History

Truly Frank Herbert (of the Dune series) said correctly, "history is written by the victors". So can we trust it?

I never realised this about Singapore's "2nd University", rather interesting to know that the 'official' historical facts are so different from the ones that the graduates remember.

Taken from NTU's incredible lies about history of Nantah

Written by jon.sherwin (pen name I think)

I found the following paragraphs on NTU's website:

"The university has a distinguished lineage with roots that go back to 1955. We began as Nanyang University (Nantah), the first Chinese-language university in Southeast Asia, through donations from all walks of life, with the Yunnan Garden campus donated by the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan.

Nanyang Technological Institute was reborn on the same campus in 1981 with government funding to educate practice-oriented engineers for the burgeoning Singapore economy. In 1991 we became Nanyang Technological University with the absorption of the National Institute of Education."

source: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/publicportal/...+us/history.htm

Anyone with a sense of history can tell you Nantah was founded by late Tan Lark Sye in 1953 but unfortunately closed down by Lee Kuan Yew in 1980. (PAP supporters among Nantah alumni always insist that Nantah was "merged" with Singapore University to form the NUS -- make it more palatable to public perception). On the other hand, NTU was founded by Lee Kuan Yew in Nantah's old campus as NTI in 1982 initially and upgraded to NTU in 1992.

And don't forget that Nantah was a real CHINESE university (the only Chinese university outside of China and Taiwan so far) while NTU is an English university with a non-significant "Department of Chinese". (NUS has one too, nowadays, which decent university in the world does not have a Chinese Department?).

So you see, other than sharing the same premise, the two universities have no commonality AT ALL, what "lineage with roots" are they talking about ?
The fact of the matter is this: the property of now defunct Nanyang University was confiscated and given to NTU, the whole campus was ransacked and almost demolished, the old buildings torn down and replaced by new ones, the beloved Nantah Gate was defaced and cut off from the campus by the highway (They wanted to tear down the Gate but no contractors dared to take the contract).

After Nantah was closed down in 1980, no one heard about Nantah or Tan Lark Sye on media until 1989 when someone in PAP sensed that China was going to be reckoned with as another powerful country on earth. They started to see the economical value of Nantah's name (which they hastenly discarded in 1980) in pursuing the Chinese business, but the regime had been most unkind to Nantah and Tan Lark Sye, the big question was how could they erase this thorny historical blackmark in people's mind ? The whole PAP propaganda machinery with the help from media has been working on this single idea ever since. They seemed to have found the solution to their problem, namely, to modify and distort the history of Nantah and NTU ...

First they changed the Chinese abbreviation of NTU from LiDa to NanDa (i.e. Nantah) on Chinese media which created an illusion on the mind of Chinese readers and audience as if Nantah was still alive. Later, Dr. Su Guaning started to push renaming of NTU's official name to "Nanyang University" which naturally met opposition from silent Chinese community in Singapore and Nantah alumni. Consequently the idea was dropped in 2004 (the rumor has it that Lee Kuan Yew was annoyed by comments made by oppositions of renaming and requests by some supporters of renaming to rehabitate his most despised enemy Tan Lark Sye) while they were planning a huge ceremony to be held in June of 2005.

With name-change or no name-change, now they just want you to sincerely believe that this angmo NTU is the same Nantah built in 1953 by Tan Lark Sye with the help from Chinese people of southeast Asia, and it has been operating since 1955, as if nothing had happened in the year of 1980 ("No, no, no, we never closd down Nantah, what happened in 1980 was just your imagination, honey").

My friend gave me a metaphor to compare with what is going on here: "Someone killed your poor Chinese mother and confiscated your little atap hut. A twenty-ish Angmo woman comes along and moves in the hut. they now tell you in straight-face that this "50 years" old angmo jarbo is your old mother you missed so many years and she really never get killed!"

How can people believe such shameless fabrication and distortion of history? (Don't tell me Singaporeans are so gullible and stupid to put up with such nonsense. Are they?)

Personally, I have to say I was ignorant of this and now I have been enlightened (yet again). "History is written by victors".