the good news and the bad news for the singapore blogsphere (updated)
it seems two bloggers have been charged for
making racist remarks over the internet
from my point of view, those two (alleged) clowns deserved it, and the deterrent effect in punishing cyber racists may actually do some good in ridding the blogsphere off morons like the blogger of secondholocaust.blogspot.com who actually had the audacity to adovocate genocide on malay singaporeans. cliched as it may sound, racial harmony is something which we should never take for granted. let's just face it, an undercurrent of racial prejudice is still pretty much alive beneath the facade of racial harmony within the singaporean society. despite all our institutional provisions that ensures a racially-indifferent meritocracy, non-systemic racial prejudices stemming from societal attitudes which sadly cannot be eliminated by legislation alone, if ever at all.
the subtlety of racial prejudice is probably largely unnoticed especially if you happen to belong to the chinese majority. when i was in pri 5, i had a chinese teacher who loved to pick on taswinder, a classmate of mine who's sikh but studying chinese. taswinder wasn't exactly the naughtiest boy around but for some reason the teacher never failed to scold him for even the slightest transgressions. she even went as far as to call him a 黑鬼 (literally translates as 'black ghost'). no one else in class felt that there was anything wrong with that, it was just another scolding by the teacher. and in hindsight, that taswinder must have been terribly awful as an 11 y/o going through that.
i once had a chat with joel, a good friend of mine who's a singaporean indian during our first semester here in perth. we were discussing the apparant lack of social integration between the asian students and the aussies, and somewhere along the line i casually asked joel whether if he had experienced any form racial prejudices at any point of time when he was in singapore. joel replied saying how it's part and parcel of growing up in singapore and how he has learnt to make a distinction between the innocuous jibes by friends like those
who call him pundeh or 'oh-it's-so-dark-that-i-can't-see-you, joel' swipes - which he take to be almost like various terms of endearment, and the offensive slurs which carries connotations of condescension (such as the time he got into a fight outside zouk when someone said 'see, the colour says it all' after he ignored the asshole's initial taunting). he also spoke about how his elder sister who was a fresh graduate had many of her job applications rejected cos she wasn't able to converse in mandarin. it seems likely that her sister probably isn't the only one with the same predicament. what one may perceive to be just an innocuous statement could be intepreted rather differently by the individual it is directed to. the best analogy i can draw, is for a singaporean chinese to be called a chink - something my housemate (who's frens with joel and calls him pundeh too) experienced last sem- and getting all pissed off about it even when perhaps the ang moh making the comment might bear no intention of being racist. the lack of sensitivity of our chinese singaporeans could probably be illustrated in this article i found. hmm...now, so i guess joel will stop calling me cheebye if i stop calling him pundeh first....
while individual racial prejudices cannot be easily eliminated, at least the shutting down of blogs which advocate extreme racial villification can eradicate a false belief that such fringe views shares solidarity with the mainstream public. so that can well be the good news.
Here comes the bad news for the blogsphere. implicit in fact that bloggers are hunted down and indicted for stuff which they post on their blogs, is that there is a possibility that some form of cyber monitoring mechanisms which allows law enforcement agencies to track down the content on the internet. big brother might be watching you. but of course, alternatively and more plausibly, it might be a case where law enforcement agencies reacting to complaints made by irate netsurfers which will at least make the 'big brother-esque' possibility less likely.
yet, this case precedence seem to have reinforced the notion that individuals are accountable for what they propagate using their cyber personas, and more importantly, it delineated the fact that the law does not make a distinction between the a normal website and a weblog which is in some instances are nothing more than a personal diary hosted online.
now bearing in mind that the 2 bloggers were charged under the sedition act , with specific emphasis on the their trangesssion on section 3(e) in which their actions served to ' to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore'. *i must confess that i'm not not well-acquaint with the law and the extent of my knowledge on the law or jurisprudence is woefully limited to the curriculum of an introductory business law unit which i'm taking now.* yet at same time the sedition act states several other forms of actions (other than racist remarks) which may tantamount to propagating views constituting a seditious tendency. behaviour such as 3(a) to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the Government; or 3(d) to raise discontent or disaffection amongst the citizens of Singapore or the residents in Singapore. If two latter definitions of a seditious tendency is what an average reasonable man like me interpret it to be, then that would effectively effectively render websites which regularly indulge in government slamming such as rockson, the singapore democrats, singabloodypore and certainly talkingcock.com liable for charges under sections 3(a) and 3(d) of the sedition act.
