Jonny I agree with the statment that “If Justin Beiber came to Bangkok, he’d generate a crowd 5-10 times the size of their rioting number of a few months back.”
Justin and his fans would not however be in crosshairs of hundreds of designated snipers armed with scope-sighted rifles with shoot on sight orders.
There is a difference. Accept that.
Also know that those thousands of Thais who believe in democray and elections (Red Shirts, UDD supporters, etc) and that their votes count and voices heard will be heard and that the people they elect will actually able to govern are not going away anytime soon.
However much repression is exacted, they are like stirring ants with a stick. Or the arcade game where you hit a mole on the head and another one pops out of a different hole.
As a former Chitralada Teacher(not from Baylor, they also hire from another equally mediocre school in California), I can shed some light on this.
The connection to Chitralada is between a Sociology Professor and the former director of the Chitralada Palace School. The two became friends when they met upon the Professor’s first visit to Thailand.
As for the teaching positions themselves, it was a once in a lifetime experience, but MUCH less glamourous than the ad makes it sound. I will NEVER complain about my teacher’s salary or hours/workload in the U.S. after teaching at that school in Thailand.
I think you are getting into some strange conspiracy theories here. We have ended up reversing roles with me having to defend 92 while you try and defend 2009/2010.
Did 1992 represent a power play by a section of the elite? Well if it did there wasn’t very many of them. I seem to remember Chavalit giving lukewarm support, mind you a bit warmer than the fence-sitting Democrats were giving at the time. No, in the end I can see a middle-class pro-democracy movement that succeeded in changing politics here just a little.
The Young Turks were an interesting group. I agree they had some pretty right wing ideas and you can certainly see a lot of what they were saying in today’s PAD. Thing is when a group of young officers gets together to overthrow an older generation you are never sure how it will end up. Do they become a right wing junta like so many did in Africa or do you end up with a Chavez or something similar to Portugal in 1974? I guess we will never know.
The structural similarities between the Saudi and Thai Regimes might make it seem that they ought to be “good friends”… but the terminal greed exhibited on the Thai end points up the bankruptcy of the concept of friends based upon the “principle” of hurray for me and a knife in the back for you… and for everyone else if it means a single satang more in my pocket… on which Thailand is “governed”.
Leah Hoyt: perhaps Mr Ashri simply knows a kindred spirit when he sees one.
The underlying, wryly hilarious twist to all this is that Saudi is itself famous for corruption, cronyism, non-transparency, and the tyranny of one massive “sensitive” subject.
In Saudi, it’s a plethora of greedy, unprincipled royals who have to strike a Faustian bargain with a powerful Wahhabi sect and its unquestionable Islamism in order to hold on to non-democratic power.
In Thailand it’s a plethora of greedy, unprincipled politicians who have to strike a Faustian bargain with a powerful military and its unquestionable monarchism in order to hold on to non-democratic power.
Missing diamond or not, the two governments ought to be good friends on principle alone.
Many thanks for pointing that out. We’ll see who will outwit whom. It is admittedly an entirely different ball game from the 19th C ‘arms race’ although the basic principle roles of gunrunners and dodgy states remain pretty much the same.
Don’t kid yourself though that the West has too much on their plate to get to the bottom of it, especially when it comes to nukes. Nobody is ever left to their own devices in the age of superpowers, starting right from the age of unashamed imperialism. There is so much going on behind the scenes as you yourself have indicated.
Jonny’s right in that free speech has known restrictions in almost every state: laws against public threat, libel, defamation, incitement, and in a few places, historical revisionism and lese majeste. Oh, and blasphemy in some places.
But those restrictions all tend to rough categories:
1) Technically clear, transparently enforced, vigorously debated in legal and academic circles. I’d put most free speech laws in developed democratic societies here, including holocaust denial in states other than Germany.
2) Technically clear, transparently enforced, rarely debated. Holocaust denial in Germany, which most Germans don’t wanna talk about. But trials for breaking that law in Germany are still on public record.
3) Technically clear, rarely enforced, generally forgotten. LM Laws in Norway, for example.
