Well done Ben, give Ne Win a good going over as well, all crimes committed against the Burmese people must be answered . Thitsaphout Than Shwe must stand trail for crimes against humanity.
We should not forget that the main subject of the Devil’s Discus is an officially closed case. Three people were tried and three people were executed.
Despite ample indications of their innocence from the most unimpeachable sources, none of these three men, as far as I’m aware, has received an official pardon.
Phibun, Sarit, Thanom, Kraivixien, Suchinda, Prem, Suthep and Abhisit are very good men.
Wow!!! I’ve never hard such a claim, even for the hard-line PAD.
Let’s see, Phibun a good mand??, I still 50-50 of Phibun but the man was a forerunner of Thailand’s fascism ideology and he lead Thailand into joining the war on the Japanese side. To me, he is equally blamed with Pridi for Thailand’s fail democracy today.
Sarit a good man?? The coup of 1957 pretty much made him a dictatorship. Under his government, people got executed for just a joint of marijuana (and we are complaining about Thaksin extra-jurisdiction killing) or they got executed for just disagree with him (many of his political opponent had been executed or exile). Some nice guy we got here.
Thanom a good man?? Wow this might be the most daring statement I’ve come across in NM since there’s very little evidence to prove other wise. I remember quite clearly that on 14th October 1973 there were about 50 protesters killed by Thanom because they were asking for democracy. Moreover, he’s somewhat indirectly responsible for another 60 kills during the student crackdown of 6th October 1976. Thanom is such a great man isnt he??
Tanin Kraivixian a good man?!? after the student massacre instead of charging those people responsible for the 6th October massacre what did he do? He, instead, order the Army and the Police to put more pressure on the students who survive the massacre. After a year in the office, the number of political prisoners is somewhere between 5,000 to 12,000. Because of him, the CPT flourished and Thailand was plunged into a semi civil war for 6 years. Another good man for Martino Ray.
Suchinda Krapayoon a good man??? did Martino Ray ever heard about Bloody May of 1992??? need not say more.
Prem a good man? well after the issuing pardon to the ex-CPT members most of the main leader of CPT slowly disappear. Who knows where they disappeared to.
Suthep and Abhisit, after 90 bodies under the belt need I say more? Moreover, someone should check on Suthep asset for once in a while, I dont think the land his son own on Kor Samui was legally acquired.
I’m sick and tired of Martino’s hopeless liberal wimpishness. It reminds me of the failure of the equally supine Sarit. He called himself something like a field marshal but proved he couldn’t marshal his forces! Thailand should have invaded and crushed the damned evil Cambodians and driven through to Phnom Penh and retrieved H.M.’s purloined golden sax at the same time.
When Thailand finally has a leader like Sonti who is willing to stand up and call a Cambodian a black primitive, then we can get back what is ours.
We can also modify all that irritating Cambodian architecture lying around the (equally primitive) northeast so that it is truly Thai and we can be proud of our heritage again. Better still, just obliterate it. In fact, one of the reasons the dull Isan natives protest is because they don’t understand what being Thai really means. I have to add that I’m not sure they should be considered Thai, but there’s too many of them now to kick them off our land.
The Isan dulards suffer a kind of sensory overload caused by all that foreign language they babble while looking at broken down Cambodian ruins. It blinds them to true Thainess. (THe less said about the non-Thais in the south the better.)
Boycotting the U.N. meeting would be one (good) step, but a small one. Just ignore the U(seless) N(innies) and take the land back. What would the World Court do? Nothing.
Abhisit is as hopeless as any Thaksin lover on this. Maybe all that public school stuff in England took the true Thai warrior out of him. At least the hopeless Aussies should understand how that works!
Only nationalism and aggression (and love for H.M.) can make Thailand great (again). The wimps are destroying us. Hopefully more of them will be jailed and, when we get our true leader, a mass re-education campaign can overcome years of liberal education in the schools and universities. It might be necessary to have re-education camps, but that could be sorted out later.
