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A Thailand “Write Up”
by John Francis Lee
This year is my fifth cycle through the animal years from pig to pig to pig to pig to pig. Here in Northern Thailand the pig’s place is taken by the elephant. I prefer the elephant.
HM the King of Thailand, Bhumipol Adulyadej, had already been King for a year when I was born. Most Thais know no other King. Everyone loves the King, myself included. He’s seen 15 coups and 19 constitutions come and go. He’s the only one in Thailand perceived to be above the self-serving mass of bureaucrats and politicians and generals that carry on the spectacle of government here.
Bhumipol Adulyadej was born in Cambridge MA, eighty years ago this 5 December. Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger he could run for President of the United States of America. I’ve always liked HM the King. He has a very good image. When he was younger he constantly travelled throughout the nation, listening to the people and devising projects, looking for solutions to their problems in the countryside. His mother was a "commoner" who’d met his royal father in MA while he was studying public medicine at Harvard University. She’d won a scholarship from the then Queen of Thailand to study nursing, at Simmons College I think, in Boston. I’ve visited the apartment building they lived in, a regulation "triple decker" in Brookline MA. His father gave his name as "Mr Songklha" rather than "the Prince of Songklha". HM’s father died young and HM the King was brought up by his mother. And it shows, to
his credit and to hers.
HM the King seems to me to be as much a victim of the Thai monarchical institution as all the rest of us living in Thailand. He became King after his brother, King Ananda, was killed by a single shot above the eye while resting one afternoon in the palace in Bangkok. The death of Rama VIII, King Ananda, has never really been resolved, although three people were executed for it. You could look it up, as Casey Stengel used to say.
I’ve tried to make sense of the death of the previous king of Thailand ever since I first read of it, thirteen years ago, when I first fell in love with Thailand. I have come to the conclusion that he was
murdered, not for anything he did or represented, but to accomplish a side effect, the vilification of the Socialist Pridi Phanomyongnd and his subsequent removal from Thai politics by a "royalist" faction of the time.
The military once again took power in Thailand last September 19th. Having done so they rule, in their own description, as the servants and protectors of HM the King. They too are "royalists".
I have also come to the conclusion that the present regime in the United States of America knowingly allowed the mass murders of 9/11 to go forward in a Neocon act of "benign neglect", in order to pursue their purifying purgative policies. It was hard for me to accept the distinct possibility of the utter
ruthlessness of both these possibilities. Of the utter disregard for the human lives of the victims as compared with the goal which "compelled" the action. With the passage of time the answers to such "why" questions may forever remain unknowable.
The government overthrown last September was a government of crony capitalists headed by a man named Thaksin Shinawatra. He and his cronies were filling both pockets with both hands as fast as they
could. Like "globalists" everywhere they had no compunctions about selling out the country to the highest bidder. The electorate, the mass of whom had never known anything but abuse and neglect from any Thai government, were thrown a calculated share of the spoils, and Thaksin’s TRT (Thais Love Thais) Party was a shoo-in for any election as a result.
The junta I fear will be no better, perhaps worse. Some describe their coup as A Coup for the Rich (pdf). They tore up the Thai Constitution and are rewriting it again. They’ve pencilled in amnesty for coup leaders and an appointed Senate… so far. They claimed they’d hold elections within a year of seizing power… now it’s within fifteen months… Musharraf is going to be holding elections in Pakistan soon, isn’t he?
The present government, unpopular as it is and growing more unpopular with each passing week of its rule, is trying to ride free on HM the King’s great popularity with his subjects. Everyone holding, seeking,
or dreaming of power in Thailand is hoping to ride on HM the King’s coattails. The King is no longer an absolute monarch. The absolute monarchy has been history since King VII, in 1932. But there is a
law in Thailand that makes lese majeste, or speaking ill of the King, absolutely illegal.
A 76 year-old Buddhist nun was found guilty of lese majeste a few weeks ago. The newspapers could not publish her offense without committing lese majeste themselves, so she is off to the gulag for her secret offense. Perhaps for thought crimes?
Lese majeste is the ultimate legal weapon. The authorities can charge people with offenses they
need not specify, for repeating such charges is an offense in itself. Sound familiar?
Recently someone put a video on youtube that the junta found offensive to HM the King.