and given the fact that how the indictment of those 2 alleged racists seem to suggest that there is little distinction made between that of a blog and a normal website, the news seems rather alarming. given the rather wide intepretation of what constitutes a seditious act, the implicit message sent from the indictment seem to be that apart from the morally unequivocal act of propagating racist views, bloggers who indulge in government slamming can be equally liable for an indictment under the sedition act.
the catch-all and wide definition of the sedition act, (as with other laws vaguely defining the OB markers of political expression) can probably be described - as coined by legalist scholar Walter Woon - to be a form of ' driftnet laws ' which 'enable the government to trawl through a whole ocean of eventualities and throw back at whatever it was not interested in'. with the intepretation then falling upon the sole discretion of the government, there arises the possibility of a huge propensity of abuse.
and even if government-slamming happen to fall beyond 'what the government is interested in', the very ambiguity surrounding what-constitutes-a-seditious-act-beyond-racial-villification still has the effect of deterring government slamming by bloggers. this i'm afraid, could well have an effect of fostering a culture of self-censorship among singaporean bloggers, and most lamentably in what's perhaps the last bastion of free political expression. a culture which singaporeans are not too unfamiliar with beyond cyberspace.
as highlighted in my previous post, the timing for the indictment couldn't have come at a better time, considering the imminent elections and the rockson-ephraim saga which demonstrated the reach of blogs to the average singaporeans.
contrary to popular belief, singapore is one of the least regulated counteries in terms of internet filtering .and so, if it was indeed a genuine gesture by the government just to safeguard the freedom of cyberexpression within acceptable limits (ie. no trangression on racial/religious harmony), it is perhaps time to diambiguate the various archaic laws such as sedition act or the internal security act, so as not to allow the safeguarding of stability to come at the cost of stifling freedom of expression. and with this new generation of political leaders, there is good reason to believe this is true. after all, despite all the features such as the 'Annals of the Dragon King', we can be glad to say that talkingcock.com is still around after all these years.
mr miyagi seem to have provided a rather good suggestion to this connundrum. ' Enact an anti-racial vilification law, fellas. Leave the Sedition Act for specific seditious acts against the State. ' he says. and i fully agree with him. racial villification is heinous enough a crime in its own right, so why not render its rightful legal status rather than befuddling it with other less well defined trangressions. moreover, a similar legsliation - the Maintainence of Religious Harmony Act (Chapter 167A) is already in place to punish actions causes '.. feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between different religious groups', so there's little no reason why we can't do with a Maintainence of Racial Harmony Act as well.
multiculturalism is and the racial harmony we've painstakingly achieved are the defining traits that makes us so proud to be singaporeans. self-censorhip need not neccessarily be one of them.
making racist remarks over the internet
*UPDATE: it appears that the two alleged clowns actually made derogratory remarks which were in fact directed at religion and less of race as described on the Lianhe Zaobao (english tranlation here) this begs the question about why they 2 blogger weren't charged under the Maintanence of Religious Harmony Act Chapter 167A (elaborated in the end of this entry) instead of the Sedition Act? it would seem that the employment of the Maintainence of Religious Harmony Act would be a far more appropriate and less ambiguous legislation that befits the 2 bloggers' transgressions since an insult directed at Muslims, would also be an insult directed at Indian/Chinese Muslims, and not just Malay Muslims. surely the law enforcement agencies would have understood that?
in light of this, one can't help but to wonder if it was the intention for the government to further ambiguate the already ill-defined 'seditious behavior' so as to serve as a warning, as well as using this as an attempt to set up new and timely OB markers upon the blogsphere considering the imminent general elections. if that was indeed the case, the bad news has just gotten worse. *
from my point of view, those two (alleged) clowns deserved it, and the deterrent effect in punishing cyber racists may actually do some good in ridding the blogsphere off morons like the blogger of secondholocaust.blogspot.com who actually had the audacity to adovocate genocide on malay singaporeans. cliched as it may sound, racial harmony is something which we should never take for granted. let's just face it, an undercurrent of racial prejudice is still pretty much alive beneath the facade of racial harmony within the singaporean society. despite all our institutional provisions that ensures a racially-indifferent meritocracy, non-systemic racial prejudices stemming from societal attitudes which sadly cannot be eliminated by legislation alone, if ever at all.
