Yesterday Reuters and AP broke the story of two Singaporean Chinese bloggers jailed for posting racist remarks about minority Malays.

Benjamin Koh, 27, was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment while Nicholas Lim, 25, was fined and jailed for a day, both for posting comments on their personal websites, or blogs, attacking the city-state’s mostly-Muslim ethnic Malay community.

The two faced up to three years jail or fines of up to S$5,000 for violating laws under Singapore’s Sedition Act by promoting ill-will and hostility between the city-state’s ethnic communities with their June Internet posts.

In several expletive-laden online posts, Koh and Lim attacked Singapore’s Malay Muslims, who account for 14 percent of the island republic’s population. District Judge Richard Magnus said their imprisonment represented a “sentence of general deterrence” as their offensive comments threatened the “very fabric of Singapore society.”

Lim, who worked in an animal shelter, posted his comments on an Internet forum for dog lovers while participating in a discussion on whether taxi cabs should refuse to carry uncaged pets out of consideration for Muslims, as their religion considers dogs unclean.

Koh, who was given the maximum fine, advocated desecrating Islam’s holy site of Mecca in his online journal.

“The right to propogate an opinion on the Internet is not, and cannot, be an unfettered right,” the judge said in his sentencing.

For Western readers such actions by government reflect the political dispensation between free-speech and the new invention of hate speech.  For Western readers like us hate speech is a social engineering tool of a repressive character, by which an unwilling host population is extensively deprived of the natural right to defend itself and its homeland.  The concern of our establishments is, first, to manufacture overarching human rights which abrogate the rights of the host and, second, to defend them on behalf of the alien aggressors.

Singaporean considerations are profoundly different.  The establishment is concerned to preserve the status quo, meaning the power of a Singaporean-Chinese cognitive elite which is small-c conservative and ethnically loyal in its posture on majority/minority rights.

Into this one can read not only the decadent and disloyal nature of the Western elites but something of the workings of the Chinese mind.  It is, of course, a mind entirely uninfected by advanced liberalism.  Its penchant quite naturally - one might well say sociobiologically - tends to authoritarianism and the demand for public conformity.  Wherever Chinese populations arise they favour their own with unashamed unity.  The notion that they should not do so but, on the contrary, should favour aliens is itself utterly alien to them.  That is also the case among Chinese in the West, where they argue doggedly against host interests - and therefore for their own - along with every other healthy-thinking minority.

In their own societies the conjunction of power and conformity suffuses Chinese life.  Thus, at a petty level stories such as this:-

In August, five junior college students who posted derogatory remarks about their teachers and vice-principal on their blogs, or online journals, were suspended for three days, the Straits Times reported.

Seven secondary schools and two junior colleges have also got tough on penalised students for making offensive remarks about teachers on blogs: one secondary school student who called a teacher a “prude” and a “frustrated old spinster” on her blog was ordered to remove the remark.

… and, much more seriously:-

For some years now, Amnesty International has been concerned that the government of Singapore is using defamation suits against political opponents to challenge their right to freely hold and - peacefully express their convictions. The intended (and expected) effect of these suits, it is believed, has been to inhibit the public activities of opposition politicians.

Amnesty International had a particular concern about eleven libel suits brought by senior government politicians, including the Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, against Worker’s Party (the opposition) candidate, Tang Liang Hong. The plaintiffs accused Tang of defaming the Peoples’ Action Party (government) leaders. During a recent election campaign, the government leaders maintained that Tang was “anti-Christian” and a “Chinese chauvinist”. When Tang filed a police report claiming these accusations were false, the eleven libel suits were the immediate response.

But to return to where we began, Singapore has perhaps the highest Internet penetration in the world.  It also has some of the toughest media laws – and none of them on the statute books so as to advance culture war.  Singapore is a land of hymn-sheet singing.

So we get a hopelessly obsequious Straits Times op-ed like this:-

I’m glad the authorities hauled the trio to court. Hopefully, doing so will send a message to like-minded folk in cyberspace that they’d better start putting the brain before the mouse.

As far as I’m concerned, blogs are possibly the worst things about the Internet. Sure, pornography and other stuff rightly furrow the brows of parents, but the things some bloggers say go far beyond the pale.

Yep, this guy really l-e-r-v-e-s his authorities and just hasn’t cottoned on to the idea that free speech is not always nice speech.  What it IS, though, is a threat to the stability of the Singaporean-Chinese majority.  So, as Reuters in that first link said:-

Police have wide powers to intercept online messages, and Internet service providers are required to block websites containing material that may be a threat to public security, national defense, racial and religious harmony and public morality.

The government has defended these controls as necessary to maintain ethnic harmony among its 4.2 million people, of which about three q uarters are ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Indians make up another eight percent.

And AP:-

This small island republic is an oasis of calm in a region where ethnic tensions sometimes explode into violence, particularly in Indonesia.  Singapore hasn’t had traumatic racial experiences since deadly Chinese-Malay riots in the 1960s.

Minority rights don’t come into it.