Totally Lost Worlds

They say that winners write history.

Wiki Spooks, has a professionally-inserted load of crap
about the life and times of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer;
and it has been designed to muffle the treachery of Muslims against the
predominantly ethnically Hindu-Raj Sultans.  

Well, I'm not sure about 'winners' but I think what survives as 'history' must be simply strewn with bundles and bundles of lies and self-congratulation and various forms of 'spin.'

Even over as few years as forty or fifty I have witnessed the most atrocious deceits being actively portrayed all over the media - and now of course, most assuredly in things like Wikipedia - to the point where no one in contemporary generations has a single clue about the reality of their own very recent past histories. That is to say, what the truth is about their fathers and mothers and grandparents.

A lot of what you will read in Wikipedia, when it comes to biographies of recent identities, is just self-serving claptrap.

I know a lot of you will be saying to yourself - what is all this animus against someone like Lee Kuan Yew...

Well, I don't personally have any involvement in his world, but I see so many young people being led by the nose about his character and what part he played in the War and afterwards and it may be that 'history' will be very 'spun' - although possibly not, because I see a few signs of voices against his propaganda appearing all over the internet.

But in short let me just say a few simple things - not specifically about Lee himself, but about what ideas people carry about the War and Colonialism and the modern globalization phenomenon which lumps together regional national identity.

World Wars I and II destroyed a lot. And in the wake of the destruction, was a void (no more buildings, artifacts, documents, papers) into which visions were made to appear, some of which being made to look like they represented the past and history - but were nothing but exculpatory facades that covered crime and nastiness and disreputable things.

As far as Asian banking goes, Teow Chew Chinese were the main proponents. Hakka Chinese were not ever known for any kind of finance or banking at all - but that is not what you will read in modern historical accounts of things.

John Little's and eventually Robinson's
in Raffles Square, Singapore.

As far as gold and silver stockpiles in Malaysia and Singapore - apart from the significant personal holdings of various wealthy Sultanates (and not all were so wealthy) - there was only one: the basement gold and silver vault of Robinson's in Raffles Square.

Although the Japanese tried to crack into this vault, and then dynamite the doors, nothing prevailed and this vault stayed shut throughout the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. Or so you would think, if you read 'modern' history. Certainly, the Japanese tortured several Chinese merchants and professionals, most to death in fact, in order to extract the safe codes and the lock opening procedures.

Well in any event, like the Roman Emperor Nero, Lee Kuan Yew had many times tried to coerce the Chinese (not Hakka) shophouse owners in Raffles Square next to Robinson's to sell to him, and by 1972 the last of several major fires completely burned down the front of Robinson's and all of the surrounding tenement shophouses following which Lee generously offered to swap these burned down dwellings for small apartments in slums, sorry, high-rise apartment buildings.

And so also today we have a massive worldwide obsession with real estate and property and central banks themselves act hand-in-glove with government fiscal policy to produce austerity measures, via which the saved dollars all go to buy bonds at a premium, thereby creating an artificial low interest rate environment in which property prices must go up all the time.

Somewhere along the line though, someone had to have had some monetary 'wedge' through which they could have effected control over the mindsets of central banks - I am speaking metaphorically if you gather what I'm saying. With respect to modern central bank policy, I don't know where exactly was the point when suddenly some accountants and policy-makers decided property was to be the ultimate goal of monetary benevolence - disregarding the lip-service to 'inflation' or employment in the foundation charters, common sense points to property values being the only real concern of central banks these days. I mean they do go to all sorts of extremes to manipulate 'data' and the structural components that derive the 'inflation' calculations.

And so too, you should realize that even in the dim, or dark and misty past of history, politicians still needed a lot of money to reach all the lobbies and sufficient of the sucker public, to grasp power.

But Lee Kuan Yew, so the story goes, was a poor but honest glued-paper vending boy.

And you can believe that too, if you want. I'll not stop you.

I'll tell you this much, though, about world property prices - without systematic theft, they cannot stay up forever. But if you like, you may believe that they will.

I'll not stop you. Put your money into that strong strong vault...