the subtlety of racial prejudice is probably largely unnoticed especially if you happen to belong to the chinese majority. when i was in pri 5, i had a chinese teacher who loved to pick on taswinder, a classmate of mine who's sikh but studying chinese. taswinder wasn't exactly the naughtiest boy around but for some reason the teacher never failed to scold him for even the slightest transgressions. she even went as far as to call him a 黑鬼 (literally translates as 'black ghost'). no one else in class felt that there was anything wrong with that, it was just another scolding by the teacher. and in hindsight, that taswinder must have been terribly awful as an 11 y/o going through that.
i once had a chat with joel, a good friend of mine who's a singaporean indian during our first semester here in perth. we were discussing the apparant lack of social integration between the asian students and the aussies, and somewhere along the line i casually asked joel whether if he had experienced any form racial prejudices at any point of time when he was in singapore. joel replied saying how it's part and parcel of growing up in singapore and how he has learnt to make a distinction between the innocuous jibes by friends like those
who call him pundeh or 'oh-it's-so-dark-that-i-can't-see-you, joel' swipes - which he take to be almost like various terms of endearment, and the offensive slurs which carries connotations of condescension (such as the time he got into a fight outside zouk when someone said 'see, the colour says it all' after he ignored the asshole's initial taunting). he also spoke about how his elder sister who was a fresh graduate had many of her job applications rejected cos she wasn't able to converse in mandarin. it seems likely that her sister probably isn't the only one with the same predicament. what one may perceive to be just an innocuous statement could be intepreted rather differently by the individual it is directed to. the best analogy i can draw, is for a singaporean chinese to be called a chink - something my housemate (who's frens with joel and calls him pundeh too) experienced last sem- and getting all pissed off about it even when perhaps the ang moh making the comment might bear no intention of being racist. the lack of sensitivity of our chinese singaporeans could probably be illustrated in this article i found. hmm...now, so i guess joel will stop calling me cheebye if i stop calling him pundeh first....
while individual racial prejudices cannot be easily eliminated, at least the shutting down of blogs which advocate extreme racial villification can eradicate a false belief that such fringe views shares solidarity with the mainstream public. so that can well be the good news.
Here comes the bad news for the blogsphere. implicit in fact that bloggers are hunted down and indicted for stuff which they post on their blogs, is that there is a possibility that some form of cyber monitoring mechanisms which allows law enforcement agencies to track down the content on the internet. big brother might be watching you. but of course, alternatively and more plausibly, it might be a case where law enforcement agencies reacting to complaints made by irate netsurfers which will at least make the 'big brother-esque' possibility less likely.
yet, this case precedence seem to have reinforced the notion that individuals are accountable for what they propagate using their cyber personas, and more importantly, it delineated the fact that the law does not make a distinction between the a normal website and a weblog which is in some instances are nothing more than a personal diary hosted online.
now bearing in mind that the 2 bloggers were charged under the sedition act , with specific emphasis on the their trangesssion on section 3(e) in which their actions served to ' to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore'. *i must confess that i'm not not well-acquaint with the law and the extent of my knowledge on the law or jurisprudence is woefully limited to the curriculum of an introductory business law unit which i'm taking now.* yet at same time the sedition act states several other forms of actions (other than racist remarks) which may tantamount to propagating views constituting a seditious tendency. behaviour such as 3(a) to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the Government; or 3(d) to raise discontent or disaffection amongst the citizens of Singapore or the residents in Singapore. If two latter definitions of a seditious tendency is what an average reasonable man like me interpret it to be, then that would effectively effectively render websites which regularly indulge in government slamming such as rockson, the singapore democrats, singabloodypore and certainly talkingcock.com liable for charges under sections 3(a) and 3(d) of the sedition act.
and given the fact that how the indictment of those 2 alleged racists seem to suggest that there is little distinction made between that of a blog and a normal website, the news seems rather alarming. given the rather wide intepretation of what constitutes a seditious act, the implicit message sent from the indictment seem to be that apart from the morally unequivocal act of propagating racist views, bloggers who indulge in government slamming can be equally liable for an indictment under the sedition act.