4) Technically clear, murkily enforced, vigorously debated. Nationalist laws in Turkey, libel in Singapore, and maybe religious issues in semi-free states like Malaysia.
5) )Technically murky (or changing), opportunistically enforced, vigorously debated. States where control is divided and the opposition is active, such as Venezuela, or Thailand’s libel laws that elites use against each other so frequently.
6)Technically murky, opportunistically enforced, non-debated due to cultural and/or legal repression. This would include Thailand’s LM, religious laws in states the lack freedom of religion like Saudi or Iran, and totalitarian states like China, Burma, and North Korea.
To say that the press is hypocritical for not treating category 1 as it does category 6 seems to grossly oversimplify important variables in the complex evaluation of free speech. If Thailand has LM laws like Norway, I think the press would react similarly. But anyone following the LM arrests in the last ten years here in Thailand can see that it is being used in ways that more resemble China’s treatment of democracy talk. And there are probably 10x more press writings on Chinese democracy than on Thai LM, so I son’t see the hypocrisy.
And yes, my categories are totally off the top of my head and leave room for improvement. But surely there is a proper gradient of some kind using three or four salient variables.
As someone who was once involved in arms dealing between Israeli arms dealers and Burmese army I have a feeling that Burmese already have some WMDs or they are very close to having some.
Burmese Generals are not just crazy they are cunning too. Don’t forget that they are very well-trained military planners too, and also they are fighting for the survival of them and their military class as a whole.
During last 50 years they have successfully established initially German-supported defense industries on the remote west-bank of Irrawaddy. And when Germans withdrew their military support and canceled the manufacturing licenses for H&K G3 rifles they immediately switched to Burmese-made MA rifles which are just the slightly-modified copies of Israeli Galil automatic rifles.
It cost them in excess of 150 million US dollars of heroin money through Singapore and less than two years to secretly transfer the whole technology package which includes detail design and specification, specialized production machinery, and technical and production support in the form of Israeli weapon engineers. (Of course Israel has strenuously denied the illegal technology transfer in violation of the UN/USA arms embargo.)
Recently I saw the ABC program “Burmese Nuclear Ambition” based on the well-known Norway’s DVB scoop. It smells of a typical military operation called “Diversionary Deception” which involves diversionary minor attacks to hide the main attack.
By intentionally giving American NED funded and eager DVB a seemingly sensitive pile of useless information and a Russian-trained military engineer as an important defector they misled the international community into believing that Burmese are wasting their money and efforts into some outdated enrichment technology called “Gaseous Isotope Diffusion”.
And DVB even showed the photos of supposedly sophisticated high-tech machinery to enrich uranium and build ICBMs. It is laughable as these machines are just commercially available machinery for a general machine shop and the engineering company here in Sydney I once worked for has the same German machines in their machine shop.
Meanwhile many hundreds of high speed Zippe centrifuges might be spinning 24/7 in some deep underground tunnels to enrich uranium mined from Burmese soil, and bits and pieces of ICBMs are coming from North Korea via Singapore, the only gateway to Burma for most illegal goods.
No proper container ships come direct to Rangoon. All the containers in and out of Burma are transported by the smaller feeder ships to and from Singapore, and no real North Korean ships are willing to run the gauntlet of US warships permanently lurking just beyond Burmese waters in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martaban unless when they wanted us to believe that the arms are coming direct to Burma just to hide the main via Singapore route.
Actually Chamlong has always been part of the establishment so in a way he was also part of the elite. He was one of the leaders of the “Young Turk” or a group of class 7 who support were right wing lean (though not ultra right wing extremist) and believe in incorruptible leader. The Young Turk had been an important part of Prem assent to the power. At one time Chamlong was appointed as Prem’s secretary so I think his background pretty much been close in close affiliate with the establishment, are we agree on that? Although he had a rift with Prem but Chamlong still hold a strong tied with Prem until today.
