I will, however, comment only on this excerpt, putting in bold a most excellent point:
SPIEGEL: During your career, you have kept your distance from Western style democracy. Are you still convinced that an authoritarian system is the future for Asia?
Mr. Lee: Why should I be against democracy? The British came here, never gave me democracy, except when they were about to leave. But I cannot run my system based on their rules. I have to amend it to fit my people's position. In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. So I found a formula that changes that...
Even in a supposedly evolved democracy like the USA, you rarely see a black, Jewish, or gay Republican, or a white evangelical Democrat, in elective office. The people tend to vote in terms of ethnic and religious identity instead of self-interest even in the USA.
In war, you don't fight against your faith and your kin, and politics is just war carried out by other means. It isn't unfortunate or irrational that people vote this way, it is unavoidable and inevitable. That's why imposing democracy in Iraq, where the religious and ethnic divisions are deep, is a bad idea. It's not a question of whether the people are "ready" for democracy (as if they're too backward culturally, or too stupid), but rather because - like Singapore - the very make-up of the country makes it a particularly dangerous form of government. And if we turned it around, and the people did vote for their own self-interest instead of their ethnic and religious identity, would that be any better?
I'm not advocating a Singapore-style dictatorship. Rather, we should abolish most of the powers and institutions of the State, so that the people could not oppress each other for either ethno-religious or economic reasons. Far better to let each person be his own dictator - his own king.
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It's true that people tend to vote based on their ethnic and religious identity. But why doesn't this translate into voting for their economic self interest? If you have political parties/factions/coalitions based on ethnic communities, why don't they also represent the economic self interest of that community. I suppose for the most part a community will contain lower class, middle class, and upper class individuals without a common economic self interest. Only if you have an ethnic class concentrated at a certain economic status will you see the expression of economic self interest in politics.
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