Psych reports are notoriously ambiguous. They fit right in with voodoo witchcraft – you have to believe in it for it to have any effect. It’s like when a shrink diagnoses someone as passive/aggressive.
I suppose that now that Bleming has been flailed alive on New Mandala, some will next try to hang Dave Everett’s hide on the wall for being politically incorrect in the “New Improved Australia”. He did as he pleased, and you can’t have that.
While I have been unable to obtain a copy of his book, I have exchanged many emails with him, and I have read his posts on NM.
In a world of fakes, Dave Everett is the real deal. Not because he has said so, but because it’s been well documented by others.
Reg says “It involves listening to the electorate, following the law (whether it suits or not and subjecting everyone equally to the law) and working for change peacefully, through reasoned and reasonable civic action and through parliament and the ballot box”
Kuson says “I am totally with you in principle…..In practice, can you get the Thaksinites to do the same, practicing on the same principle and lawful way that constitutes a good Democracy ….?
karmablues is caught in the PAD trap. It is all about Thaksin and if you are not for the proto-fascist, elite-mongering, royal arse-polishers then you must be supporting Thaksin, the war on drugs, murder and so on. What a lot of poppycock. Frankly, I can hear all this stuff by simply viewing the potty mouths on ASTV.
BTW, a nice play on the Nation (Suthichai Yoon I think it was) in your style in post #20. I found the Nation’s contrived democracy dialogues similarly unconvincing and trite.
Vianney says that all the “conflicts in the world could be solved if each of us learn to be content in what we have.” Nice bit of buddhist theology but is it SE? Anyway, as I look out my window in Bangkok this morning and see yet another crane – a metal one, not the bird – rise close to my abode I know that all these Bangkok rich people are truly experiencing SE and putting it to work in concrete, steel and glass.
kuson: you see, there lies the problem: you accept these suggestions/ideas in principle but not in fact.
BTW, do you only watch ASTV for your news? You do have a very skewed perception of reality, where PAD = good. Do look a bit more broadly. Perhaps read the Chang Noi column in the Nation (21 July). I suspect that there view is not a minority opinion.
There is one respected regional university which accepts bright Burmese students and provides scholarships to them without any consideration to who their parents are or what their political aspirations are.
The only criterion the university considers for the admission are the prospective student’s undergrad academic qualifications and his or her work experiences in the related fields.
The university is called Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and she has been providing hundreds of young Burmese free post-graduate education for over four decades now.
So calm down and let nature take its course.
Nature ?
Anyway. I believe that open information and public scrutiny are the best solutions. People should be informed.
It’s enough of those stupid little secrets that eventually fuel the rumors machine, over and over again.
Times of secrecy seem to be over. We don’t like it ? We regret the good old days ? Well, it’s the same price.
Now with Internet, a reader can tell us that he saw prince’s aircraft at the airport in Munich. We can cross informations with local medias, all over the world.
So eventually, it highlights the strange ways of doing of thai medias. And eventually, and unfortutanly, it deserves the royal family.
To be a public figure without public scrutiny… just can’t work anymore.
Surely, Thailand might be willing to avoid this reality… But the question is : is it possible ?
This is confusing indeed – the vast majority of ‘former Khmer Rouge’ fighters were given blanket amnesty (as indeed were highup leaders, including some who are now in the ECCC dock) as an attempt to prevent further bloodshed; many of those were incorporated in the state’s armed forces for the same reason, which resulted in an enormous and bloated (and deeply underpaid) military.
It is an undeniable fact that some current soldiers were at one point fighting for ‘khmer rouge’ groups (though it would be nice to see more precision on this, since Khmer Rouge is a term of deep imprecision when talking about the armed conflicts of the last four decades).
Further, given the location, and the existence of the Anlong Veng area as one of the Khmer Rouge’s last holdouts (Ta Mok remains a feared and respected name in the area, years after his death), it merely makes sense to assume that a fair number of the most local soldiers fought for the Khmer Rouge at one point.
It’s the sort of reporting on Cambodia that infuriates a lot of us – there could very well be important news in there, but it has been subordinated to the stereotypes of Cambodian trauma – “Khmer Rouge,” skulls, child sex workers – that are most appreciated by a Western audience.
The book written by this man should be taken with a big grain of salt. While it is a well written and engrossing story, it is exactly that. He recounts his leaving the SASR as him being sick and tired of the attitude of senior officers and “management” as he puts it. This culminated when he was told to cut his hair. He fails to make any mention of his psych reports which, to say the least, were interesting reading.
In all these books about cross-border adventures deep into Burmese jungles the authors often mentioned the dangerous malaria and how they themselves had suffered from it. But Burmese soldiers seem to be immune from that scourge of the jungle. Are they genetically different from the foreigners? No, but they have a secret weapon no one seems to know about it.