The liberals need to be weeded out too – start with Abhisit. This is where StanG gets it all wrong. Liberals like him and Abhisit know nothing of Thailand and just suck up outdated Western ideas that can never fit our beloved nation. They’ve even failed in the West! Abhisit is all talk about freedoms and human rights when these ideas are culturally alien to Thailand and true Thais. Hierarchy and control are part of human wiring, especially in Thailand.
So enough wimpishness on Khao Phra Vioharn and everywhere else. Some backbone, some Thainess.
Does Amsterdam have any socialist credentials as such? Or is he just a PR man in search of a noble cause with which to soften his hard-nosed capitalist face?
I have no idea why people are insisting on a report such as this being unbiased. Robert Amsterdam is Thaksin’s lawyer. Lawyers aren’t meant to give balanced accounts. They’re meant to protect their client’s best interests and to fearlessly assert their client’s position. Amsterdam is doing that job – and very well. Abhisit and the Democrats have their own legal machines to do the same job.
Yes, AN unbiased report would be good – and it needs to be made by an independent committee. But this report is not meant to perform that job and should not be criticised for this supposed failing.
So Amsterdam represents his client? Isn’t that what lawyers are actually supposed to do? Would be a bit weird if he didn’t, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t the Thai govt (and pretty much every single govt on earth) also employ lawyers or others to counsel them?
Also you mention he makes ad hominem attacks – on whom? Where? Can you point us to the evidence please?
On his Thai blog Amsterdam’s actually says he’d have a debate anywhere and at anytime with anyone from the Thai government. Given the fact that their only response so far is to call Amsterdam “farang” it would appear that the entire talent available to the Abhisit regime might not be up to the task.
You’ve also likely not bothered to find out that Amsterdam does plenty of pro bono work on HR that largely stays out of the spotlight – but hey, who needs facts when smears will do?
Bangkok Pundit has a story today about the absolutely disgusting harassment, including late-night visits by plain-clothes police, of a 16 yr-old schoolboy & his parents in Chiang Rai, over the kid’s carrying a sign in a small (5 students) & totally peaceful demonstration, saying “I saw dead people in Ratchaprasong.” Reconciliation? Listen to the people? Boh penyang dok!
I was never a Thaksin fan, but he now appears an attractive alternative when compared to the current fascist regime.
Martino Ray #36: Absolutely agree with you on Prem/Australia! What Oz needs is someone with cahones (an Amerikan expression, I believe), like him. Hopefully Gillard will get up in the coming erections.
In fact, I would like to fly a kite with you for the proposition that he should get right up now – he’d soon put an end to all this mutual mass debating nonsense of the Abhisit govt & its committees, a pack of warring bankers, if you ask me.
The problem with Amsterdam’s credibility and ad hominem attacks is that he could have written a completely pro-government, anti-red report if he had been paid so.
Considering his actual arguments is a big waste of time because he has not produced this report for a debate in the first place. He is not searching for truth and he is not going to change his mind so why bother?
It’s just an example what the money can buy on the PR market.
Yes, Chris Beale (4) you are right to compare the Chartists’ important role in the struggle for universal suffrage in Britain with the Red cause in Thailand. Even the Irish rebellions against English colonialism could be compared with the struggle of Isaan people against Bangkok colonialism, However I doubt many Isaan people want their region to become another poor, landlocked, independent, Laos. They just want a Bangkok régime that is less oppressive.
I was thinking more about the rights of the Thai parliament, and comparing that with the struggle between the British Parliament and Stuart absolutism. There is universal suffrage in Thailand, but the parliament is (again) firmly under the monarchist/militarist jackboot. Though the Whig grandees in Britain got the king they wanted in 1688, it took a string of unpopular kings to allow democracy to emerge from the shadow of absolute monarchy in the hearts of the English-speaking people: three Georges in America; and four Georges and a William (at least) in Britain.
