Never for a moment would I think of suggesting that “rirkrit” should be gagged. But I’d like to draw attention (especially HIS attention) to how absurd, irrational, propagandistic his whole thinking is. See these two sentences of his:
we have a hard working Monarch who worked and spent all his time for the betterment of his people.
Now I just would like to respecfully ask: How in heaven would you proof such a statement? It is univerally accepted in modern times that, one should not believe anything without the right and freedom to CRITICALLY examine it. Now, EVERYTHING about the monarchy in Thailand cannot be subjected to critical scrutiny (without risking jail terms), cannot be held accountable in any shape or form, how would you know that such a statement is true? Blind faith, of course.
The second from the above:
His Majesty feels unwell, because Thaksin is a large part of His Majesty’s burden
Wow! This is new to me, and I guess new to the entire medical world not only in this country but the whole planet. From the statements of the Royal Household Bureau as well as from what we can observe, His Majesty suffers from pneumonia-like illlness, or some other illness naturally assaociated with old ages.
Rirkrit now discovers that such illnesses is caused by Thaksin!
I simply suggest that next time Rirkrit feels like commenting on anything here, he should first WAKE UP from his sleep in the 19th century, and try to catch up with how the world had evolved these past couple of hundred years.
While its’ grab so much media attention, is n’t Thaksin’s interview really something of a side-show ?
Surely the real issue now facing Thailand is who holds the barrel of every gun ?
The pro-Thaksin police seem to be refusing to be replaced according to Abhisit’s plan.
And what has happened to the annual military re-shuffle, supposedly completed every October ?
Not a word about that on the Internet, at least. It looks like
Abhisit dare n’t dismiss pro-Thaksin military officers.
And, anyhow each annual military re-shuffle has to be approved by a King who has been gravely ill for more than three weeks.
Steinberg recently orchestrated a “policy review” in DC but did not invite people like me who disagree with him.
Sanctions are meant to send the junta a strong message — no more no less.
Anyway, all the “engagement policies” will do no good because junta just keeps on with its human rights abuses. It has carried on military campaigns against all the ethnic groups and is attacking its own people, if you haven’t heard.
Anyone trying to be in this debate should do their own research.
The anti-sanctions clique has accepted money and other perks like free trips from the spdc, so hardly have a good reputation, but they keep trying.
Mr Thaksin issued a statement saying that The Times’s report was “distorted” and “untrue”. The text of the interview, posted on Times Online, matches the recording of the conversation and was transcribed by a press representative of Mr Thaksin.
Portman says: “Alas, Rirkrit, you have probably realized that most of the farang readers of NM have bought into the romantic notion of Thaksin as a latter day Robin Hood and champion of democracy that he has sold them and are willing to overlook all of his blatant corruption and thievery along with the thousands of murders he presided over.” How do you work this out? Most? Really? You’d have to be reading with one eye closed to imagine this.
rickrit, just a quick warning re. your “puffy Queen of a Monarch” comment. You do realise the current Thai lese majeste laws also apply to other heads of state? Basically, well done on not specifying which monarch you were refering to.
And don’t mention her name in future, unless you want to risk some jail time.
“Thaksin didn’t introduce the waiver on capital gains tax on gains from listed securities. That was in existence long before Thaksin entered politics.”
This represents the whole problem with Thai “intellectuals”, particularly those aligned with the PAD / Democrats. Tell a blatant lie to augment their arguments and hopes no one will notice. Thought they have been getting away with this and other outright lies – in bangkok Post / Nation etc, there’s no getting away with it here – thank goodness.
A lie is a lie Rirkrit, no matter how eloquently put.
Magnus: You and others who still believe the myth that “Thailand managed to keep its independence throughout the period of western colonialism” should read Thongchai Winichakul’s “Siam Mapped” and Chaiyan Rajchagool’s “The Rise and Fall of the Thai Absolute Monarchy”.
During colonialism, there was no “Thailand”; it was Siam. And Siam did not include most of the territory that is now Thailand; it was the greater-Bangkok area. After the Bowring Treaty, the British acquired considerable control over Siam itself and the surrounding area, even though they did not actually colonize it. The British got what they wanted without the need to colonize it (and hence bear the burden of governing and administering it).
