1 - Government Sources: Who Uses Them, and the Alternates’ Unarticulated Ideological Outlook

Summary

THE ALTERNATES’ COMPLAINT ABOUT GOVERNMENT SOURCES

In constructing the New Singapore History in general and their version of Coldstore in particular, the Alternates advance the argument that the original Singapore Story is flawed and “deeply partial”. This is not just because the prevailing master narrative has been written by the winning PAP side, it has also been based on previously classified official documents — confidential correspondence between London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, minutes of meetings, position papers and handwritten notes — said to be deeply permeated by “the rhetoric of counterinsurgency” that reflects “Cold War imperatives” and is “dominated by its stark political categories”. This “prose of counterinsurgency”, argues T.N. Harper, is manifested in the “plausible yet Olympian language of the intelligence abstract; the measured tone of the despatch; the bureaucratic-passive tense”; and allegedly a “ ‘careless and impressionistic’ use of the evidence”. He asserts that not only have most “journalists and observers” providing the historical record “unquestioningly embraced its assumptions”, much of the prevailing accounts have “backprojected categories of counter-insurgency that were not so hard or discrete at the time”. According to such logic, mainstream accounts of the Singapore Story in general and the Malayan Emergency and Operation Coldstore in particular, such as, inter alia, the works by John Drysdale, Dennis Bloodworth, Aloysius Chin and Lee Ting Hui, precisely because they are “based on Special Branch sources”, are eo ipso problematic. At the time of writing, incidentally, Hong Lysa warned of the pitfalls of reading the work of the “poisonous and scandalous Dennis Bloodworth”, presumably because he was given access to inter alia, “ISD [Internal Security Department] records”.

Such sentiments are misleading. Contemporaneous and knowledgeable observers who watched the Singapore Special Branch in action in 1956 declared that it was “unquestionably the world's greatest authorities on Communism in Asia”. At any rate, a related charge by elements within the Alternate constituency is that those historians and other observers who attempt to defend the Singapore Story, in particular those employed by national security think-tanks linked to the Singapore government, are ipso facto themselves suspect of having an immutable counter-insurgency/national security and pro-government bias.