Singapore—After writing a post on Facebook defending embattled controversial blogger Xiaxue, Critical Spectator Michael Petraeus says he has been accused of defending racism by ‘some snowflakes.’
Mr Petraeus says he does not consider Xiaxue’s comments on Twitter from some years ago to be racist.
A tweet she wrote in 2010, seemingly targeting migrant workers, was the basis of a police report lodged against her for stirring up anti-Indian sentiments.
Not only does Mr Petraeus not consider Xiaxue’s tweets as racist, he claims in a Facebook post on September 29 that he thinks racism does not exist in Singapore “at all.”
For Mr Petraeus, the word has been used so often “by the left-wing kool-aid InstaTikTok generation” and it has lost what it really means.
“It has become a vehicle of ignorant virtue signalling of people born in the best time in human history.”
He then went to recount how he had grown up in Poland near concentration camps where millions of people were killed in World War II.
“All of them perished because they weren’t considered quite valuable, quite human enough – and needed to be purged to make space for the superior Aryan race, as envisioned by the Nazi leadership. In total 17 million people were murdered in the process of systematic extermination on ethnic or national grounds.”
For him, this defines what racism is.
https://www.facebook.com/CriticalSpectator/photos/a.806742819433447/3220305628077142
In contrast, in Singapore, which he calls “the literal heaven on Earth” due to its multicultural and meritocratic society, racism does not exist but there are “some self-righteous, virtue-signaling brats claiming they are somehow struggling with” it.
He went to explain what actually occurs in Singapore is not racism but “stereotyping,” since “most of the alleged racism refers to certain observations people have about each other.”
He adds that those who believe “in some racial supremacy of any other group in any developed society then by your own standards you’re being racist too. And if everybody and everything is racist, then nothing is. The term loses its meaning.”
This, he said, it is an insult to the real “victims of real racism,” who lost their lives and “whose suffering is now being devalued by the entitled ‘bubble-tea generation’.”
In this country, Mr Petraeus added, no one really suffered because of their ethnicity. “There are millionaires, celebrities, academics, politicians or artists representing every racial group in the city-state.”
Calling Singapore the most successful diverse society in the world he argues that there is nowhere on Earth with such diversity and where the situation is peaceful and people uniformly enjoy prosperity.
Xiaxue, he said, was not racist, and her tweets were just “rants.”
“Angry tweets based on negative personal experiences, little else,” he wrote, adding that he found it ironic that the people who call for empathy or understanding seem to be unwilling to extend the same to her.
He ended his post with a scathing denouncement of Xiaxue’s critics, as well as reiterating his views that life in Singapore is better than anywhere else.
“It’s just cynical, self-centered, self-pleasing grandstanding by people who seek relevance in life by claiming they are victims, despite living better lives than 99% of humanity.
There’s no safer, more prosperous and more equal multiracial country in the world than Singapore, he says.
“So, before you want to complain again (let me use your own lingo so it’s easier to understand): check your privilege.” —/TISG