[Rajaratnam] believed that a Malayan nation could be created, and the prelude to it was a Malayan consciousness, which he sometimes used interchangeably with “Malayan outlook”. The latter could be brought about “by implanting in the minds of people ideas and sentiments which provide them with a sense of common identity, common purpose, common effort, and common destiny”. He argued it was not an impossible task as detractors might think. He reeled off examples from round the world — people were not born Americans, French, or Japanese. “A man becomes an American, or Frenchman, or Japanese because of mental conditioning he is subjected to. In other words, national consciousness is largely a question of education and upbringing. A child is not born a Frenchman, or a German or a Malayan, or even a Malay or a Chinese. It is through the long process of mental conditioning that he turns out to be a Malay, Chinese or Indian,” he contended. In what had become his constant refrain, he said: “It is not race but the cultural conditioning to which a man is subjected that makes him whatever he is”. He pointed to his own experience: He himself thought as a Malayan even though he was a Ceylonese. “One becomes a Malayan when one ceases to evaluate the character, goodness, and intelligence of a man by the colour of his skin, by the shape of his nose, or the texture of his hair.” His conception of a Malayan was a strikingly ethical one. It emphasised moral attributes, as opposed to physical ones. In its essence, he envisaged the Malayan nation as embodying a principle, as a form of morality. As courageous were his ideas on race and cultural evolution. Unlike some in the cabinet, Raja held the view that racial sentiments were a result of socialisation and politicisation, not something rooted in the blood. His boldest assertion, given the hold of traditional outlooks at the time, was that race was a prejudice, and an attitude that could be removed by rational analysis. If people responded to racial and communal pulls, it was simply because these were the older and traditional basis for unity.

when I was a kid I read a short story collection set in india, and one of the stories was a guy getting kidnapped to undergo a forced vasectomy while being terrified and confused. it's one of two stories I remember from that collection because of how stark it was, but I then didn't think of it as historical or real, you know, just something dramatic for the sake of fiction.

With families came births and children, followed by the need for schools. The colonial authorities had no interest at all in the education of the great majority of Asian children and they certainly did not want to provide mass English-language education for fear that the Asians might start getting above themselves. They did show some interest in providing an English-language education to a small number of those who already had a workable knowledge of English, but even in the case of this exception to the rule, it was left to a group of merchants to revive Raffles’ plans to build the Singapore Institution in the 1830s. Nevertheless, with the number of children increasing noticeably, the Asian communities – both the immigrant communities and the Malays – along with a large number of Christian missionary societies, established many schools in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of these schools had modest levels of state support, but many were entirely self-sustaining and between them they offered a bewildering variety of curricula and standards. A collection of these Christian schools still exists today as state-supported ‘mission schools’ – such as St Joseph’s Institution (founded in the 1850s) and the Methodist Girl’s School (founded in the 1880s). Yet only at the opening of the twentieth century did the colonial authorities begin taking much interest in education. In 1902 the government made modest commitments to provide English-medium education to Asian children and in 1903 it resumed control of Singapore’s first school, Raffles Institution, eight decades after Raffles initiated the project and seven decades after private beneficiaries finished the building and opened the school. The government continued to ignore Chinese and Indian schools but, in a gesture towards the region’s indigenous population, it did build some Malay-medium schools. Ironically this gesture does not seem to have done the Malays any favours in the long term, since it set the community down a path that led it to successfully resist the introduction of English-language education in the 1950s. And indeed the Malay language seemed to be on the ascendant culturally as well as politically in the 1950s and 1960s, complete with a flourishing film industry that was churning out racy Malay-language films from studios in Singapore. This victory laid the foundations for the community’s later economic and social disadvantage when the government turned English into the language of economic and political empowerment. (The leadership of the Chinese communities also resisted the introduction of English-medium education in the 1960s, but with less success.)

