YouTube video

The Show with PJ Thum — Episode 4 — How the PAP Nanny State creates Dependence and Controls Citizens

Historian Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) explains how the People’s Action Party in Singapore, through purposeful social design since the 1960s, has created a system through which the state is able to intimately interfere in peoples lives and create public dependence on the state; and how this dependence on the state then makes people afraid to speak up or oppose the government.

On Operation Coldstore and the PAP: https://newnaratif.com/podcast/the-spectre-haunting-singapores-peoples-action-party/

N.B.: This video was filmed 28 January 2020. Also, the book “Critical Responses to the PAP in Rhyme, 2nd ed.” doesn’t actually exist. It’s a joke, ya’ll.

New episodes of The Show with PJ Thum drop Fridays until May. For more, please see https://newnaratif.com/theshowwithpjthum.

Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is Managing Director of New Naratif and a historian at the University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel, his work centres on Southeast Asian governance and politics. His most recent work is Living with Myths in Singapore (Ethos: 2017, co-edited with Loh Kah Seng and Jack Chia). Reach him at pingtjin.thum@newnaratif.com.