Many have argued that what is now Thailand was indeed colonized — by Bangkok-centered Siam.
Agreed! And rirkrit, who is this “puffy Queen of a Monarch” you refer to? Surely not QEii, who, in her 80s, is still working the long hours she always has. I know that you would be guilty of LM if you specifically named anyone(the law here applies to insults to any monarchs, not only the Thai one), but I’m wondering if the sort of insult you have made could be used to charge you as ‘an insult to monarchs in general.’ (But it’s OK, I won’t tell anyone you’re an insulter of monarchs. I don’t support the law, although I have no reason to break it.) Do you know of any monarchs who don’t work hard all their lives?
I haven’t read this book, but Andrew Walker’s review seems to be a fair appraisal. I am surprised, however, that he does not challenge the term ‘peasant’ as an adequate description, certainly for the groups in what he calls “mainstream rural society.” Indeed, I would suggest that the straightforward term ‘farmers’ is better. Chayanov himself made it clear that a peasantry ceases to exist when its conditions of reproduction are substantially off-farm. This can be where off-farm labour and its income becomes a substantial part of a family’s income – the sort of thing Walker has documented so well. Or, peasants become small, or indeed substantial capitalist farmers, or parts of, or subordinate to, much larger agribusinesses.
In terms of ‘identity’ this is expressed as a form of ‘individualism’ and an assertion of citizenship in the society at large – which as Walker points out, is something Thaksin recognised. So, continued adherence to the term ‘peasant’ would appear to reflect a certain rural romanticism on the part of Yos, something also hinted at by the reviewer.
It seems Thaksin has now admitted he made a mistsake by answering a question and forgetting something. Quite how any Thai person would have forgotten that is questionable especially one so heavily involved in politics but hey ho here we go.
Like Craig Reynolds, I greatly enjoyed reading Wassana’s book on politics and magic. His review was informative and tempered. It also revealed one of the flaws of the books approach. While the method of gathering information through interviews and observations shows the strength of a journalist’s training, it also reflects a lack of reflection on the nature of the very terms studied — magic, religion, superstition, etc. Speaking about “magic” specifically, a notoriously difficult word to translate as Jacob Neusner said “one man’s magic is another man’s relgion.” The journalistic approach has the tendency to reduce the practice of magic to the “economic,” the functional, and the cultural. Wassana’s is a book about magic and politics, but we actually learn very little about the details of magical practice. As a ritual technology the practice of saiyasat is not taken seriously as a legitimate object of study. Instead it is simply a function of political rivalries. Moreover, magical practices are generally depicted as only performative exercises, not as practices with sophisticated histories. There are Thai terms which try to separate protective and sinister magic. These Thai terms are drawn creatively from Sanskrit and Pali. Itthirit (protective power) or wetmon (the use of magical words), as well as local terms for magically “blessing” something (bao sek and pluk sek) are more commonly used by monks than saiyasat. However, Pali terms like “iddhip─Бс╣нih─Бriya” (wondrous psychic powers like clairvoyance, levitation, psycho-kinesis) or abhi├▒├▒a (super-cognitive powers like the ability to see the future, see past lives, read minds, and the like) are generally not used when discussing the protective practices more broadly. What is generally referred to as normative Thai Buddhist ritual and liturgy employs the same logic, implements, aesthetics, lexicon, and personal as saiyasat. However, some practices are considered legitimate (white magic?) and some nefarious (black magic?). These divisions are not rarely clear though. Magic is in the eye of the beholder.
Related to this, another problem I have with Wassana’s book is that magic is spoken about too generally. Can we even speak generally about Thai magic at all? The term magic, like the terms “culture,” “religion,” “secular,” must be qualified when speaking of everyday protective practices in Thailand. Neuroscientists and psychologists associate magic with trickery and mentalism. Instead of defining magic in comparison to the metacategories of science and religion, they define it by methods, stratagems, performance, and effects (i.e. “conjuring,” “misdirection,” “biasing recall,” and “reducing suspicion,” and “slight of hand”). These slight of hand tricks are generally not associated with practices connected to yantras, Pali and vernacular incantations, holy water and amulets.
