Why It's important

You'll see a phrase like this in Wikipedia:

"a relatively underdeveloped Colonial outpost." This is in reference to Singapore before World War II, in the entry about Mr. Lee Kuan Yew and his life and times.

Or you'll read this kind of thing: "many local Muslim Malays were sympathetic to the Japanese concept of liberating their country from colonialism."

And so a lot of you young pups will never comprehend the insidious villainy of these types of sentences. 

Yet, Malaya and Singapore were as much 'Colonies' back then as they are national sovereigns today - they simply are not in any strict sense. They are leased lands with independent political systems legally owned by various Sultanates - none of which were originally Muslim at all - they sprang from the massive expansion of a Hindi King many many centuries ago, and all of his royal offspring became the 'Sultans' that owned and ruled over those places in the Far East and South East Asia.

It's all very well to call Singapore 'a relatively underdeveloped Colonial outpost,' but you would have had difficulty explaining that to someone from J. Paul Getty's Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York) Corporation, which had its refineries there, or to Wrigleys, or to Castrol, or Burma Oil, or to the Vesteys - who continued to install refrigerated air-conditioners in the barber and hairdressing salons and cafe bars in Robinson's and John Little's Department Stores (that were there BEFORE the war) that were the envy of even Parisian Department Store tycoons!

When Armand Hammer sent his Russian trading ships out to Singapore and Penang (and got bombed by the Nazi 'Emden' for their trouble) it wasn't because he viewed either Singapore or Penang as 'a relatively underdeveloped Colonial outpost.' 

The Sarkees Brothers hotel buildings were the envy of the entire hotel world.

And I do love how Lee claims to have decided to 'buy' a farm in Cameron Highlands. That would have been interesting as such a thing could have set you back the entire GDP of a small European nation - seeing as how they were among the best tea-growing lands in the world. Racism is this ignorant idea that because, for instance, Indians and Chinese also owned tea and rubber plantations this must have meant such things were cheap - not. There were then, as there are now, Indians and Chinese who are not only among the wealthiest and most well-educated people on earth, some of them, yee gods, even have it off with white women don't you know.

I see that yesterday's Guardian Newspaper calls Lee the first hardline government leader in Asia. 'Hardline -' what does that mean? 

It means someone who has to go out of their way to cover over criminality. 

And that is all that 'hardline' ever means when it comes to politics. Always has since the Greeks invented the word, and always will. Don't be a dummy and suppose that you are being 'tough' or 'tough on crime' or 'tough on budgetary discipline' and all of this when you support some politician who is 'tough.' Because they're not being tough for your benefit. 

The Left has its own stunning inadequacies and in today's politics it is regularly impossible to tell between the two flanks.

People who seek power... when they have the choice of immersing themselves in a computer game instead... are problematic which ever way you look at it. 

You see, if a Colonial - or say for instance today - some CIA operative sticks bamboo slivers up the fingernails of a young girl, then you prosecute them or hunt them down and arrest them. 

Or if they stuck chopsticks through the brains of the girls' fathers via their eardrums in front of them. You don't just blithely say 'I was an interpreter for the Japanese (Secret Police).'  People today do not have the stomach for the truth while they easily fall for financially-sponsored lies and propaganda. All the local Chinese other than those directly within Lee's circle knew what he was about. 

You don't say something like: 'oh, these guys were just trying to liberate young girls from old men.' Do you? Lee Kuan Yew was a criminal swine who cut the throats of anyone who stood in his way - and bribed and corrupted many many politicians, bankers, and media organisations in order to give this feted impression about him that far too many naiive people have of him.

It's a bit like saying that Sunni Muslims are helping Jihadi John because he's liberating them all from a wicked Western infidel path of unrighteousness. That's just a fucking lie.

There is no 'Singapore economic miracle.' And there never was.

Ask Getty, the Vesteys, Hammer, or the Teow Chew Chinese gold merchants Lee stabbed in the back regularly.

A Cambridge educated lawyer? My god. What a nerve. Mind you - now you know why there are many Oxford, Cambridge, and Inns Of Court people who have thrown their 'bits of academic paper' into the bin.

Not for many a long year has entrance and qualification to and from these places been for anything but money. 

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...

LKY On Life Support

The Singapore Straits Times this morning reported in a fairly vague small column that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had been hospitalized.

Lee Kuan Yew is in fact on life support and in a coma with mechanically ventilated breathing.

The Singapore government's sudden implementation of taxation increases is somewhat unusual for this country.

It is a largely pointless exercise, given the way all of the Western media has done nothing but philoxenize this individual, to explain to the otherwise unsuspecting, exactly who and what sort of person this person was.

Hoi An Festival -
a celebration of the return of divine illumination
into a dark world. Mark me down as this kind of 'Illuminati.'

And I am not going to expand on what I have already indicated about him, short of saying that he was radically astray of what the general public assumed him to be. It would be instructive to all those who are skeptical about what I am saying, to give a thought to the recent revelations about the so-called 'entrapments' of Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkin. Only very much later on in people's public careers, can one often get to really see what had been going on under everyone's noses all along.

