Singapore arrested two bloggers for making offensive-to-Islam remarks on their blogs, with charges of contributing to religious hatred. The de-facto state-controlled Singapore tabloid, The Electric New Paper, breathily noted that this pair also even was ‘said to contain vulgarities.’ In Singapore they have laws against that kind of thing.

I am an ex-Singapore resident who first learned how to use the Internet in Singapore. Prior to that, I had no idea what it was. I was a denizen of Singapore’s first Internet cafes, (since I didn’t have a very good home computer) and often I consider Singapore and cyber-Singapore my real ‘home.’

Of course I still love the treasured place.

In recent years, Singapore has gone to great ends to show the rest of the world it’s ‘lightening up.’ Its prime minister was recently seen disco dancing to show he knew how to ‘let his hair down’ and Singapore even sponsored an openly gay festival – although if truth be told, I knew where all the gay places were in Singapore in the late 1990s and cops never bothered them. I remember how Lee Kuan Yew warned Singapore officials that Singapore needed to start generating some ‘buzz’ – a certain intangible he could not quite define – to stay globally competitive, of course. Everyone laughed – and at long last found themselves obeying the signs on the bus shelter wall, warning them to ‘smile’ on government orders.

But it’s a good good country, in a truly marvellous place, with very little crime, all the technological amenities, good decent bureaucrats, good decent business people, good clean water, every contract good. There is no such thing as barbaric crap like eating people or phony government lawsuits against journalists or child-selling or head-hunting or relative-hiring or under-the-table-payments or sea-piracy or going to the bathroom on the beach or currency devaluation or tinpot dictators in mirrored sunglasses that goes on around its neighbors. (Although most Singaporeans believe in ghosts!) They don’t even eat cats. In fact their animal-protection societies are some of the most active in the world. Singaporeans are highly civilized people.

But there is something about Singapore that makes you want to get out, to get fresh air, to feel a certain freedom, even if you’re just heading to third-world Jakarta. You often feel stifled in Singapore even though everything is so nice, the streets are so clean, the ATMs all work, the Starbucks is wherever you need it and the bougainvillea grows in perfect pink puffs under the sharp, perfectly aligned areca palms. You want to go. You want to be in a shantytown. You want to eat some dodgy dangerous food. And you feel good when you are leave and you feel doubly good when you return to the perfection. That’s just Singapore.

So what is behind the sudden effort to crack down on Singapore’s bloggers?

Singapore has four kinds of people and about seven languages. You got your Chinese, 77% of the population, who speak mainly Hakka, Hokkein and Teo-chew. You got your Indians, 7%, largely Tamils speaking Tamil. You got your Malays, 15%, Malay-speaking and veil-wearing Muslim. You got your Eurasians, 1%, who might speak anything. And you have at least 100,000 expats on the island of 4 million. Everyone speaks a bit of Singlish, which is English, combined with Malay and Chinese dialects. Not that the government likes it, lah!

Singaporeans all make fun of each other – Chinese against Malays, Malays against Chinese, Indians against Chinese, Indians against Malays, Malays against Chinese, everyone against whites, whites against Chinese. Usually, they portray their rivals as dense and out of it. They have special stereotypes with actual names they play around with – like ‘Mat’s’ for Malays named Mohammed, and ‘Ah Beng’s’ for Chinese men in flip flops – both modelled on an archetypal dense person. I’ve seen an early Web site devoted to making fun of Singapore’s ethnicities, called Talking Cock, but when I went there today, I noticed the wild ethnic humor it had earlier seemed to be gone. They must have gotten word before these other two bloggers did. The Electric new paper says these guys were extremely racist – which could be propaganda or could be perfectly true. The climate for making fun of other nationalities does exist.

Singaporeans also chafe at their government. They are as patriotic as anyone but get them in private and they will curse the control the government has over them – I’ve heard it many many times. It’s not something that is done publically but it’s not hard to get someone to do it privately. People really scream about their government and lack of freedoms. It’s a society that’s beset by rules, rules, rules. And unlike its neighbors, which also have rules, rules, rules, those rules are expected to be obeyed. THAT is what makes Singapore different from places like Jakarta. Both have a zillion rules, but in Singapore, the rules are expected to be obeyed.

In the months after 9/11, in December, a terrorist attempt was made on Singapore. The perpetrators were local Malay Singaporeans, supposedly good neighbors of all who knew them. The terror attempt on the Sembawang military base up north on the Malay border shocked Singapore. They were stunned that locals could be responsible for this, and began to question whether they really knew their neighbors anymore.

That was important to do, because Singaporeans had thought they had gotten rid of racist and ethnic strife. Affirmative action was everywhere. They had endured fierce race riots in the 1960s, Malay against Chinese against Indians, and generally felt that affirmative action was a decent compromise to prevent something like that from ever happening again.

The impact of that terror attack scared the Singaporeans into thinking that maybe they hadn’t.

The blogger busts were directed at those who made fun of Islam and Muslims. The impetus to bust them was purely legal, but there probably was some political input. The government doesn’t want this kind of thing going around, even though for Singaporeans, making fun of others may be their only means of feeling free and expressing themselves in their tightly controlled society. The government wants all Singaporeans to get along and it’s willing to take names if they don’t. They certainly do find time to watch the blogs, I suppose.

It was a sudden and unexpected move to bust the bloggers and perhaps the government did it because it feels it’s losing control – either of the Muslims in their midst, or in an inherent dislike of Internet freedom, such as the Chinese government sometimes shows. They had perfect legal grounds, and in Singapore trials, the accused virtually always gets convicted.

The society is opening up so fast that I can see the government fearing a loss of control. Along with the fear of radical Muslims, these two factors probably had a lot to do with why Singapore joined Iran in being the only two nations that have ever cracked down on bloggers. They hope that to kill the chicken, they will scare the monkey.

They’ll probably get away with it, unfortunately. It’s the kind of place where they do.

UPDATE: Myrick at AsiaPundit has excellent, thoughtful additional commentary here.

UPDATE: Tom Friedman has a first-rate essay on the essence of Singapore and takes a good look at its history. One more reason why I am a Friedman fan.