Quora Answer: Do You Believe Singaporeans Who Say You Will Not Get Arrested for Criticising the Government?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do you believe Singaporeans when they say that you will not get arrested for criticising the government?”

Have you ever been on social media in Singapore?  Anybody who knows how to read can see the amount of criticism the government gets, justified or unjustified.  Singaporeans have high expectations, or they are pampered, depending on which side of the argument you are.  Have you gone on the Facebook page of some of our ministers, or the posts of our local media?  Some of that criticism is brutal, some of it outright personal attacks.  You could go on my Quora, my Facebook, or my blog, to see in some detail my criticism of certain government policies, or my derision of specific politicians.  And I am certainly not alone.

If the government started arresting every person who had a dissenting opinion, we are going to need a bigger prison than simply Changi Prison complex.  We are going to need space for every old man at the coffeeshop, every academic, every student leader, maybe even their pets.  And then what?  Who is going to pay for feeding and housing most of the population now in prison?

Criticism of the government is part of democracy.  It is nothing special.  The difference is that this criticism has limits, and cannot be an attack on the integrity of the public servant.  It cannot be an attack on race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender.  For example, I could say that Minister So-and-So is a sorry excuse of a person, likely a new species of parasitic worm that inhabits the anus of a cockroach, with the intelligence of a lobotomised rat that has been sodomised to death.  I cannot, however, say that he or she is corrupt without proof, and attack him or her on the basis of race, religion, and so forth.  That would contravene several laws and grant me a day in court.

This is perfectly reasonable.  We cannot have idiots attacking the integrity of the state and its servants simply because they have a difference of opinion on some matters of policy.  We cannot have idiots exacerbating religious and racial tension, and promulgating hate speech.  This would be an attack on our multicultural society, and should not be tolerated.