Dear Yellow
Under Cold Store Chin Peng the CPM Boss Sec Gen declared his communist underground in SG got wiped out. They wanted a revolution on the streets, but if you were Gov in Malaya and in SG with the CPM still armed and surbodinates seeking "peaceful revolution" would you logically trust any of them ?
Locke
Like Scroobal and Omnia, you've swallowed PAP propaganda hook, line and sinker. Most of those detained (don't just take it from me — check Geoff Wade's seminal academic paper) under Cold Store were largely ex-left-wing members who had split from the PAP to form the Barisan Sosialis.
These were in the main socialists, concerned with social justice and the lot of the poor and disenfranchised. If they had any sympathies with the communist movement, it was largely with the socialist aspects of Marxist doctrine. But violence was not their modus operandi.
Moreover, declassified documents from the UK Archives have shown unequivocally that the British colonial authorities, LKY and the ISD were well aware that the 110+ arrested had not and were not planning any violent, anarchic schemes to seize power. The 'communist label' was just a convenient excuse to get rid of LKY's formidable rivals, just as Operation Spectrum 24 years later targeted social workers with the ludicrous calumny of 'Marxism'.
It's the oldest political trick in the book: smear your opponents, make it stick, and hang him for it.
That's why none of those detained - Lim Hock Siew, Said Zahari, Poh Su Kai, Chia Thye Poh, etc had ever confessed to being communists. That's why they were detained for so long, through the entire prime of their lives, for no other reason than that old fart (and the PAP) had to maintain these historical lies which are now propagated as TRUTH in our kids' history textbooks. (History, as they say, being always written by the victors.) 16, 17, 20 years were the norm, and in Chia Thye Poh's case, a whopping 32 years, an ignominious world record for political detention (5 years longer than Mandela's).
It is also noteworthy that most political historians today agree that Operation Cold Store was the single decisive factor responsible for the demise of left-wing socialist politics in Singapore.
Who knows what kind of Singapore we might have inherited if there were a left-wing ballast to PAP's decidedly right-wing and increasingly fascist polity? A messier country perhaps, lower GDP maybe, strikes and sit-ins possibly, certainly a more vibrant and rambunctious political and activist scene.
But, in all probabilities, but for Cold Store, we would also have inherited a kinder, more humane state with greater social equity and a voice for the downtrodden and under-privileged.