The struggle of democracy against absolutism, the main theme of Modern History, is being played out again in Thailand. I hope they don’t suffer as long as the British, or as intensely as the French, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and Chinese before absolutism is finally put to rest. I hope for a long and peaceful reign for the unpopular Vajiralongkorn, and for the consequent euthanasia of Thai absolutism.
Got to agree with Sonti here. Okay it has supposedly taken ten years for Thailand to make an appeal, but for at least 9 years and 364 days, that appeal has been on the desk of a damn foreign admin assistant in UNESCO. If I had my way, we’d be all having a great party on top Khao Phra Wihan and even the Cambodians could come if they show a visa. And if they gave us Thaksin. But they didn’t so they will be charged for entry. And since Cambodians can’t afford to eat their own rice, they can’t afford to enter. Too bad.
So, next year we will celebrate Songkran on Khao Phra Wihan! I will bring a picnic that you Australian individuals are fond of because we are tolerant of other peoples.
Thailand, rainbow smiling nation. Better than South Africa who just have ‘rainbow’. We could make a World Cup bid! We have good, real temples like Khao Phra Wihan.
Your post is very funny had me in stitches, I have noticed that on most of these new mandala threads now we have always have at least one poster representing the PAD side, whose comments are so outlandish, insulting and intellectually defunct that I have great trouble believing they are for real. So before people get to worked up I think somebody is just having fun trying to rouse tempers with trollish comments like this.
I grow tired of all the Democrat Party/PAD apologists that continually try to tell us how undemocratic Thaksin was.
We know. We lived though it. He was deporable in his civil rights and deflamation suits.
That was then.
But this is now.
And now we have a government that uses snipers for crowd control, harrangs teen aged boys for facebook postings, declares that the majority party politicians and their fans are terrorists, ship UNHCR refugees back Lao, leads boat people to their deaths at high seas, arrests scores over computer postings, regards intercrime as reposting information from Bloomberg…..and the list goes on.
So of the two admitedly problem regimes, Thaksin was the preferable one and it had unrefutable “democratic” legitimacy.
As for this report, it outlines the events that did happen. Except for the fact that it omits of the assination plot against Thaksin (a car bomb driving around outside his house).
I await to see a formalized report from the lawyers of Korn, Kisit, Abhisit, al with such detail.
Phibun, Sarit, Thanom, Kraivixien, Suchinda, Prem, Suthep and Abhisit are very good men. They do their best for their country. They are their country. Are you your country? I don’t think you are. Australia isn’t even a country because you’re all individuals. No similarity amongst Australians at all – how can you even be defined as a country? Damn silly if you ask me. Prem is a great man. He unifies Thais. We all owe him a big thanks. Australians could use a Prem of their own. Someone to look up to. Prem didn’t even go to Chula or Triam Udom yet he reached the top. Very inspiring for Australians with not much education, which refers to so many of you.
Srithanonchai, no point talking about intellectual falls here. They’re so biased against intellectual consistency. They don’t even realise we haven’t changed since Rama I, how are they going to understand why Thaksin was trying to be King?Silly Australian emus. Emus have big behinds just like Australians. I just got a suit made, the tailor can eat cow pat for another day then he has to work again. He had a good behind. Maybe if Australians had to work, they wouldn’t have such big unattractive behinds.
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Benedict Rogers on Than Shwe
Well done Ben, give Ne Win a good going over as well, all crimes committed against the Burmese people must be answered . Thitsaphout Than Shwe must stand trail for crimes against humanity.
The Devil’s Discus – in Thai
We should not forget that the main subject of the Devil’s Discus is an officially closed case. Three people were tried and three people were executed.
Despite ample indications of their innocence from the most unimpeachable sources, none of these three men, as far as I’m aware, has received an official pardon.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
Martino Ray – 36
Phibun, Sarit, Thanom, Kraivixien, Suchinda, Prem, Suthep and Abhisit are very good men.
Wow!!! I’ve never hard such a claim, even for the hard-line PAD.