Anyhow, you might be right that most of the elites rally behind Gen. Suchinda but only initially because they need someone to get rid of Chartchai and Suchinda is the man for the job. Once they noticed that Suchinda would become too powerful because most of the Jor Por Ror class 5 were supporting him and that Suchida could become PM for a long while the rift with class 7 and other establishment sec. start to appear. However, this rift is not because the establishment was pro democracy but because they are seeing Suchinda as another treat to their power and interest, much like Tanorm.
Mr. Crispin it has been days and still no reply to my comment. I find it difficult to understand why you do not want to clarify your position? Surely, misquoting a well known media figure would warrant some type of valid response?
Jonny, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve just given you a thumbs-up for your comment #28. This is because it helps clarify where you stand on free speech:
-you absolutely support it
-you don’t support it if there are laws restricting it
-you absolutely support it for you
Look, it’s only a web board. If you want to write at length, do what the much-maligned StanG does, keep a light hand in here, but put your extended thoughts on your own blog. It’s not difficult.
My impression with 1992 struggle is that it was a truly crash between elites, Army on one side and the establishment on the other.
What a strange take on 1992. Now if you said 2010 was a clash of the elites you could make a good argument. Thaksin and the provincial godfathers on one side and the old aristocracy on the other would certainly be one way of looking at it. But 1992? Who was the elite on the side of the protesters? Chamlong? Does he count as part of the elite? Seems to me that most of the elite was lined up behind Suchida with possibly the Democrats taking a neutral position.
Just for the usual suspects – there’s nothing wrong in changing your mind but it does depend on why you do it. If it’s for political opportunism and expediency, then it’s nothing to be proud about. As always I try and look back to history to find something similar happening. Maybe someone can point me to when people demonstrated to bring down a country’s leader and then the same people demonstrated to bring him back. Isn’t that what you have done with Thaksin, and then attacked those who point it out?
@ Jonny. Hi Jonny, over the past few days you have had a VERY good run on New Mandala. Time for some other voices to come through. We encourage diverse and varied discussion. Andrew Walker
Since Saul was on the road to Damascus, the world has undoubtedly encountered no conversion comparable to Jonny’s: in just one day, through his own diligent striving for liberation, Jonny has been born again.
On 24 September, he was fearful of going out on a limb, terrified that the regulator’s sharp spear might be used to puncture the spirit of lèse majesté and embolden those who wished ill of Thailand. On 25 September, his American friend enlightened him: we do not provoke the flame and spear! Take precautions first!
And then, to drive home the message, he imagined how Holocaust deniers might be treated in Germany and Australia. We can almost feel the spirit of Him lurking nearby, ready to declare the discussion ended.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
@ moderators. You’d be well-advised to cease and desist. Screenshots are a wonderful invention. Who needs that kind of embarrassment when one is criticising censorship and suppression of dissenting opinion? Who wishes to retain a modicum of respect in the academic community? Who wishes to continue to be able to claim the moral high ground?
1. Publish all ‘pending’ comments.
2. Or kindly email me with the reasons why you prefer not to.
There is no 3rd option available. Not any that are…advised. I am pragmatic – to a fault. But I do not stand for censorship without decency. Your reasons don’t even need to be valid. It’s mere etiquette that I demand. Nothing more.
Hi,can anyone confirm if the Nation published notice of the death of Colonel Manas Kongpan.Apparently by explosives,according to a knowledgeable friend.Many thanks.
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Colourful Thai political ephemera
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Thai elections in 2010, or 2011, or 2012, or 2013, or 2014, or 2015, or 2016, or 2017, or 2018, or ….
Jonny I agree with the statment that “If Justin Beiber came to Bangkok, he’d generate a crowd 5-10 times the size of their rioting number of a few months back.”
Justin and his fans would not however be in crosshairs of hundreds of designated snipers armed with scope-sighted rifles with shoot on sight orders.
There is a difference. Accept that.
Also know that those thousands of Thais who believe in democray and elections (Red Shirts, UDD supporters, etc) and that their votes count and voices heard will be heard and that the people they elect will actually able to govern are not going away anytime soon.
However much repression is exacted, they are like stirring ants with a stick. Or the arcade game where you hit a mole on the head and another one pops out of a different hole.