HM does not file, nor does he approve of charges of lese majeste. In fact he has specifically said that he disapproves of the whole concept. "Actually,
I want them to criticise," he said on the occasion of his birthday speech two years ago. At the time Thaksin was trying to silence his critics with multiplebillion-baht slander lawsuits, a la the Lee regime in Singapore, and the King was criticising him for it.
So the junta blocked access to youtube from within Thailand.
The obscure video immediately became the one everyone just had to see, I’m told, and copycat videos appeared as well. This had the effect of drawing everyone’s attention away from the junta and uniting, after a fashion, Thailand against the disgusting, crude outside world that would stupidly and cruelly make fun of its beloved King in his eightieth year, the sixty-first of his reign. I think the junta may well have put the videos on youtube themselves, so effective were they in drawing attention away from their own shortcomings and power grabs, and in drumming up support for their censorship.
For the past three days I have been unable to post to MoA, or to make an http connection to typepad.com. Has someone, somewhere in Thailand posted something the junta does not like using typepad.com? Or is this just prophylactic action? I don’t know. They don’t publish the lists of sites they block.
Two things strike me about the junta’s censorship. The first is that summary decree is their first recourse in ruling the nation. That’s why they call it a dictatorship, I guess. They dictate. The second is that they do not have a realistic assessment of their own dictatorial powers. Who was the king, Canut?, who ordered the tides not to rise? Censorship is ultimately discovered to be the tool of the weak. And it is the response of the junta to its unexpected inability to rule by decree that is unpredictable, and therefore dangerous.
Please do not misunderstand me. I love Thailand. I love Thais. I love living here. Just as I love America and Americans. I’m sure that if I lived in Israel or Palestine or Iraq or Iran I would love Israelis, Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranians. There’s only one human race and the faults of all our governments are the faults of our common humanity.
Greed, chiefly. And the greedy among us will use our genetic proclivity to cohere into units, into groups of "us" and "them", and to exploit us thereby for their own ends for just as long as we are unable to resist them.
Monolycus :
It sounds all-too-familiar, and if a comparison is to be drawn, our
own pretender sounds a bit closer to your description of Thaksin than to
the benevolent monarch he tries to paint himself to be…
I was thinking about the provisions of the PATRIOT Act that make it
illegal for librarians, for instance, to tell patrons that they have
furnished information on their reading habits to the “authorities”. Or
perhaps to the provision that the “authorities” can break into and enter
your home, search for and remove “incriminating evidence” and never tell
you. Or that under the MCA the poor souls in the gulag can be brought up
on charges and the evidence against them withheld by the “authorities”.
And so forth.
Noirette:
Here the press is filled with the fact that the King freed the Swiss
drunken insulting sprayer, so the King is tops…
Yes. Poor Mr Lufer. About my age and still a slave to drink. There but
for fortune… On one of the celebratory days of HM the King’s 60th year
on the throne last year, the sale of alcohol was forbidden. This always
enrages the farangs here. No alcohol for an entire day! Mr Lufer was so
enraged at HM the King for having been on the throne for 60 years and
thus being the occasion of the celebration that left Mr Lufer without
his juice that he purposefully spen his juice money on a spray can of
black paint and proceeded to spray paint HM the King’s face on several
of the ubiquitous posters honoring him.
In the US this would have resulted in “suicide by cop”, which may well
have been what poor Mr Lufer was seeking. I remember well the
self-loathing that accompanied my own enslavement to the juice. At any
rate, everyone is happy now. Mr Lufer can go home to Switzerland, the
junta have shown no mercy to a barbarian farang, and HM the King has
displayed his infinite wisdom and forebearance. It may have been this
happy result that gave the junta the idea to move on to the internet,
and to the hordes of barbarian farangs harbored there.
annie:
‘inventing ancient thai traditions’
Yeah… that’s pretty interesting, annie. One of the things I admired
about the Thais when I first met them was their amazing ability to avoid
colonization by the British or the French, or by the Dutch or Portugese
for that matter earlier on, while all around them succumbed.
It seems more nearly the case that in fact the Thais were colonized…
but by Bangkok. I live in Northern Thailand where folks my age can
recount being punished for speak Passa Nuea, or Kham Mueang, the
language of the North, or of the people of the region, in the schools
set up for their “edification” as Thais by the imperial regime in
Bangkok. In South Texas I knew Tejano folks who told the same tales.
There were cannons pointed out of the windows of Overbrook Hospital, a
Christian missionary unit allowed to help with the “civilization” of the
North by Bangkok, during the millinarian revolt in 1902 or 1903. And so
also with Isaan in the Northeast. I’m sure you’ve read of the “troubles”
in South Thailand.