Let’s see, Phibun a good mand??, I still 50-50 of Phibun but the man was a forerunner of Thailand’s fascism ideology and he lead Thailand into joining the war on the Japanese side. To me, he is equally blamed with Pridi for Thailand’s fail democracy today.
Sarit a good man?? The coup of 1957 pretty much made him a dictatorship. Under his government, people got executed for just a joint of marijuana (and we are complaining about Thaksin extra-jurisdiction killing) or they got executed for just disagree with him (many of his political opponent had been executed or exile). Some nice guy we got here.
Thanom a good man?? Wow this might be the most daring statement I’ve come across in NM since there’s very little evidence to prove other wise. I remember quite clearly that on 14th October 1973 there were about 50 protesters killed by Thanom because they were asking for democracy. Moreover, he’s somewhat indirectly responsible for another 60 kills during the student crackdown of 6th October 1976. Thanom is such a great man isnt he??
Tanin Kraivixian a good man?!? after the student massacre instead of charging those people responsible for the 6th October massacre what did he do? He, instead, order the Army and the Police to put more pressure on the students who survive the massacre. After a year in the office, the number of political prisoners is somewhere between 5,000 to 12,000. Because of him, the CPT flourished and Thailand was plunged into a semi civil war for 6 years. Another good man for Martino Ray.
Suchinda Krapayoon a good man??? did Martino Ray ever heard about Bloody May of 1992??? need not say more.
Prem a good man? well after the issuing pardon to the ex-CPT members most of the main leader of CPT slowly disappear. Who knows where they disappeared to.
Suthep and Abhisit, after 90 bodies under the belt need I say more? Moreover, someone should check on Suthep asset for once in a while, I dont think the land his son own on Kor Samui was legally acquired.
Temple of gloom
I’m sick and tired of Martino’s hopeless liberal wimpishness. It reminds me of the failure of the equally supine Sarit. He called himself something like a field marshal but proved he couldn’t marshal his forces! Thailand should have invaded and crushed the damned evil Cambodians and driven through to Phnom Penh and retrieved H.M.’s purloined golden sax at the same time.
When Thailand finally has a leader like Sonti who is willing to stand up and call a Cambodian a black primitive, then we can get back what is ours.
We can also modify all that irritating Cambodian architecture lying around the (equally primitive) northeast so that it is truly Thai and we can be proud of our heritage again. Better still, just obliterate it. In fact, one of the reasons the dull Isan natives protest is because they don’t understand what being Thai really means. I have to add that I’m not sure they should be considered Thai, but there’s too many of them now to kick them off our land.
The Isan dulards suffer a kind of sensory overload caused by all that foreign language they babble while looking at broken down Cambodian ruins. It blinds them to true Thainess. (THe less said about the non-Thais in the south the better.)
Boycotting the U.N. meeting would be one (good) step, but a small one. Just ignore the U(seless) N(innies) and take the land back. What would the World Court do? Nothing.
Abhisit is as hopeless as any Thaksin lover on this. Maybe all that public school stuff in England took the true Thai warrior out of him. At least the hopeless Aussies should understand how that works!
Only nationalism and aggression (and love for H.M.) can make Thailand great (again). The wimps are destroying us. Hopefully more of them will be jailed and, when we get our true leader, a mass re-education campaign can overcome years of liberal education in the schools and universities. It might be necessary to have re-education camps, but that could be sorted out later.
The liberals need to be weeded out too – start with Abhisit. This is where StanG gets it all wrong. Liberals like him and Abhisit know nothing of Thailand and just suck up outdated Western ideas that can never fit our beloved nation. They’ve even failed in the West! Abhisit is all talk about freedoms and human rights when these ideas are culturally alien to Thailand and true Thais. Hierarchy and control are part of human wiring, especially in Thailand.
So enough wimpishness on Khao Phra Vioharn and everywhere else. Some backbone, some Thainess.