Positions teaching “the future king of Thailand”
As a former Chitralada Teacher(not from Baylor, they also hire from another equally mediocre school in California), I can shed some light on this.
The connection to Chitralada is between a Sociology Professor and the former director of the Chitralada Palace School. The two became friends when they met upon the Professor’s first visit to Thailand.
As for the teaching positions themselves, it was a once in a lifetime experience, but MUCH less glamourous than the ad makes it sound. I will NEVER complain about my teacher’s salary or hours/workload in the U.S. after teaching at that school in Thailand.
Andrew Marshall on “the curse of the blue diamond”
A T #8
Widely reported in the Nation and the Bankok Post so read more and Google first.
The Nation 13 Jan. 2010:
“After the military coup on September 19, 2005, Somkid had a stable career reportedly due to the influence of his brother, Army General Somjate Boonthanom, one of the many coup plotters.”
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2010/01/13/national/national_30120205.php
Sanitising Thai political history
Tarrin – 22
I think you are getting into some strange conspiracy theories here. We have ended up reversing roles with me having to defend 92 while you try and defend 2009/2010.
Did 1992 represent a power play by a section of the elite? Well if it did there wasn’t very many of them. I seem to remember Chavalit giving lukewarm support, mind you a bit warmer than the fence-sitting Democrats were giving at the time. No, in the end I can see a middle-class pro-democracy movement that succeeded in changing politics here just a little.
The Young Turks were an interesting group. I agree they had some pretty right wing ideas and you can certainly see a lot of what they were saying in today’s PAD. Thing is when a group of young officers gets together to overthrow an older generation you are never sure how it will end up. Do they become a right wing junta like so many did in Africa or do you end up with a Chavez or something similar to Portugal in 1974? I guess we will never know.
Andrew Marshall on “the curse of the blue diamond”
The structural similarities between the Saudi and Thai Regimes might make it seem that they ought to be “good friends”… but the terminal greed exhibited on the Thai end points up the bankruptcy of the concept of friends based upon the “principle” of hurray for me and a knife in the back for you… and for everyone else if it means a single satang more in my pocket… on which Thailand is “governed”.
Prachatai manager arrested
super anonymous,
Good point. I think all Jonny needs is a StanG’s relentlessness and he could be equally maligned.
Andrew Marshall on “the curse of the blue diamond”
Leah Hoyt: perhaps Mr Ashri simply knows a kindred spirit when he sees one.
The underlying, wryly hilarious twist to all this is that Saudi is itself famous for corruption, cronyism, non-transparency, and the tyranny of one massive “sensitive” subject.
In Saudi, it’s a plethora of greedy, unprincipled royals who have to strike a Faustian bargain with a powerful Wahhabi sect and its unquestionable Islamism in order to hold on to non-democratic power.
In Thailand it’s a plethora of greedy, unprincipled politicians who have to strike a Faustian bargain with a powerful military and its unquestionable monarchism in order to hold on to non-democratic power.
Missing diamond or not, the two governments ought to be good friends on principle alone.
Burma in Limbo, Part 3
Hla Oo,
Many thanks for pointing that out. We’ll see who will outwit whom. It is admittedly an entirely different ball game from the 19th C ‘arms race’ although the basic principle roles of gunrunners and dodgy states remain pretty much the same.
Don’t kid yourself though that the West has too much on their plate to get to the bottom of it, especially when it comes to nukes. Nobody is ever left to their own devices in the age of superpowers, starting right from the age of unashamed imperialism. There is so much going on behind the scenes as you yourself have indicated.
Prachatai manager arrested
Jonny’s right in that free speech has known restrictions in almost every state: laws against public threat, libel, defamation, incitement, and in a few places, historical revisionism and lese majeste. Oh, and blasphemy in some places.
But those restrictions all tend to rough categories:
1) Technically clear, transparently enforced, vigorously debated in legal and academic circles. I’d put most free speech laws in developed democratic societies here, including holocaust denial in states other than Germany.
2) Technically clear, transparently enforced, rarely debated. Holocaust denial in Germany, which most Germans don’t wanna talk about. But trials for breaking that law in Germany are still on public record.
