i’ll leave this one quote here though

In the early days, many Malay Singaporeans were not called up for NS. When NS started in 1967, race relations were fragile and tenuous, after the riots of 1964 and separation in 1965. The government could not ignore race tensions, simply recruit all young Malays and Chinese and have them do military training side by side. Israeli instructors would have been involved in the training of Malay/Muslim servicemen at a time of Muslim-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. So we did not recruit every Malay male, unless we were confident his participation in NS would not be a problem. Even then there was no blanket ban against Malays in the SAF. We have progressed as circumstances have changed. By the 1980s, we were confident enough to offer SAF undergraduate awards to Malays.

Perhaps maybe one day I’ll write about the parallels on settler colonial histories of other parts of the Global South and that of Singapore. Although that is personally going to be one heck of an effort.