Lee Kuan Yew Quotes
Repression can only go up to a point. When it becomes too acute, the instruments of repression, namely the army and the police, have been proved time and time again in history to have turned their guns on their masters.
Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, Straits Times, May 5, 1959
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Empress had earlier decided not to try and suppress the Boxers when they started attacking foreigners--{641838}. But now things had gotten out of hand and many ordinary Chinese people—especially Chinese Christians-- were suffering Boxer abuse. Cixi thought the government had to “ally” with the Boxers in the hope that she could influence directions in the future. This, of course, made her anathema in the West and forever damaged her reputation and legacy in Western history.
China had learned to grow new crops from the Americas and their greater ability to produce food led to large population growth which was straining the other national resources and the economy, technology and government could not handle the growth, producing much unhappiness and discontent.
In the Vietnam War, America and her allies were defending the South Vietnamese from the Communist and Nationalist incursions of the North Vietnamese. However, the South Vietnamese government was itself a very fragile democracy which provided rights little better than the Ho Chi Min lead government of the North. Further, the South Vietnamese rulers and governments while claiming to be democracies, were little more than in name only and were very corrupt. As with many unstable and weak governments, South Vietnam had experienced a succession of coups, with some of his advisors favoring the coups and a few actualy supporting them. Johnson was continually frustrated by this and this expression was his own inimitable style.
There is a , romantic American myth about the Militiamen in Colonial and Revolutionary America—the citizen soldiers who would leave their farms and rise to the military necessity of the day. However, not only were the militia very hard to muster to duty, but most actually didn’t own or have experience with firearms, and the prevailing opinion of knowledgeable military leaders from George Washington on down was that the militia were not very good soldiers. See {613015}, {613016}, {613022}, {613027}, {621987}, {621988}, {613030}, {613033}, & {613056}
The coup started with the takeover of a large German Beer Hall where the political leaders of Bavaria were holding a meeting. Hitler and his Brownshirt thugs burst into the Hall. Hitler jumped up on a chair and shouted this statement waving a pistol in the air. Hitler was bluffing however, At the time he did not have the police or army supporting him, although they did soon after. This was the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power, the ruination of Germany, and tragedy for the world.
Lee Kuan Yew GCMG CH SPMJ, often referred to by his initials LKY, was a Singaporean statesman and lawyer who served as Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. As one of the founding members of the People's Action Party, Lee is recognised as the nation's founding father, credited with rapidly transitioning the country from a "developing third world country into a developed first world country within a single generation" under his leadership. Lee died of pneumonia on 23 March 2015, aged 91. In a week of national mourning, about 1.7 million Singaporean residents as well as world leaders paid tribute to him at his lying-in-state at Singapore's Parliament House and at community tribute sites around the country.
