as the few AKs and artillery pieces the Red Guards had were certainly no match for the PLA's tanks and the air force. But how come no one (including us Chinese ourselves) ever mourns for those misguided youth hmm? But they were just teenagers then too. Why? Is it because they were heathen commies? Brainwashed and idolatrous heathen commies to boot?

No one is saying that had the students had their way in 1989, China will assuredly collapse into chaos. Far from it. There were sympathetic elements in the government who will soon rise to take over, BUT (and I can't emphasize this enough) only with substantial outside support. This will not sit well with the Chinese, as it will mean indebture to foreign powers all over again, not no mention a much weaker and possibly even reduced nation. One of the reasons the Nationalists lost the civil war was because they got too identified with US interests in the latter years. People think of this as selling out. For democracy to come to China it will have to blossom from within, not imposed from outside, and most certainly not through a CIA plot to duplicate "People Power" one more time during the time when it was all the fad.

Now while agreeing to the necessity of not allowing the events at Tiananmen to spiral out of control, it does not follow that one also agrees to the bloody way in which suppression was carried out. Surely there must have been better alternatives, but what's done is done. A bunch of fools arguing about it on the internet isn't going to bring those naive kids back to life. I for one believe that justice will eventually be served, but not just yet.

 

[bathsheba666]

Humans are expendable, if they must be destroyed for the greater good, so be it. If I am in the way of my country's future, then let me die. My death will benefit many others.

Even if it does improve the quality of debate here, I still don't believe you should die...
... on balance.

 

[JohnRM]

As far as I am concerned, from the point of view of a conservative American, I would rather have a stable China with the kind of government that it has now rather than have an unstable China with democratic rule. I could not care less about the freedom of the Chinese. What concerns me is the status of Chinese nuclear weapons, the world economy, and any potential for a more hardline government taking power and starting conflicts with its neighbors. I am perfectly satisfied with what we have now, and so should everyone else. Let the Chinese handle themselves, internally, on their own. Outside interference is bound to cause more trouble than it is worth.

 

[Imaginos]

Dann said:
"At any rate, a person of Lee Kuan Yew's stature saying this publicly sends shivers down one's spine. Perhaps we should be thankful he did not become leader of a larger nation."

Many years ago I read a Q&A session where he said that he could become the PM and did what he did only because he lived in Singapore and that if he had lived in China, he would probably had only been a minor official in the Chinese Govt.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Whatever LKY is, he's certainly preferable to those Malay supremacists back home.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketuanan_melayu

 

[mangxema]

"If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it."

Eh... Their population can take the hit.

 

[Imaginos]

Originally Posted by Gr3yL3gion:
My country would die for to have a leader like Lee. The rate of development in Singapore since it is separated from Malaysia speaks for itself.

Phlegmak said:
Yes the people of your country would die.

Why would they? When Singapore was part of Malaysia, he and the party were standing on a platform of a "Malaysian Malaysia", where there is meritocracy between the races, where all the races were equal. What if he had won instead and we were still part of Malaysia? Paraphrasing one of the Sing Govt's favourite term at the moment: "it's a win-win situation for all".

 

[Imaginos]

Interesting. You just said that as long as order is maintained, the deaths of the disorderly people is a good thing. You just rationalized tyrannical dictatorship (I'm not referring to China here, but dictatorship in general).

Didn't the US use a similar path of reasoning when it dropped the 2 A bombs in Japan in '45? Better to let a certain number of people die and end the war or to continue a war and allow many many more to die?

 

[Winner]

The bottom line is
that we cannot judge a place like China with our Western morals.

Or we should deal with our own societies problems first...

.

Of course we can. It is wrong, period. We can't advocate killings, torture and other crimes just because in other cultures, such things may be common. In our standards, they're wrong and we have to say that.

 

[Phlegmak]

Originally Posted by Gr3yL3gion:
My country would die for to have a leader like Lee. The rate of development in Singapore since it is separated from Malaysia speaks for itself.

Phlegmak said:
Yes the people of your country would die.

Why would they? When Singapore was part of Malaysia, he and the party were standing on a platform of a "Malaysian Malaysia", where there is meritocracy between the races, where all the races were equal. What if he had won instead and we were still part of Malaysia? Paraphrasing one of the Sing Govt's favourite term at the moment: "it's a win-win situation for all".

"If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it."

The entire point of the opening post was that a bunch of Chinese citizens should die to prevent chaos in the country. With a leader who advocates the murder of his own citizens to preserve order, the citizens of the country would die.

Didn't the US use a similar path of reasoning when it dropped the 2 A bombs in Japan in '45? Better to let a certain number of people die and end the war or to continue a war and allow many many more to die?

Yep, they sure did follow a similar path. The difference here is that the US was in a war. What Lee is talking about is an imaginary scenario in which an unknown number of people could die, if chaos became prevalent in the country, so he must sacrifice a few hundred thousand people.

 

[luiz]

do not fall into the trap to think it was LKY alone who was responsible for Singapore's success. There are a lot of factors, besides being equipped with excellent infrastructure and civil service by the British, a location that is superb for trading, etc.

LKY was always ruthless, just remember operation cold store where his own old comrades were imprisoned without trial. Some of them spend decades in prison without any trial.
If you want to find out more about Singapore, read here. The man who almost was the first PM of Singapore
Lim Chin Siong

more on that, simply scroll down the link
Spore history

These days LKY is an old senile man and nobody inSingapore dares to tell him to shut up and leave us all alone with his antics. His immense arrogance pisses off anyone off that has not been brainwashed by the Singapore system. The country reminds one more of North Korea than a democracy (of course you got all the freedom to make money and travel). It is actually extremely fragile theses days.

Amen. The guy is not the responsible for Singapore's success.

His comments on the OP are typical fascistoid BS and should be rejected by all sane people.

The argument that China needs a blood-thirsty dictatorship to stay in order is also BS, as Silver said look at the equally complex India.

As for the "different cultures, different systems" BS argument, I point out that liberty is not something inherent to the european peoples, that many asian nations have succesfully implemented a functioning democracy.

China can be a stable democracy that does not resort to slaughtering students. Or do you folks think that the chinese are somehow inferior to us, are a race of mindless barbarians that need central guidance from a totalitarian party to keep them from killing themselves?