3) Technically clear, rarely enforced, generally forgotten. LM Laws in Norway, for example.
4) Technically clear, murkily enforced, vigorously debated. Nationalist laws in Turkey, libel in Singapore, and maybe religious issues in semi-free states like Malaysia.
5) )Technically murky (or changing), opportunistically enforced, vigorously debated. States where control is divided and the opposition is active, such as Venezuela, or Thailand’s libel laws that elites use against each other so frequently.
6)Technically murky, opportunistically enforced, non-debated due to cultural and/or legal repression. This would include Thailand’s LM, religious laws in states the lack freedom of religion like Saudi or Iran, and totalitarian states like China, Burma, and North Korea.
To say that the press is hypocritical for not treating category 1 as it does category 6 seems to grossly oversimplify important variables in the complex evaluation of free speech. If Thailand has LM laws like Norway, I think the press would react similarly. But anyone following the LM arrests in the last ten years here in Thailand can see that it is being used in ways that more resemble China’s treatment of democracy talk. And there are probably 10x more press writings on Chinese democracy than on Thai LM, so I son’t see the hypocrisy.
And yes, my categories are totally off the top of my head and leave room for improvement. But surely there is a proper gradient of some kind using three or four salient variables.
Burma in Limbo, Part 3
Moe Aung,
As someone who was once involved in arms dealing between Israeli arms dealers and Burmese army I have a feeling that Burmese already have some WMDs or they are very close to having some.
Burmese Generals are not just crazy they are cunning too. Don’t forget that they are very well-trained military planners too, and also they are fighting for the survival of them and their military class as a whole.
During last 50 years they have successfully established initially German-supported defense industries on the remote west-bank of Irrawaddy. And when Germans withdrew their military support and canceled the manufacturing licenses for H&K G3 rifles they immediately switched to Burmese-made MA rifles which are just the slightly-modified copies of Israeli Galil automatic rifles.
It cost them in excess of 150 million US dollars of heroin money through Singapore and less than two years to secretly transfer the whole technology package which includes detail design and specification, specialized production machinery, and technical and production support in the form of Israeli weapon engineers. (Of course Israel has strenuously denied the illegal technology transfer in violation of the UN/USA arms embargo.)
Recently I saw the ABC program “Burmese Nuclear Ambition” based on the well-known Norway’s DVB scoop. It smells of a typical military operation called “Diversionary Deception” which involves diversionary minor attacks to hide the main attack.
By intentionally giving American NED funded and eager DVB a seemingly sensitive pile of useless information and a Russian-trained military engineer as an important defector they misled the international community into believing that Burmese are wasting their money and efforts into some outdated enrichment technology called “Gaseous Isotope Diffusion”.
And DVB even showed the photos of supposedly sophisticated high-tech machinery to enrich uranium and build ICBMs. It is laughable as these machines are just commercially available machinery for a general machine shop and the engineering company here in Sydney I once worked for has the same German machines in their machine shop.
Meanwhile many hundreds of high speed Zippe centrifuges might be spinning 24/7 in some deep underground tunnels to enrich uranium mined from Burmese soil, and bits and pieces of ICBMs are coming from North Korea via Singapore, the only gateway to Burma for most illegal goods.
No proper container ships come direct to Rangoon. All the containers in and out of Burma are transported by the smaller feeder ships to and from Singapore, and no real North Korean ships are willing to run the gauntlet of US warships permanently lurking just beyond Burmese waters in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Martaban unless when they wanted us to believe that the arms are coming direct to Burma just to hide the main via Singapore route.
Sanitising Thai political history
LesAbbey – 21
Who was the elite on the side of the protesters?
Actually Chamlong has always been part of the establishment so in a way he was also part of the elite. He was one of the leaders of the “Young Turk” or a group of class 7 who support were right wing lean (though not ultra right wing extremist) and believe in incorruptible leader. The Young Turk had been an important part of Prem assent to the power. At one time Chamlong was appointed as Prem’s secretary so I think his background pretty much been close in close affiliate with the establishment, are we agree on that? Although he had a rift with Prem but Chamlong still hold a strong tied with Prem until today.