Lee Kuan Yew was never the man people think that he was. And I frankly doubt that you will ever get to hear or see what he really was like - certainly not in their gory details; especially not with respect to his personal history as a 'translator' for the Japanese Secret Police against local ethnic Chinese, which he seems to think was something worthy of including in his own Wiki encomium.

You should realize, that even with something as close to recent history as Guantanamo is/was, the things that actually went on in there have already started to become blurred and disowned by those who did it all.

But I will tell you this, in days of yore, torture was quite a bit different by quality and degree, than it is now, even under the hands of nutcases like Cheney. The permanent leer on the face of Mr. Lee, was on account of what he got away with and what he thinks of you as a member of liberal open democracy...

Or rather, what he thought of you.

The Political Wolf

I guess there are things you might as well know here, now that you are all grown up...

Things have been going on on this planet, as you well know, for a long time - Herodotus even says the Egyptian priests scolded the Greeks for 'being young, like children, and imagining that things that were recounted to them as stories only happened last week, when they in fact happened millenniums ago, even many times over and over again and again they happened...'  

The remains of the Temple of Zeus
on Mount Lykaion

And so I must tell you that when you see the wild and relatively sparse if not completely barren Mount Lykaion in Greece, and you imagine that this - as the archaeologists say - is the place where there was once a temple to Zeus, you should understand there indeed are many such places, and that they have never been 'out of service' as it were.

What happens in the secret rituals to the god, Zeus, is that items of art; books, writing materials, and especially musical instruments, are presented in a huge iron basin filled with sand, upon a large stone altar. Music and chanting and the burning of ceremonial fires takes place, and some time late in the night, possibly after midnight, lightning strikes the altar and this means God himself would oversee the affairs of those participating in the ritual the whole of their lives. This is all a secret of course and has never been revealed by Greeks as in the first place, it is only known to those not merely of aristocratic blood, but only those who are from the various family lines of regional kings. The rituals of Zeus belong only to royal houses.

'Oh dear.' It is a common enough saying. However, it is from the ancient European appeal to the ruler of gods and men - 'Oh Dias.' (Zeus).

The ancient Greek tale about King Lycaon (who ruled in Arcadia) proceeds along the lines that Lycaon and his entire family were 'nefarious' people, and at one point were so powerful and arrogant, that they sought to test whether a certain traveler in their midst, whom the local people had taken to have actually been Zeus himself appearing openly as a human (the gods never disguise themselves but appear as who they are, though not always perceived by the people as what they are) - and so they mixed a very tiny amount of human flesh in a meal served to this person, who promptly tipped the table over and walked out, though not saying anything.

King Lycaon though, became a werewolf, and established the first of such beings on earth, and burdened with various tasks and edicts about what such beings must do and live like.

Zeus and wolves are linked, and not all wolves
are bad

The moral of the story is this: a man, once having tasted the flesh of other men, is doomed to become a wolf, and is obsessed thereafter with the consumption of humans, and must resist this obsession or else remain an animal until they die. And because the story relates to something about Zeus, it has a political dimension (all stories about Zeus do, because he is the patron god of politics and leadership). A man, once having taken political power by taking life, or tasting the power that comes from having taken a life once he becomes a political leader, is destined to become an animal, and to be obsessed by that which is animalistic, wherein the seeds of a violent self-destruction both of him and potentially any he rules over, are sown.  

  

Dors Venabili, The Living Automaton

So these Russian bombers have been flying close to the UK yesterday and the RAF sent up some Eurofighter Typhoons to 'escort' them away.

I like the Eurofighter Typhoon a lot; they're very fast, quite manoeuvrable, have an excellent range. A work of art, really.

I suppose one might point out that of course, the Russians were not flying in anything other than international airspace - but that won't affect the way the general media covers this particular item. Even so there is no doubt the flights are a flip to the United Kingdom and NATO about the fiasco in Debaltsova, where a bunch of mercenaries have been captured by the Russians. (90% of the Ukraine army has been able to retreat/withdraw - according to the Kiev government).

This testing/probing/war-game style of messing around is all very well but it is a grave mistake to believe we are in an era in which hot conflict between these very large powers can be 'won' by any particular side, or that they will unfold in quite the same ways that past wars have.

My own personal outlook is that modern society has lost its respect for all of human beings generally because we think we already know so much about everyone 'else.' And familiarity has bred contempt and boredom and the thirst for individual power, rather than the desire to learn about others and culture in general.

Unlike the Merchant Magistrates of Venice, we, know already too much about 'the Forbidden Kingdom' and - there are no new horizons.

Dors Venabili was just a fictional character in an Asimov story, and there are no alien worlds or alien people we in any short time are going to encounter, or thrill over.

There is, however, the 2015 Geneva Motor Show coming up in just a few days (5 March) in which we will see for the first time the new Aston Martin Vulcan, another extremely limited edition (yawn) exercise.

Trust Bertone!

And for me over the next few weeks there is a series of the greatest sprint races that I have seen - in terms of strength of the fields engaged - in the Australian horse racing calendar. 

I will be able to be entertained. 

And shortly, I will relate to you, the Greek myth of Lycaon... But not yet.