Has the script changed in essence ?

While I think the late Patrick Keith's book Ousted! An Insider's Story of the Ties that Failed to Bind (Singapore, Media Masters, 2005) is an excellent guide for younger Malaysians and Singaporeans to understand one of the most tumultuous periods of the modern history of our respective countries, I must also say that it has its inherent limitations because it does not cover the politics of the people's movement on the ground.

We cannot blame Patrick because all human beings' perspectives, including mine, are limited by our own prevailing stations of life, value-systems and intellectual paradigms. We can, however, try to overcome the limitations of the perspectives of authors by reading more books written by other authors who have seen or experienced things differently such as Pak Said's memoirs Menliti Lautan Gelora and Dalam Ribuan Mimpi Gelisah.

In his two memoirs, Pak Said provides a perspective that centred on the people's movement and how it was crushed with mass detentions without trial and tortures, both physical as well as psychological.

With the contrasting perspective provided by Pak Said's memoirs, we younger people now can see more clearly that Ousted! focuses only on the realm of the power struggles among the contending rightwing elites like Tunku Abdul Rahman and his UMNO, Tan Siew Sin and his MCA and Lee Kuan Yew and his faction in PAP and all of them were, to varying degrees, pro-British and anti-Left, and that their power struggle was of intra-elite nature.

In other words, they were only factions within the larger pro-British bloc of elites. Once they faced a common threat from the anti-colonial Left and effective challenges from the people's movement from below, they united to crush it to defend their common interest in the name of 'national security' (but with military 'assistance' and 'intelligence sharing' from their Great Motherland on the other side of the globe) and what not. Has the script changed in essence?

Ex-political prisoner says he's not bitter despite 17 years in detention
http://www.singapore-window.org/sw06/060409ap.htm