Last weekend, about 400 Singaporeans gathered in a local park to call attention to a notorious 25-year-old raid called Operation Spectrum, when Singapore’s Special Branch swooped down on 16 activists and community workers and charged them with being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Eventually six more were arrested, bringing the total to 22.
To this day, no one is really sure what it was about. The 22 were mostly young Catholics who were forced to “confess” on television such sins as sending books to China, which might have made a good deal more sense if instead they had been receiving books from China, which was then still a putatively Marxist dictatorship. The detainees didn’t fit any stereotypes as agitators, such as those who rattled the island republic during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Full story