Anyhow, you might be right that most of the elites rally behind Gen. Suchinda but only initially because they need someone to get rid of Chartchai and Suchinda is the man for the job. Once they noticed that Suchinda would become too powerful because most of the Jor Por Ror class 5 were supporting him and that Suchida could become PM for a long while the rift with class 7 and other establishment sec. start to appear. However, this rift is not because the establishment was pro democracy but because they are seeing Suchinda as another treat to their power and interest, much like Tanorm.
Thai elections in 2010, or 2011, or 2012, or 2013, or 2014, or 2015, or 2016, or 2017, or 2018, or ….
Mr. Crispin it has been days and still no reply to my comment. I find it difficult to understand why you do not want to clarify your position? Surely, misquoting a well known media figure would warrant some type of valid response?
Prachatai manager arrested
Jonny, you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve just given you a thumbs-up for your comment #28. This is because it helps clarify where you stand on free speech:
-you absolutely support it
-you don’t support it if there are laws restricting it
-you absolutely support it for you
Look, it’s only a web board. If you want to write at length, do what the much-maligned StanG does, keep a light hand in here, but put your extended thoughts on your own blog. It’s not difficult.
Sanitising Thai political history
Tarrin – 20
My impression with 1992 struggle is that it was a truly crash between elites, Army on one side and the establishment on the other.
What a strange take on 1992. Now if you said 2010 was a clash of the elites you could make a good argument. Thaksin and the provincial godfathers on one side and the old aristocracy on the other would certainly be one way of looking at it. But 1992? Who was the elite on the side of the protesters? Chamlong? Does he count as part of the elite? Seems to me that most of the elite was lined up behind Suchida with possibly the Democrats taking a neutral position.
Just for the usual suspects – there’s nothing wrong in changing your mind but it does depend on why you do it. If it’s for political opportunism and expediency, then it’s nothing to be proud about. As always I try and look back to history to find something similar happening. Maybe someone can point me to when people demonstrated to bring down a country’s leader and then the same people demonstrated to bring him back. Isn’t that what you have done with Thaksin, and then attacked those who point it out?
Andrew Marshall on “the curse of the blue diamond”
Anonymous Thai – 8
It was because Somkid was the one who responsible for forging fake evidence for the PPP dissolution case, so the Dem owe him quite a lot.
Prachatai manager arrested
@ Jonny. Hi Jonny, over the past few days you have had a VERY good run on New Mandala. Time for some other voices to come through. We encourage diverse and varied discussion. Andrew Walker
Prachatai manager arrested
Since Saul was on the road to Damascus, the world has undoubtedly encountered no conversion comparable to Jonny’s: in just one day, through his own diligent striving for liberation, Jonny has been born again.
On 24 September, he was fearful of going out on a limb, terrified that the regulator’s sharp spear might be used to puncture the spirit of lèse majesté and embolden those who wished ill of Thailand. On 25 September, his American friend enlightened him: we do not provoke the flame and spear! Take precautions first!
And then, to drive home the message, he imagined how Holocaust deniers might be treated in Germany and Australia. We can almost feel the spirit of Him lurking nearby, ready to declare the discussion ended.
Well done, wise and brave Jonny!
Prachatai manager arrested
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
@ moderators. You’d be well-advised to cease and desist. Screenshots are a wonderful invention. Who needs that kind of embarrassment when one is criticising censorship and suppression of dissenting opinion? Who wishes to retain a modicum of respect in the academic community? Who wishes to continue to be able to claim the moral high ground?
1. Publish all ‘pending’ comments.
2. Or kindly email me with the reasons why you prefer not to.
There is no 3rd option available. Not any that are…advised. I am pragmatic – to a fault. But I do not stand for censorship without decency. Your reasons don’t even need to be valid. It’s mere etiquette that I demand. Nothing more.
Refugee abuse commander’s human rights record
Hi,can anyone confirm if the Nation published notice of the death of Colonel Manas Kongpan.Apparently by explosives,according to a knowledgeable friend.Many thanks.