By Rahim Zainuddin
“Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”
That quote, by nineteenth century English philosopher Herbert Spencer, struck me when I first laid eyes on the magnificent mausoleum dedicated to Ho Chi Minh on a tour of Hanoi not so long ago. It was just one of the city’s numerous tributes to Vietnam’s most revered leader.
My twenty-something tour guide spoke with much adulation of a man she was too young to know, yet it was hard not to notice that she also seemed too entranced by his legend.
Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew must have been wary of that very same effect.
He did not want to be cast as Singapore’s all-time hero.
He did not want the Singapore skyline to be filled with monuments built to his memory, so much so that he even decreed that his own Oxley Road family home be demolished after his demise.
“Lee Kuan Yew would have cringed at the hero worship,” his physician daughter Dr Lee Wei Ling posted on Facebook last week, accusing her prime minister brother Lee Hsien Loong of abusing his authority by leading Singaporeans into hero-worshipping their late father just one year after his demise.
Her views got her into a tangle with the editors of the Straits Times, leading to her claim that the pro-government paper was restricting her freedom of speech by censoring her views on the subject. Once again, Spencer’s words struck a chord within me.
Dr Lee does have a point.
Photos abound on Singapore websites and blogs showing young schoolchildren bowing to his image, adults kneeling before it and soldiers in uniform saluting it. News reports tell of young children comparing him to Ironman and claiming he had bionic vision.
Yet, Dr Lee complains that her views on the subject were being blanked out. Chief among them were her comparison of tributes given elsewhere to two other national icons – China’s Mao Zedong and Britain’s Winston Churchill.
Mao, she said, died on September 9th, 1976. By November 24th of that same year, the foundation stone had been laid for a “gigantic” memorial hall in his honour.
“The construction went on day and night, and the building was finished on August 29th, 1977,” her post on Facebook reads. He was laid to rest there on the first anniversary of his death.
On the other hand, Winston Churchill was commemorated 50 years after his death, allowing UK prime minister David Cameron to proudly tell his audience how the legacy of Britain’s wartime premier continues to inspire their nation.
According to Dr Lee, the Straits Times edited out her examples of Mao and Churchill, claiming that they were irrelevant. She, on the other hand, claims that the real reason they were omitted was to dilute the impact of her argument.
In fact, Dr Lee’s views appear to echo what her late father himself said during a 2009 Ministerial forum. Asked how he would like to be remembered, Singapore’s founding father said, “In all honesty I can tell you I never thought about that.”
Obituaries published as soon as one dies, Lee pointed out, are merely “ephemeral”.
“Reputations are finally decided twenty, thirty, forty years after you are dead, when historians [and] students research your life, research your work, your documents [and] things you decided on,” Lee said. “And then there is a revision of what a man is worth.”
Lee Kuan Yew, as always, makes a sound point. Watch him make it in the video below.
But why was his daughter not allowed to express hers?
Rahim Zainuddin is an FMT reader.
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