Recently I gave a talk on magic at the AAR conference in Montreal. In that talk, drawn from a book I recently wrote on Thai ritual, I was trying to trace the way magic has been discussed in the field of Religious Studies. According to the work of Randall Styers, Magic has been described in the field of Religious Studies along two general lines, one linguistic and the other sociological. Ernst Cassirer, Max Weber, Leonard Zusne, Warren Jones, Annette Werner, and Frits Staal have associated magic (East and West) as an “inordinate belief in the efficacy of mere words,” or “thinking that fails to recognize the essential differences between representation and reality,” or “a basic confusion of linguistic and physical relationships…[it] disregards the distinction between physical and psychological causes, the difference between energy and information.” Tambiah, following J.L. Austen and John Searle see magicians as employing “performative utterances.” These utterances inherently confuse the relationship between metonymic and metaphoric language. In short, magicians wrongly assume that words can “do things” in the physical world. Sociologically, magic has been described as a tool of the powerless. In this way, magic has been associated with the oppressed, the non-industrial, “configured as the province of women, children, foreigners, primitives, and other deviants.” Magic is not central to ecclesiastical religion and it is not quite science. It is the tool of those who do not have access to real laboratories or state sanctioned theological colleges, churches, and vestments. Wassana’s book shows that magic can’t be talked about in just that way. It is also a tool of the elite fighting other elites. However, magic is still reduced to a product of social forces.
Randall Styers criticizes both of these approaches to the study of magic. He argues that the scholarly association of magic with a false belief in the kinetic efficacy of language repeatedly affirms that “language is inert and powerless.” It also, more broadly “configures a sharp and impermeable boundary between nature and culture, a natural world subject to nonhuman causality and the artificial, transitory world of human language, meaning, desire, and value.” Therefore, magicians are always seen as premodern leftovers, as quaint cultural asides, because “to be modern is to recognize this essential binary” between nature and culture. Language, as part of culture, functions only as “a medium of passive representation,” and therefore “the construction of meaning and assertion of desire are portrayed as lacking all causal efficacy.” According to most scholars then “any sense that human desire or behavior can influence other human beings or the natural world [through various magical techniques, especially the use of verbal or written incantations]…that human techniques can exert control over other persons, powers, or events–any such sense falls into magic.” Scholars, like Cassirer, Stark, Weber, Keller, Sumner, and others then see magic as separate from religion. This limits proper religion to the seeking objectives that are “transcendent or supraempirical,” without any “attention to materiality or pragmatic worldly ends.” Magicians are thus not quite religious. They are base, selfish, emotional, and concerned only with power in this “world.”
There is a reason that Thai politicians use magic to combat each other versus using only opinion polls, photo ops, exaggeration, slander, and the like. Unless, we study magic as magic and take it seriously (not necessary believe in its efficacy, but study it in historical and technical detail) then we cannot hope to understand its enduring power and see it as more than a base political and economic tool. This will also allow us to see the practitioners and those who believe in magical efficacy as more than hapless tools of the political elite.
Unlike any of its neighbours, Thailand managed to keep its independence throughout the period of western colonialism. That is the proud heritage of a country whose rulers and citizens showed remarkable intelligence in adopting and adapting foreign ideas and influences.
That is why it is a shame to see contributors such as rirkrit lapse into ranting against “ignorant Farangs” who don’t understand Thailand’s unique ways.
Thailand is unique, but its citizens are just as deserving of an open society offering opportunities for all as those of countries in the west. Thai-ness is a concept that is too easily used by certain sections of society to suppress open discussion by other sections of society.
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Richard Lloyd Parry with Thaksin
Never for a moment would I think of suggesting that “rirkrit” should be gagged. But I’d like to draw attention (especially HIS attention) to how absurd, irrational, propagandistic his whole thinking is. See these two sentences of his:
The first from another post
http://www.newmandala.org/2009/11/09/thaksin-on-crown-prince-vajiralongkorn/#comment-671988:
we have a hard working Monarch who worked and spent all his time for the betterment of his people.
Now I just would like to respecfully ask: How in heaven would you proof such a statement? It is univerally accepted in modern times that, one should not believe anything without the right and freedom to CRITICALLY examine it. Now, EVERYTHING about the monarchy in Thailand cannot be subjected to critical scrutiny (without risking jail terms), cannot be held accountable in any shape or form, how would you know that such a statement is true? Blind faith, of course.
