la nausée

The PAP has seen fit to reply on the mini-storm that’s brewing over perceived double standards towards certain ‘cycling events’. Check out TOC’s post, “Planning cycling events: Uniquely Singapore, F1 or F9?”.

To begin with, I’m quite surprised that MPs Lim Wee Kiak and Zaqy Mohamed actually decided to respond — the most sensible strategy if I were them would be to decline comment and wait till everything blows over.

As it is, quite predictably, they were unable to explain, convincingly, why the PAP can organize outdoor activities at all, while the same kind of activities, if organized by, say, the Workers’ Party, are automatically deemed ‘political’ and thus refused. And attempting to recategorize a night cycling event as “not actually organized by the YP”, but by the Canberra ward youth executive committee, as Mr. Lim has done, comes across as nothing but an ex post facto legerdemain with words.

The more I think of it, the more I feel that the covert attempt by someone in the YPAP’s quarters to ‘rectify’ history is really quite sinister, even if evidently a ‘trifling’ matter. When information becomes as manipulable as a contortionist’s limbs, bending to someone else’s political choreography, our memory, our very identity, is at threat. The more our truth becomes whatever someone else dictates, the more we are ensnared in a tyranny more terrifying than tyranny by gestapo and genocide, because more intimate, more complete than mere tyranny over our bodies — a tyranny over our minds.

Sinister also, because the members of the YPAP are precisely those who are being actively groomed to take up leadership positions within the ruling party in the future. Surely they can do better than just furtively erasing away anything which shows them up in a bad light? A little explanation wouldn’t hurt, would it? Such explanation also should have been forthcoming without the YPAP having to be prodded by the blog community. Even to a bystander like myself, such an action (or lack thereof) speaks very poorly of them.