The Devil’s Discus – in Thai
That book reference is available on several sites –
See http://openlibrary.org/books/OL2834277M/physician_at_the_court_of_Siam
http://arts.tu.ac.th/tuart/images/vijai/2549_pimpan.pdf
At Amazon…. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=A+Physician+at+the+Court+of+Siam&x=0&y=0&ih=1_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_1.1156_47&fsc=-1
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
StanG
We dont need Robert Amsterdam to write a completely pro government, anti red shirt report when we have you StanG.
Interview with Claudio Sopranzetti: The politics of motorcycle taxis
thai version via Matichon online
http://www.matichon.co.th/news_detail.php?newsid=1279899382&grpid=01&catid
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
Does Amsterdam have any socialist credentials as such? Or is he just a PR man in search of a noble cause with which to soften his hard-nosed capitalist face?
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
I have no idea why people are insisting on a report such as this being unbiased. Robert Amsterdam is Thaksin’s lawyer. Lawyers aren’t meant to give balanced accounts. They’re meant to protect their client’s best interests and to fearlessly assert their client’s position. Amsterdam is doing that job – and very well. Abhisit and the Democrats have their own legal machines to do the same job.
Yes, AN unbiased report would be good – and it needs to be made by an independent committee. But this report is not meant to perform that job and should not be criticised for this supposed failing.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
StanG,
So Amsterdam represents his client? Isn’t that what lawyers are actually supposed to do? Would be a bit weird if he didn’t, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t the Thai govt (and pretty much every single govt on earth) also employ lawyers or others to counsel them?
Also you mention he makes ad hominem attacks – on whom? Where? Can you point us to the evidence please?
On his Thai blog Amsterdam’s actually says he’d have a debate anywhere and at anytime with anyone from the Thai government. Given the fact that their only response so far is to call Amsterdam “farang” it would appear that the entire talent available to the Abhisit regime might not be up to the task.
You’ve also likely not bothered to find out that Amsterdam does plenty of pro bono work on HR that largely stays out of the spotlight – but hey, who needs facts when smears will do?
The Devil’s Discus – in Thai
Are we any closer to a downloadable version in English?
Reconciliation, Thai style
Bangkok Pundit has a story today about the absolutely disgusting harassment, including late-night visits by plain-clothes police, of a 16 yr-old schoolboy & his parents in Chiang Rai, over the kid’s carrying a sign in a small (5 students) & totally peaceful demonstration, saying “I saw dead people in Ratchaprasong.” Reconciliation? Listen to the people? Boh penyang dok!
I was never a Thaksin fan, but he now appears an attractive alternative when compared to the current fascist regime.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
Martino Ray #36: Absolutely agree with you on Prem/Australia! What Oz needs is someone with cahones (an Amerikan expression, I believe), like him. Hopefully Gillard will get up in the coming erections.
In fact, I would like to fly a kite with you for the proposition that he should get right up now – he’d soon put an end to all this mutual mass debating nonsense of the Abhisit govt & its committees, a pack of warring bankers, if you ask me.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
The problem with Amsterdam’s credibility and ad hominem attacks is that he could have written a completely pro-government, anti-red report if he had been paid so.
Considering his actual arguments is a big waste of time because he has not produced this report for a debate in the first place. He is not searching for truth and he is not going to change his mind so why bother?
It’s just an example what the money can buy on the PR market.
From the archives: Silcock with reference to Queen Sirikit
Yes, Chris Beale (4) you are right to compare the Chartists’ important role in the struggle for universal suffrage in Britain with the Red cause in Thailand. Even the Irish rebellions against English colonialism could be compared with the struggle of Isaan people against Bangkok colonialism, However I doubt many Isaan people want their region to become another poor, landlocked, independent, Laos. They just want a Bangkok régime that is less oppressive.
