The Meaning of Democracy

Many countries, especially in the west, are supposedly democratic. But what makes a nation truly democratic? What are the ideas behind true democracy? It has been defined as the distribution of power, where every citizen of the state can vote and a government would be formed based on these votes. Basically, the people have the power to install a government of their choice which would serve the people. That is but one ideal of democracy. True democracy must have the freedom of thought, speech and action. The need to express one's self unreservedly must be present in a true democracy for in a state where there is limited freedoms, there can be multiple backlashes which would violate the very essence of democracy.

Critique

Where freedom is restricted, the restriction of people’s intellectual expression will follow. When the freedom of speech is not present, people cannot voice their opinions and critique. Critique is what makes people think. People need to be challenged to think and without the freedom of speech there are no two sides of a matter but just the governing body’s side of that matter. This is detrimental to the growth of a society. A society where people cannot voice intellectual opposition to various matters regarding philosophy, religion or politics, is a dead society. The debates and thinking which would be present in a free society, are what makes a society vibrant and dynamic and not docile or ignorant. In addition to this, a society where one cannot voice their opinions will make the people of that society one sided and they will not be aware of opposition to convention. This will mean that opposition to a ruling party will find it hard to win power as the people don’t even know the true extent of the society they are living in. Ignorance of Man will be detrimental to true democracy. This ignorance would be a result of the lack of a free society. Thus, it must be said that a nation is only democratic when there it is a free country.

Singapore

One good example of a nation that is said to be democratic but has various restrictions that limit the freedom of speech, is the Republic of Singapore. Singapore, located in South-East Asia, is a nation with a solid economy and a clean environment. The leaders of Singapore also maintain that the Singaporean Government has made Singapore a stable nation.

I agree that the Singapore Government, made up of the ruling People’s Action Party, is a stable one. But what does stability actually mean? Stability is defined as a state of being stable and stable refers to something that is not subject to sudden fluctuations. Stability is also akin to predictability. For the economy, this is a good thing but for the political system of Singapore, this is something that is not good. It is common knowledge that the People’s Action Party (PAP) have won every election they contested in since 1959. This means that Singapore has never had any other political party making up the government for more than 40 years. A key reason for the PAP’s long monopoly of politics in Singapore is the lack of the freedom of speech. Singapore has a handful of papers which are all under the Singapore Press Holdings which has close ties to the PAP. The media is thus tightly controlled. A tightly controlled media cannot be objective and news will undoubtedly be one-sided and biased. This means that political opposition rarely gets publicity through newspaper, television or radio. Even more alarming is that most people within a nation which employs various restrictions on the freedom of speech do not actually know the true extent of the evils which occur within their country.

Singapore has laws in place which allow the ruling elite to intimidate political opponents. One such law is the Internal Security Act which allows for just about anyone to be detained without trial for as long as deemed necessary by the PAP. This law has been used to detain more than a hundred of opposition members and unionists in 1963. This large-scale operation was dubbed Operation Coldstore and it must be noted that it was carried out just before the 1963 elections.

An excerpt from a report in The Sunday Times on the 3rd of February 1963:

At least 107 left-wing politicians and trade unionists in Singapore were arrested today in the biggest and "most important" security operation since the Emergency. The operation is continuing.

The swoop, aimed at preventing subversives from establishing a "Communist Cuba" in Singapore and mounting violence just before Malaysia, was carried out by the Singapore police assisted by men from the Federation.

The PAP claimed that those who were arrested were communists who were in some way responsible for acts of “mounting violence” just before the establishment of a merger with Malaya. Most of the “left-wing politicians” were in fact of the Barisan Sosialis, an opposition party that was accused of being of communist ideology by the PAP. The Barisan Sosialis strongly refuted this claim. The Barisan Sosialis, made up of former PAP members who left and formed their own party, were actually a very big threat to the PAP. The PAP recognized this and it is my belief that this was a major factor in the decision to launch Operation Coldstore. And if the arrests of more than a hundred opponents of the PAP were not enough, the PAP carried on misusing this law numerous times after Operation Coldstore. The most famous, or rather infamous, detention was that of Chia Thye Poh. Chia, an MP and an opposition politician, was arrested at the headquarters of the Barisan Sosialis in 1966. He was accused of being a communist, a claim which he denied repeatedly. He only became a free man in 1998. These arrests serve as deterrents to future opponents of the overbearing arm of the government. These deterrents have created a virtual one-party system in Singapore. A government which discourages opposition cannot be a democratic one because democracy is essentially about choice. The people must be able to choose their own leaders freely.

Freedom

Basically a democracy is the distribution of power but this distribution of power is illegitimate when there are various restrictions on freedoms. In the case of Singapore, we observe a country that perhaps cannot be considered democratic because of the lack of freedom.

Voltaire was once quoted saying:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Fundamentally, Voltaire is saying that we are entitled to freedom; we are born free but if we do not utilize our rights then we will find that people who wish to rule over us will do so and in the process we will find whatever freedom we may have had would have dissipated.

Religion

But then he also mentions that tyrants will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. This leads us to ask what the role of religion in democracy is and does religion advocate democracy? Voltaire was not really a democrat but he strongly believed in freedom of expression and opposed any political system or religion that restricted various freedoms.

Religion and freedom, especially intellectual freedom, have often been perceived at being at ends. Classic examples are that of the early Catholic Church and its supposed intolerance of ideas contradictory to Catholic teachings. Persecutions of intellectuals whose ideas were not favourable to that of the church were not uncommon. Famous examples include Galileo Galilee, the famous Italian mathematician whose ideas mostly infuriated the Catholic Church leading to his persecution in the form of imprisonment and the prohibition of publication of his ideas. Once, he was even required to publicly retract his theory of heliocentrism whereby the sun was believed to be at the centre of the universe. In addition to this example, there existed quite a range of other persecutions of freedom on the basis of religion, not only of the Catholic faith but also of a few others.

The question here is, does religion have a place in democracy?