The second from the above:
His Majesty feels unwell, because Thaksin is a large part of His Majesty’s burden
Wow! This is new to me, and I guess new to the entire medical world not only in this country but the whole planet. From the statements of the Royal Household Bureau as well as from what we can observe, His Majesty suffers from pneumonia-like illlness, or some other illness naturally assaociated with old ages.
Rirkrit now discovers that such illnesses is caused by Thaksin!
I simply suggest that next time Rirkrit feels like commenting on anything here, he should first WAKE UP from his sleep in the 19th century, and try to catch up with how the world had evolved these past couple of hundred years.
Richard Lloyd Parry with Thaksin
The reality is that we are not in the millions, as he would like us to believe, at most we are a hundred thousand in ‘Red shirts’
The ‘reds’ are a very diverse group if it includes Giles and Rirkrit 🙂
Translation of Thaksin interview
While its’ grab so much media attention, is n’t Thaksin’s interview really something of a side-show ?
Surely the real issue now facing Thailand is who holds the barrel of every gun ?
The pro-Thaksin police seem to be refusing to be replaced according to Abhisit’s plan.
And what has happened to the annual military re-shuffle, supposedly completed every October ?
Not a word about that on the Internet, at least. It looks like
Abhisit dare n’t dismiss pro-Thaksin military officers.
And, anyhow each annual military re-shuffle has to be approved by a King who has been gravely ill for more than three weeks.
Steinberg vs Kyi May Kaung: Burma debate continues
Nov 11, 2009.
This debate never goes away.
Steinberg recently orchestrated a “policy review” in DC but did not invite people like me who disagree with him.
Sanctions are meant to send the junta a strong message — no more no less.
Anyway, all the “engagement policies” will do no good because junta just keeps on with its human rights abuses. It has carried on military campaigns against all the ethnic groups and is attacking its own people, if you haven’t heard.
Anyone trying to be in this debate should do their own research.
The anti-sanctions clique has accepted money and other perks like free trips from the spdc, so hardly have a good reputation, but they keep trying.
Kyi May Kaung — please don’t miss-spell my name!
Richard Lloyd Parry with Thaksin
Re:
Thai government bans Thaksin Shinawatra interview with The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6909856.ece
The penultimate paragraph reads:
Mr Thaksin issued a statement saying that The Times’s report was “distorted” and “untrue”. The text of the interview, posted on Times Online, matches the recording of the conversation and was transcribed by a press representative of Mr Thaksin.
The core pillar
Portman says: “Alas, Rirkrit, you have probably realized that most of the farang readers of NM have bought into the romantic notion of Thaksin as a latter day Robin Hood and champion of democracy that he has sold them and are willing to overlook all of his blatant corruption and thievery along with the thousands of murders he presided over.” How do you work this out? Most? Really? You’d have to be reading with one eye closed to imagine this.
Another taboo broken!
[…] http://www.newmandala.org/2009/11/10/another-taboo-broken-2/ […]
Another taboo broken!
Looks like NotTheNation has its own take on the issue…
http://www.notthenation.com/pages/news/getnews.php?id=844
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
rickrit, just a quick warning re. your “puffy Queen of a Monarch” comment. You do realise the current Thai lese majeste laws also apply to other heads of state? Basically, well done on not specifying which monarch you were refering to.
And don’t mention her name in future, unless you want to risk some jail time.
The core pillar
By Portman – in response to Rirkrit
“Thaksin didn’t introduce the waiver on capital gains tax on gains from listed securities. That was in existence long before Thaksin entered politics.”
This represents the whole problem with Thai “intellectuals”, particularly those aligned with the PAD / Democrats. Tell a blatant lie to augment their arguments and hopes no one will notice. Thought they have been getting away with this and other outright lies – in bangkok Post / Nation etc, there’s no getting away with it here – thank goodness.
A lie is a lie Rirkrit, no matter how eloquently put.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
Magnus: You and others who still believe the myth that “Thailand managed to keep its independence throughout the period of western colonialism” should read Thongchai Winichakul’s “Siam Mapped” and Chaiyan Rajchagool’s “The Rise and Fall of the Thai Absolute Monarchy”.
