Two thoughts ran through my mind as I was escorted to the women’s toilets at the police station so the investigators could confiscate the T-
My country—known for being clean, efficient, and “strict”—is no totalitarian state. Presided over by a supremely tech optimistic government, me and my people are hyper-connected, constantly glued to our devices and our social media, on which plenty of anti-establishment comments can be found. We have a small but busy civil society scene, and an emergent leftist movement that’s building grassroots capacity for organizing. It’s a disservice to stereotype us Singaporeans as oppressed, timid, politically apathetic digits in an island dictatorship.
But it would also be a mistake to assume that we’re free.
What we have is a calibrated, insidious, and petty system of control that allows the government to promote the country as a cosmopolitan, open-for-business city-state while fencing public discourse into boundaries that they choose. This is achieved through legislation, regulation, enforcement, and bureaucracy, all presented as being in the interest of national security, stability, the maintenance of social harmony, and the protection of the Singaporean way of life. The reality on the ground is our political freedoms and civil liberties are dwindling, and our capacity for dissent and activism has been stifled. But if you point it out, the government will deny it.