When Moses had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission on April 18, 1924, there had been one state park on Long Island, the almost worthless 200-acre tract on Fire Island. By the end of the summer of 1928, there were fourteen parks totaling 9,700 acres. Because 6,775 of those acres had been acquired—from Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Babylon towns, the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City and private individuals—as gifts, the Long Island parks had cost the state a total of about a million dollars. At 1928 land values, they were worth more than fifteen million.

In May 1939 the St. Louis sailed from Hamburg to Havana, carrying more than nine hundred Jewish refugees. Most of those on board had paid handsomely for tourist permits to land in Cuba, but while they were en route, the Cuban government decided to invalidate the documents. As the ship approached Havana, the passengers were informed that they were no longer permitted in the country. One man, traveling with his wife and two children, slit his wrists and jumped into the bay. Twenty-two refugees were allowed to land because they had immigration visas the government considered legitimate. The rest were stuck. The ship’s captain, Gustav Schroeder, feared a “collective suicide pact” among the passengers if they were forced to return to Germany. After being forced to leave Havana, Schroeder diverted the St. Louis toward the Florida coast, while the U.S.-based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee negotiated with the Cuban government. The St. Louis sailed close enough to the U.S. shore that the passengers on board could see the lights of Miami.  By now the story of the ill-fated ship had landed on the front pages of American newspapers. Friends and relatives of the passengers pleaded with the Roosevelt administration to act, but the State Department again refused to change its position, and the president declined to intervene. More than seven hundred on board were waiting for permanent American visas, but the combined German-Austrian immigration quota for that year—27,370—had already been filled. The wait list now stretched for several years, and U.S. officials did not want the refugees on the St. Louis cutting in front of others. Weeks later the ship sailed back across the Atlantic. The Joint Distribution Committee helped persuade Belgium, Britain, France, and the Netherlands to take many of the passengers. Still, an estimated 254 died after returning to Europe, most in extermination camps.

23 hours into Zero Parades so far and I'm enjoying it.

Raja was uneasy at the prospect that, if the PAP were to field 51 candidates, it would be a Trojan horse for some “hidden communists” and the PAP would not know any better until they were waving their red books in the Legislative Assembly. Once in, they would cause no end of problems. As Raja confided in Bloodworth at the time, “Remember, when the PAP got three seats in the old Assembly, we were able to make a hell of a nuisance of ourselves and to show up the Lim Yew Hock government as a bunch of colonial stooges by talking in public and getting our speeches printed in the newspapers. If they get three chaps in, they’ll do the same to us. So we’ve got to be very careful.” Raja further argued that a government which assumed power under a constitution which did not grant full independence would run into severe difficulties. He listed them: There would be demagogues who would try to cash in with slogans about an independent Singapore and other violent, anti-colonial posturing. Merger with the Federation might be a very slow affair, providing more fuel for advocates of an independent Singapore. There would be, in such circumstances, attempts to brand the government in power as compromising with colonialism. Even more onerous would be the task of trying to resolve the economic and social problems of an isolated Singapore with no natural resources. Added to these was the equally formidable problem of trying to transform a predominantly Chinese Singapore into a Malayan Singapore. Raja believed that it would be better for the PAP to build up its strength and its experience for another few more years as an opposition party. Let some other party make the mistakes and incur the odium in the course of trying to resolve these difficult problems, he advised. These were powerful arguments against forming a government. Indeed, until about the beginning of 1959, the trend of thought within the party was against fighting to win. Lee gravitated to this view as he knew the problems facing the next government would be immense. At that time, unemployment was 12 per cent and the birth rate was four per cent a year. Economic prospects were grim, made worse by the militant climate of labour unrest. Lee was not at all confident that they could withstand the communist assaults that would follow. Lee recalled the arguments: “Raja, ever the idealist and the ideologue, was in favour of our forming a strong opposition.” Disagreeing, Goh Keng Swee and Kenny Byrne argued that the PAP had to form the government. They feared that, if it waited another five-year term, the corruption would spread from the ministries into the civil service itself.