During colonialism, there was no “Thailand”; it was Siam. And Siam did not include most of the territory that is now Thailand; it was the greater-Bangkok area. After the Bowring Treaty, the British acquired considerable control over Siam itself and the surrounding area, even though they did not actually colonize it. The British got what they wanted without the need to colonize it (and hence bear the burden of governing and administering it).
Many have argued that what is now Thailand was indeed colonized — by Bangkok-centered Siam.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
Agreed! And rirkrit, who is this “puffy Queen of a Monarch” you refer to? Surely not QEii, who, in her 80s, is still working the long hours she always has. I know that you would be guilty of LM if you specifically named anyone(the law here applies to insults to any monarchs, not only the Thai one), but I’m wondering if the sort of insult you have made could be used to charge you as ‘an insult to monarchs in general.’ (But it’s OK, I won’t tell anyone you’re an insulter of monarchs. I don’t support the law, although I have no reason to break it.) Do you know of any monarchs who don’t work hard all their lives?
How flexible can a peasant be?
I haven’t read this book, but Andrew Walker’s review seems to be a fair appraisal. I am surprised, however, that he does not challenge the term ‘peasant’ as an adequate description, certainly for the groups in what he calls “mainstream rural society.” Indeed, I would suggest that the straightforward term ‘farmers’ is better. Chayanov himself made it clear that a peasantry ceases to exist when its conditions of reproduction are substantially off-farm. This can be where off-farm labour and its income becomes a substantial part of a family’s income – the sort of thing Walker has documented so well. Or, peasants become small, or indeed substantial capitalist farmers, or parts of, or subordinate to, much larger agribusinesses.
In terms of ‘identity’ this is expressed as a form of ‘individualism’ and an assertion of citizenship in the society at large – which as Walker points out, is something Thaksin recognised. So, continued adherence to the term ‘peasant’ would appear to reflect a certain rural romanticism on the part of Yos, something also hinted at by the reviewer.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
Rirkrit: ‘Puffed-Up Queen’? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. 🙂
The core pillar
It seems Thaksin has now admitted he made a mistsake by answering a question and forgetting something. Quite how any Thai person would have forgotten that is questionable especially one so heavily involved in politics but hey ho here we go.
Another taboo broken!
Hooray for our Crown Prince! Oops, I remember, we cannot mention anything about this sacred family. So I take it back.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
I’m trying to think of a society that isn’t unique.
Review of Wassana
Like Craig Reynolds, I greatly enjoyed reading Wassana’s book on politics and magic. His review was informative and tempered. It also revealed one of the flaws of the books approach. While the method of gathering information through interviews and observations shows the strength of a journalist’s training, it also reflects a lack of reflection on the nature of the very terms studied — magic, religion, superstition, etc. Speaking about “magic” specifically, a notoriously difficult word to translate as Jacob Neusner said “one man’s magic is another man’s relgion.” The journalistic approach has the tendency to reduce the practice of magic to the “economic,” the functional, and the cultural. Wassana’s is a book about magic and politics, but we actually learn very little about the details of magical practice. As a ritual technology the practice of saiyasat is not taken seriously as a legitimate object of study. Instead it is simply a function of political rivalries. Moreover, magical practices are generally depicted as only performative exercises, not as practices with sophisticated histories. There are Thai terms which try to separate protective and sinister magic. These Thai terms are drawn creatively from Sanskrit and Pali. Itthirit (protective power) or wetmon (the use of magical words), as well as local terms for magically “blessing” something (bao sek and pluk sek) are more commonly used by monks than saiyasat. However, Pali terms like “iddhip─Бс╣нih─Бriya” (wondrous psychic powers like clairvoyance, levitation, psycho-kinesis) or abhi├▒├▒a (super-cognitive powers like the ability to see the future, see past lives, read minds, and the like) are generally not used when discussing the protective practices more broadly. What is generally referred to as normative Thai Buddhist ritual and liturgy employs the same logic, implements, aesthetics, lexicon, and personal as saiyasat. However, some practices are considered legitimate (white magic?) and some nefarious (black magic?). These divisions are not rarely clear though. Magic is in the eye of the beholder.