The country we know as Thailand was built by the present, Chakri,
dynasty. Chiefly by Kings numbered 4 and 5, known to farangs
respectively as Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn. Mongkut was played by
Yul Brenner in the version of the “The King and I” that is of my
vintage. The Thais were scandalized by his barbarian burlesque of one of
their wisest Kings in Margaret Landon’s fantastical treatment of the
white woman’s burden.
Chulalongkorn, King number 5, presided over the forging of a nation
state out of the collection of peoples, princes and principalities that
occupied the territory called Siam. He did so by copying primarily the
British imperial structures surrounding him. He and his father invented
the history of a country that had not existed prior to their invention.
The same process was repeated again under the brutal dictator Sarit,
Dulles’ friend, after the revolution that had effectively transferred
power from the monarchy to the military. Chulalongkorn had abolished
slavery and had his subjects rise in his presence. Sarit made them crawl
again.
Alamet:
I had read at the time of the coup that there were also genuine
popular movements as opposed to the fake popularism of Thaksin. Are
these movements divided, confused? Or did they bear the brunt of the
Junta’s violence as it always happens?
I guess I see parallels between the US and Thailand because I’m and
American living in Thailand. But I’m not the only one. Ji (pronounced
Jai) Ungpakorn says of the opposition’s strategy in A Coup for the Rich:
The voting strategy proposed by the Thai social movements was
called “voting to get the dogs to bite each other”, which is in fact,
nothing but a pale reflection of the failed “tactical voting strategy”
proposed by demoralised Labour Party voters in the U.K. in the 1980s.
It is similar too to the unsuccessful “Anyone But Bush” campaign in
the 2004 U.S. presidential election. These tactics have failed in other
countries because people are not encouraged to vote positively “for”
a party or candidate because of their qualities. Instead, they are asked
to vote for one bad choice to try and block another bad choice, which
is hardly an incentive to vote. What is more, in the Thai context, a
call to vote to destabilise the Thai Rak Thai government amounted to
a vote to destabilise many of the government’s Populist policies,
including low cost health care and financial help to villages. This was
not an attractive proposition for the poor. No wonder the strategy
failed to gain any support.
Thailand is the Bangkok Empire. The Sino-Thai political-managerial class
in Bangkok views the country as a city-sate, like Singapore, with a more
secure hinterland. The “opposition” plays Neoliberal to the Military’s
Neocon.
What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle
ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper
classes from the rest of the country…
Here in Thailand the elite doesn’t need to secede… it was never a part
of the country to begin with.
…and we will be reading about the Islamist threat…
Yes. Slothrup will be warning us of it any day now 🙂 A good paper on
the South of Thailand is Understanding the Situation in the South as a “Millinarian Revolt” by Nidhi Aeusrivongse.
PeeDee :
I’ve been awaiting comment from you since you went off-line during
and after the event itself. Was that coup related?
No, I was just feeling exhausted. I had had the idea, I guess, that all
this blogging was somehow supposed to have an effect on the real world,
but that it was failing. I have since disabused myself, more or less, of
the former notion, which has given me room to redefine “success”, vis a
vis the latter.
Juannie, b real :
Thanks for the complements, you’re welcome.
conchita :
He loved Thailand and I have always wondered about the country. Thank
you for sharing your thoughts and educating me about the history.
Yeah. I loved Thailand from the very first trip that Kae, my Thai
sweetie, and I took here from the USA. We visited every year we could
and then finally moved here in fall of 2002. My knowledge of the history
is not at all in depth. But no one’s is. It’s hard to explain, but the
Thais never had a sense of history like the West’s. There are so many
areas where what istaken for granted in the West to be VERY IMPORTANT,
is just not important at all to the Thais. What attracts me is the
community in the countryside. What is not at all important in the West
is the MOST IMPORTANT thing in rural Thailand. That’s a good part of the
answer to the question of how can the Thais put up with their
disenfranchisement at the national level and “poverty” in the
countryside. Yeah, they’re more and more buying into how IMPORTANT all
that is, bombarded by the very slick advertisements from Bangkok. But at
bottom they know that it is not important at all. The Moo Ban, the
village, is important. Is life itself.
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comment submitted per mail by John Francis Lee (who has access problems)
Posted by: b | Apr 17 2007 6:52 utc | 9
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