I was thinking more about the rights of the Thai parliament, and comparing that with the struggle between the British Parliament and Stuart absolutism. There is universal suffrage in Thailand, but the parliament is (again) firmly under the monarchist/militarist jackboot. Though the Whig grandees in Britain got the king they wanted in 1688, it took a string of unpopular kings to allow democracy to emerge from the shadow of absolute monarchy in the hearts of the English-speaking people: three Georges in America; and four Georges and a William (at least) in Britain.
The struggle of democracy against absolutism, the main theme of Modern History, is being played out again in Thailand. I hope they don’t suffer as long as the British, or as intensely as the French, Germans, Russians, Japanese, and Chinese before absolutism is finally put to rest. I hope for a long and peaceful reign for the unpopular Vajiralongkorn, and for the consequent euthanasia of Thai absolutism.
Temple of gloom
http://bangkokpost.com/news/politics/187626/pad-urges-boycott-of-world-heritage-meet
Got to agree with Sonti here. Okay it has supposedly taken ten years for Thailand to make an appeal, but for at least 9 years and 364 days, that appeal has been on the desk of a damn foreign admin assistant in UNESCO. If I had my way, we’d be all having a great party on top Khao Phra Wihan and even the Cambodians could come if they show a visa. And if they gave us Thaksin. But they didn’t so they will be charged for entry. And since Cambodians can’t afford to eat their own rice, they can’t afford to enter. Too bad.
So, next year we will celebrate Songkran on Khao Phra Wihan! I will bring a picnic that you Australian individuals are fond of because we are tolerant of other peoples.
Thailand, rainbow smiling nation. Better than South Africa who just have ‘rainbow’. We could make a World Cup bid! We have good, real temples like Khao Phra Wihan.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
@Martino Ray
Your post is very funny had me in stitches, I have noticed that on most of these new mandala threads now we have always have at least one poster representing the PAD side, whose comments are so outlandish, insulting and intellectually defunct that I have great trouble believing they are for real. So before people get to worked up I think somebody is just having fun trying to rouse tempers with trollish comments like this.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
I grow tired of all the Democrat Party/PAD apologists that continually try to tell us how undemocratic Thaksin was.
We know. We lived though it. He was deporable in his civil rights and deflamation suits.
That was then.
But this is now.
And now we have a government that uses snipers for crowd control, harrangs teen aged boys for facebook postings, declares that the majority party politicians and their fans are terrorists, ship UNHCR refugees back Lao, leads boat people to their deaths at high seas, arrests scores over computer postings, regards intercrime as reposting information from Bloomberg…..and the list goes on.
So of the two admitedly problem regimes, Thaksin was the preferable one and it had unrefutable “democratic” legitimacy.
As for this report, it outlines the events that did happen. Except for the fact that it omits of the assination plot against Thaksin (a car bomb driving around outside his house).
I await to see a formalized report from the lawyers of Korn, Kisit, Abhisit, al with such detail.
“The Bangkok Massacres: A call for accountability”
David Dunne,
Phibun, Sarit, Thanom, Kraivixien, Suchinda, Prem, Suthep and Abhisit are very good men. They do their best for their country. They are their country. Are you your country? I don’t think you are. Australia isn’t even a country because you’re all individuals. No similarity amongst Australians at all – how can you even be defined as a country? Damn silly if you ask me. Prem is a great man. He unifies Thais. We all owe him a big thanks. Australians could use a Prem of their own. Someone to look up to. Prem didn’t even go to Chula or Triam Udom yet he reached the top. Very inspiring for Australians with not much education, which refers to so many of you.
Srithanonchai, no point talking about intellectual falls here. They’re so biased against intellectual consistency. They don’t even realise we haven’t changed since Rama I, how are they going to understand why Thaksin was trying to be King?Silly Australian emus. Emus have big behinds just like Australians. I just got a suit made, the tailor can eat cow pat for another day then he has to work again. He had a good behind. Maybe if Australians had to work, they wouldn’t have such big unattractive behinds.
Abhisit’s talk in Oxford: From the inside
What a man Suzie, but do you really think he is ready to take over from Sae Daeng?