To the Editor:
There are several rather disturbing misperceptions in Won Joon Choe's '97 column "Judging Asia's Authoritarianism" (May 2).
Amid his enthusiasm for what he identifies as that country's political and legal authoritarian underpinnings, he asserts that no government can rightly "claim that it is the best form of government in all cases and for all people." Curiously, this does not prevent Choe from prescribing that very system for the United States, whose crime and environmental problems he attributes to "the proliferation of individual rights."
Yet the author fails to consider that Singapore, with its tiny and homogeneous population of 2.5 million, has largely escaped the societal problems posed by a multicultural population ten times its size.
To conclude that the current difficulties in this country are the result of its commitment to individual rights is absurd. Further, in light of his allegations of U.S. cultural chauvinism, his label of Americans as "ideology-intoxicated" seems rather hypocritical.
That said, the premise that caning, here in the case of American student Michael Fay, as criminal punishment is acceptable because it received the sanction of a majority of Singapore's population is not only erroneous, but dangerous. History offers numerous examples of the perils of unmitigated majority rule, one of which -- Hitler -- Choe emphatically shuns, though that dictator's regime was in fact endorsed by, in the author's words, "an overwhelming majority of its people."
I will indulge in some personal American "ideology-intoxication" and point out that in the U.S., the valued power of judicial review safeguards individual liberties against abuse either by a majority or by the state. Abuse in this context most certainly would include caning, a practice of exceptional brutality which leaves permanent scars upon its victims.
International human rights accords have affirmed the archaism and cruelty of corporal punishment as a criminal deterrent, and the international community has every right to expect a country with Singapore's high level of socio-economic development to live up to this standard. It is also unfortunate that when Americans question the right of another country to disfigure a U.S. citizen, the author's response is a hollow and irrational charge of Western ethno-centrism.
JOHN MURRAY '94
