Singapore’s former Prime Minister and founding father Lee Kuan Yew, who took a dilapidated colonial port city in what he called the “Third World” and turned it into a global financial powerhouse – at the expense of individual liberty – has passed away at age 91, after a lengthy bout with pneumonia.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Lee was a “giant of our region”, while US President Barack Obama called Lee a “visionary” whose “remarkable” leadership helped build “one of the most prosperous countries in the world today”.

Not everyone would agree with those assessments.  Singapore’s success was created with a combination of centralized power, clean government, and economic liberalism.  Along with that came the suppression of the political opposition and strict limits on free speech and public assembly. 

From the moment he first became Prime Minister in 1959, and especially after Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965, Lee believed in what he believed were the “Asian Values” of putting the rights of the individual and citizens aside in favor of an orderly society run by a benevolent patrician.  Lee’s legacy is the ultimate “go along to get along” nation, in which roughly 5.5 million citizens care less about how things work than of acquiring the bourgeois materials of a middle class (or higher) life.

“I’m not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honorable purpose,” Lee said in 2010.  “I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”

Lee insisted it was necessary to craft a nation out of three ethnic groups – Malay, Chinese, and Tamil.  The language of each would be recognized as an official language.  But English was favored and encouraged as the common tongue and official language of business.