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Essays | Winter 1983
Singapore

Third World standards, in political freedom and participation. Is the price too high? Here, historian J. Norman Farmer looks at Singapore's colonial past. Political scientist Thomas Bellows de- scribes the mini-republic that Lee built.

CITY OF THE LION
J. Norman Panner
For more than 2,000 years, the narrow Strait of Malacca has been among the busiest shipping routes in the world, a shallow corridor, bedeviled by shifting sandbars, between East and West. At the southern entrance to the Strait, sev...

Essays | Winter 1983
CITY OF THE LION

For more than 2,000 years, the narrow Strait of Malacca has been among the busiest shipping routes in the world, a shallow corridor, bedeviled by shifting sandbars, between East and West. At the southern entrance to the Strait, several hundred yards off the tip, of the Malay Peninsula and several leagues above the equator, lies a diamond-shaped island, roughly 30 miles across. The island has no natural resources. Its name, Singapore, means "city of the lion" in Malay, but there are n...

Essays | Winter 1983
BIG FISH, SMALL POND

, after 25 years of his rule, scarcely resembles the city young "Harry" Lee left behind him in 1946, and the transformation has been largely Lee Kuan Yew's own doing. But some things he has been powerless-or unwilling-to change. Some things are part of a city's nature. An elderly veteran of the prewar Malaysian Civil Service (ret.), returning after a long absence, might venture out of the old Strand Hotel on Bencoolen Street and encounter a city and an island in some respects still the...

Essays | Winter 1983
BACKGROUND BOOKS

heri- tage and in younger days an ardent Communist (jailed the British), a prominent union activist, and, ulti- mately, a loyal supporter of the Peo- ple's Action Party who survived Lee Kuan Yew's purge of the PAP'S pro- Communist wing in 196 1.
Singapore was not built by the overly meek, the studiously consis- tent, the scrupulously virtuous. In his One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in Singapore (Murray, 1923; Univ. of Malaya, 1967), Song Ong Siang quotes Sir James Brooke, writing only...

Essays | Winter 1983
MUSIC AND LITERATURE

A quark is defined as "any of three hypothetical subatomic particles having electric charges of magnitude one-third or two- thirds that of the electron, proposed as the fundamental units of matter." The word is taken from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, where the gulls are ironically hailing the impotent King Mark of the Tristan legend: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!" It is very nearly an arbitrary borrowing (the three qualifies total random- ness). In Joyce the vocable is imitative,...

Essays | Winter 1983
America's National Security

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1983 fegdcy of Vietnam: widespread hostility toward any U.S. inter-
vention abroad, even in CentralAmerica, "AmenCa.'s bacAyard."
The past two decades have been extraordinarily difficult, so- bering, even traumatic for the United States in matters of war and peace. President John F. Kennedy's inaugural summons of January 21, 1961, to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose a...

Essays | Winter 1983
THE VIEW FROM THE KREMLIN

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X.C.CISPES 1
v
SPONSORED BY: I FOR CREATIVE
4
N0M-V--------A
1983 fegdcy of Vietnam: widespread hostility toward any U.S. inter-
vention abroad, even in CentralAmerica, "AmenCa.'s bacAyard."
The past two decades have been extraordinarily difficult, so- bering, even traumatic for the United States in matters of war and peace. President John F. Kennedy's inaugural summons of January 2...

Essays | Winter 1983
THE UNIEASY ALLIANCE: WESTERN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

THE UNEASY ALLIANCE:
WESTERN EUROPE
AND THE UNITED STATES

by Edward A. Kolodziej and Robert A. Pollard
'6In this century," Senator Sam Nunn (D.-Ga.) observed not long ago, "Americans have died in large numbers on European battlefields. We are prepared to do so again if necessary, but only for a Europe that is dedicated to its own defense."
Once again, with anti-American demonstrations taking place in England and Germany, Americans are asking if the costs of sustaining the N...

Essays | Winter 1983
LIMITS ON THE USE OF AMERICAN MILITARY POWER

"You can't send soldiers off to war without having the support of the American people," Army Chief of Staff General Edward C. Meyer told newsmen just before retiring last June. "I think that's one of the great lessons that comes out of Vietnam." Meyer urged "a face-to-face discussion between the President and the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense and the military as to what the h..."

Essays | Winter 1983
THE HUMAN ELEMENT

"I'm telling you," Command Sergeant Major Ronald Ham- mer told a New York Times reporter at Fort Hood, Texas, last spring, "we are so much better today than we were a year ago." Because the Army is signing up better-qualified soldiers and dis- charging those who do not perform well, the "[one] thing you don't hear," added Sgt. Major Malachi Mitchel, "is that old standard: I came in the Army to keep from going to jail."
This marks a major change. After the...

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