The Select Committee probing the vexatious issue of deliberate online falsehoods must have a lot to chew on. Not just on the 170 submissions and answers from the 65 witnesses who spent more than 50 hours under the spotlight, some of them facing a public grilling not seen in Singapore politics in a long while.

What stole the spotlight was Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam’s interrogation of at least two of the witnesses, Facebook’s Simon Milner and historian Thum Ping Tjin. Enjoying every bit of his inquisitor-in-chief role, Shanmugam was very much in the driver’s seat with nobody in the panel, not even chairman Charles Chong, wanting to step in, thus leaving a sour taste in many Singaporeans’ mouths.

For all that has been said and done since 1990, when then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong spoke of moving away from a society that had been brow-beaten into submission by his predecessor Lee Kuan Yew, those two interrogations must have been, to put it mildly, one big disappointment. Welcome to the new-old Singapore where the rules of engagement, especially political engagement, are still stuck in the mire of what should have been a bygone era.

It was gut wrenching to watch the videos of the unflappable Shanmugam going for the kill and his prey, Thum, trying to look dignified and occasionally putting on a smile. The witness should have come with a watertight case to defend his thesis that the People’s Action Party government under Lee Kuan Yew had used falsehoods to detain political opponents during the police swoop of 1963, codenamed Operation Coldstore. There was no way Shanmugam was going to let that accusation go.

As the six hours of interrogation wore on, Thum had no choice but to admit that he could have also mentioned what former Communist Party of Malaya leaders like Chin Peng and other historians had said that ran counter to his narrative. His explanation that these accounts were not reliable just did not wash as those in the business will tell you that citing different points of view in a thesis is a basic tenet of research. And an opportunity to discuss the declassified Special Branch documents, which Thum cited as the main evidence in his thesis, was lost.

Who is right?

View photos Historian Thum Ping Tjin was questioned for six hours by Shanmugam. PHOTO: Nicholas Yong/Yahoo News Singapore More

It was a very controversial part of Singapore’s history with historians and politicians going to and fro about why the more than 100 arrests were made. Just this week, a Facebook post by researcher and author Siew Min Sai added another complication to the Chin Peng story. She said that at a closed-door workshop in Canberra some time ago, Chin Peng answered many of the questions politely put to him which revealed that the CPM’s involvement in the Barisan Sosialis, a breakaway faction of the PAP, many of whose members were also detained, was not so clear cut. As Siew said: “It is not possible to prove or disprove a communist conspiracy because to do so involves using words or concepts not used by historical actors themselves who may have different perspectives on what they had done/were doing.”

If such a momentous event that happened 55 years ago is still fraught with the issue of what is true and false, then what about determining what is fake news in today’s technology-driven world? With all the sparks flying at the six-hour interrogation, very little time was spent on exploring this issue in depth. Still, there was a genuine desire, even among the very moderate participants like Carol Soon and Gillian Koh of the Institute of Policy Studies, that there should be a legal plus plus route – education to help the public sieve through the truths, half-truths, falsehoods and half-falsehoods that appear online. That stand should be celebrated as laws alone are not going to solve the problem.

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