Extract from foreward by Devan Nair, former President of Singapore.
Francis’s account of his seventy-two days of detention by Prime Minister Lee’s government confronted me yet once again with acutely poignant questions: What has the nation come to? And what malefic hidden persona has emerged in Lee Kuan Yew of today? Surely, this cannot be the same man, whom I and several other starry-eyed anticolonial revolutionaries in the fifties and sixties had jubilantly accepted as our captain in the grim, heroic struggles of those early days to create what we expected would be a new Jerusalem? Alas, it took us thirty years to realize that we had been treading on air. Mr. Seow’s book is an eye-opener, that is, for those whose eyes stillrequire to be opened. Mine too, forthat matter. Nobody is blinder than a captain’s inveterate hero-worshipper. And none probably as wilfully, self-righteously closed to unfolding reality as I was. Indeed, until fairly recently, I had believed that the People’s Action Party (PAP) go