Related to this, another problem I have with Wassana’s book is that magic is spoken about too generally. Can we even speak generally about Thai magic at all? The term magic, like the terms “culture,” “religion,” “secular,” must be qualified when speaking of everyday protective practices in Thailand. Neuroscientists and psychologists associate magic with trickery and mentalism. Instead of defining magic in comparison to the metacategories of science and religion, they define it by methods, stratagems, performance, and effects (i.e. “conjuring,” “misdirection,” “biasing recall,” and “reducing suspicion,” and “slight of hand”). These slight of hand tricks are generally not associated with practices connected to yantras, Pali and vernacular incantations, holy water and amulets.
Recently I gave a talk on magic at the AAR conference in Montreal. In that talk, drawn from a book I recently wrote on Thai ritual, I was trying to trace the way magic has been discussed in the field of Religious Studies. According to the work of Randall Styers, Magic has been described in the field of Religious Studies along two general lines, one linguistic and the other sociological. Ernst Cassirer, Max Weber, Leonard Zusne, Warren Jones, Annette Werner, and Frits Staal have associated magic (East and West) as an “inordinate belief in the efficacy of mere words,” or “thinking that fails to recognize the essential differences between representation and reality,” or “a basic confusion of linguistic and physical relationships…[it] disregards the distinction between physical and psychological causes, the difference between energy and information.” Tambiah, following J.L. Austen and John Searle see magicians as employing “performative utterances.” These utterances inherently confuse the relationship between metonymic and metaphoric language. In short, magicians wrongly assume that words can “do things” in the physical world. Sociologically, magic has been described as a tool of the powerless. In this way, magic has been associated with the oppressed, the non-industrial, “configured as the province of women, children, foreigners, primitives, and other deviants.” Magic is not central to ecclesiastical religion and it is not quite science. It is the tool of those who do not have access to real laboratories or state sanctioned theological colleges, churches, and vestments. Wassana’s book shows that magic can’t be talked about in just that way. It is also a tool of the elite fighting other elites. However, magic is still reduced to a product of social forces.
Randall Styers criticizes both of these approaches to the study of magic. He argues that the scholarly association of magic with a false belief in the kinetic efficacy of language repeatedly affirms that “language is inert and powerless.” It also, more broadly “configures a sharp and impermeable boundary between nature and culture, a natural world subject to nonhuman causality and the artificial, transitory world of human language, meaning, desire, and value.” Therefore, magicians are always seen as premodern leftovers, as quaint cultural asides, because “to be modern is to recognize this essential binary” between nature and culture. Language, as part of culture, functions only as “a medium of passive representation,” and therefore “the construction of meaning and assertion of desire are portrayed as lacking all causal efficacy.” According to most scholars then “any sense that human desire or behavior can influence other human beings or the natural world [through various magical techniques, especially the use of verbal or written incantations]…that human techniques can exert control over other persons, powers, or events–any such sense falls into magic.” Scholars, like Cassirer, Stark, Weber, Keller, Sumner, and others then see magic as separate from religion. This limits proper religion to the seeking objectives that are “transcendent or supraempirical,” without any “attention to materiality or pragmatic worldly ends.” Magicians are thus not quite religious. They are base, selfish, emotional, and concerned only with power in this “world.”
There is a reason that Thai politicians use magic to combat each other versus using only opinion polls, photo ops, exaggeration, slander, and the like. Unless, we study magic as magic and take it seriously (not necessary believe in its efficacy, but study it in historical and technical detail) then we cannot hope to understand its enduring power and see it as more than a base political and economic tool. This will also allow us to see the practitioners and those who believe in magical efficacy as more than hapless tools of the political elite.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
Unlike any of its neighbours, Thailand managed to keep its independence throughout the period of western colonialism. That is the proud heritage of a country whose rulers and citizens showed remarkable intelligence in adopting and adapting foreign ideas and influences.
That is why it is a shame to see contributors such as rirkrit lapse into ranting against “ignorant Farangs” who don’t understand Thailand’s unique ways.
Thailand is unique, but its citizens are just as deserving of an open society offering opportunities for all as those of countries in the west. Thai-ness is a concept that is too easily used by certain sections of society to suppress open discussion by other sections of society.
Thaksin on Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn
rirkrit: “we will take it back” Goodonyer! Who from?