the catch-all and wide definition of the sedition act, (as with other laws vaguely defining the OB markers of political expression) can probably be described - as coined by legalist scholar Walter Woon - to be a form of ' driftnet laws ' which 'enable the government to trawl through a whole ocean of eventualities and throw back at whatever it was not interested in'. with the intepretation then falling upon the sole discretion of the government, there arises the possibility of a huge propensity of abuse.
and even if government-slamming happen to fall beyond 'what the government is interested in', the very ambiguity surrounding what-constitutes-a-seditious-act-beyond-racial-villification still has the effect of deterring government slamming by bloggers. this i'm afraid, could well have an effect of fostering a culture of self-censorship among singaporean bloggers, and most lamentably in what's perhaps the last bastion of free political expression. a culture which singaporeans are not too unfamiliar with beyond cyberspace.
as highlighted in my previous post, the timing for the indictment couldn't have come at a better time, considering the imminent elections and the rockson-ephraim saga which demonstrated the reach of blogs to the average singaporeans.
contrary to popular belief, singapore is one of the least regulated counteries in terms of internet filtering .and so, if it was indeed a genuine gesture by the government just to safeguard the freedom of cyberexpression within acceptable limits (ie. no trangression on racial/religious harmony), it is perhaps time to diambiguate the various archaic laws such as sedition act or the internal security act, so as not to allow the safeguarding of stability to come at the cost of stifling freedom of expression. and with this new generation of political leaders, there is good reason to believe this is true. after all, despite all the features such as the 'Annals of the Dragon King', we can be glad to say that talkingcock.com is still around after all these years.
mr miyagi seem to have provided a rather good suggestion to this connundrum. ' Enact an anti-racial vilification law, fellas. Leave the Sedition Act for specific seditious acts against the State. ' he says. and i fully agree with him. racial villification is heinous enough a crime in its own right, so why not render its rightful legal status rather than befuddling it with other less well defined trangressions. moreover, a similar legsliation - the Maintainence of Religious Harmony Act (Chapter 167A) is already in place to punish actions causes '.. feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between different religious groups', so there's little no reason why we can't do with a Maintainence of Racial Harmony Act as well.
multiculturalism is and the racial harmony we've painstakingly achieved are the defining traits that makes us so proud to be singaporeans. self-censorhip need not neccessarily be one of them.
6 Comments:
Free speech is a two-edged sword.
IMO, blogging should be free. But some code of ethics should still be observed.
It might be ok to rant about your Malay/Indian/Chinese neighbour, but condemning the whole race is another issue altogether. The last thing we want is to have one race ganging up their blogs/forums to attack another race because of some trigger. When this happens online, we can't predict what will happen offline.
i hate to say this..
Racism happens everywhere. ANYWHERE in the world..... Singaporeans already did a nice job by refraining and not growing to be too racist. but it'll never die off.
to each their own i think. :(
i think one has to be especially tolerant, if one's ethnicity happens to be part of the minority.
and, as spinnee says, [it] happens everywhere.
and *just* sometimes, greetings of cheebye or munjen or pundeh become terms of endearment in themselves. wonderful how we evolve, eh?
Trackback: e pur si muove, Bloggers Charged Under Sedition Act
beng> totally. especially cos'we cannot gauge the extent of which such subversive views are shared by the mainstream populace on cyberspace, any websites which propagate such views may give a false impression that racial extremism is rampant in the society.
spinee & limegreespyda> yeah, that is indeed the sad reality. just as how many of my us singaporean students here in perth used to share a dim view regarding the arrogance of scholars from PRC and India back home without even considering it to be a form of racial prejudice, now that we're international students ourselves, we can fully appreciate how difficult it can be to integrate one's self into a foreign culture. haha, talk about poetic justice.
i guess it's more of the intention and context which the words are used that really makes it offensive. just as how saying 'i'm ya nigga' ' would connote an affirmation of solidarity, and 'stupid nigga' ' would be downright offensive.
ivan> u mean this: Decisions under Act not justiciable
18. All orders and decisions of the President and the Minister and recommendations of the Council made under this Act shall be final and shall not be called in question in any court.
yeah i guess there are flaws in this as well, but at least u can't charge just about anyone for saying just about anything deemed remotely subversive with the M.R.H Act which in that aspect at least, opens it to less room for the propensity for abuse.
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