As part of their rations every Burmese soldier on the front line is issued a bottle of army rum heavily laced with quinine and no one knows what else every week, for the battalions in Kachin State almost every day, as a preventive measure against malaria. It really works. So my advice to anyone planning to cross into Burma should buy that army rum bottles at the border and carry it along with them. It has a very bitter taste though, but if one drinks it long enough one can easily get addicted like Takano to the brown opium.
Dannatt was born a hundred years too late. A century earlier and he would have been in there with his boots on. If not “sphere of influence” then “sphere of influenced”.
Seasonal islands appear in the Irrawaddy during winter ‘when the water is small’ leaving narrow channels for rivercraft. These islands are a frequent cause for dispute among neighbouring villages over which one has the right to grow crops on them and it could come to blows.
The seasonal differences of water levels in Irrawaddy is much more pronounce in Middle Burma in places like Minbu and Myingyan than in Myitkyina. I used to work as a mechanical engineer for Burma Irrigation Department and was involved in the design, building, and commission of first ever River Water Pumping Project at Kanni near Minbu on the west bank of Irrawaddy in 1980s.
We had to mount the large German pumps on the barge floating on the river and the huge reservoir was on the deep bank, and the rubber flexible pipes between the centrifugal pumps and almost vertical, permanent 24″ CI pipes to the reservoir were at least 100 foot in length to accommodate the seasonal slacks, if I still remember correctly.
Takano’s book is incredible. The way the Wa administrative and poppy based agricultural system works and was effectively administered was acutely observed and written so clear that I felt like I was in his place there. (The Khin Nyunt’s story must be true as the book is packed with valuable information for both friends or foes of very militant Wa.)
But I’ve never heard of Yoshida’s book. I tried Goggling, but nothing came out save this posting. Can you please post the title of it and whether it is available in English translation. Thanks.
Reg, I do not totally disagree with you – in fact, I am totally with you in principle: “It involves listening to the electorate, following the law (whether it suits or not and subjecting everyone equally to the law) and working for change peacefully, through reasoned and reasonable civic action and through parliament and the ballot box” which is everything you said! 🙂
In principle only. The same way people at trouble spots feel when thousands and thousands of kms away a group of UN diplomats talk about principle while the sufferers lay dying.
*** In practice, can you get the Thaksinites to do the same, practicing on the same principle and lawful way that constitutes a good Democracy we so agree? I think in Essence this is where we don’t agree. I don’t think it is possible to do that– and being polite do the job (unlike the impolite and fed up, misguided PADites). Do you have a solution for this, or how do you think its best done?
My point is, if peaceful reasoning cannot happen, police force is necessary. If Thaksin did his homework well, he’d have the police in his hands (oh I forgot he was a police). But if the police are not up to it, then what?
I am not citing for all out violence (like what the Thaksinites are doing very brutally in Chiang Rai against the Academic PADites) as I mentioned they are not fruitful, but this is where PADites come in— to ensure that the Police are being Lawful and Courts are carrying out the Thaksin Trials. PADites are obviously the last buffer before something you like less comes in : A coup.
Conclusion: I accept what you say practically, if and only if Thaksin complies what you’ve said. Can he? But perhaps the Courts will put him in Jail, PAD has no more political agenda, and everyone has a happy ending and everyone goes for a Red Bull and Thai corn booze!
No, no, we’re in total agreement here – hilariously, to me, your last comment sounds like a briefer (and in some ways, better) version of a paper I wrote a few years back, right down to the name dropping of the three thinkers on value I consider most foundational (well, after the earliest sociological ones, like Marx et al.) – Munn, Graeber, and Turner.
I find Turner’s stuff inspiring but extraordinarily difficult to get through, and his focus on media largely irrelevant to my own work, but Graeber’s big book on value remains one of the best current approaches to value thinking in anthropology.
Munn’s work is even better in her focus on the transformations of value, though I find her definition of symbol (paraphrase: a symbol is something that means something) difficult to take too seriously – that doesn’t damage the importance of her work, just betrays my own preference for a certain version of symbolic anthropology.
Value appears to me as something constantly in conflict and contest, always fluctuating. There are, however, institutions (‘regimes,’ as you put it) which attempt (not always successfully) to stabilize and control these meanings. Buddhism has been a profoundly successful strategy of value stabilization, for reasons I think revolve around their emphasis on death and the particular manner in which they integrate with sovereign regimes.
“Modernity” needs to be better defined or else tossed out, but I’m disinclined (and don’t take you to be pushing this idea) to agree that the Buddhist regime of values is tossed into distress by modernity. Cheers,
While I agree transactional exchange models are not the only way to analytically and theoretically think about value in a productive fashion, I am predisposed to a general anthropological take on value. And since the mid-80s to 90s and the practice turn, that has more and more tended towards models that attempt to account for the production, reproduction and transformation of value, in either their specific or general sense – Munn, Turner, Graeber, etc.
While I agree substantively with your approach at a descriptive level – i.e. distinct domains of value within a single world (although I’m not sure I would argue that this necessarily implies a single cosmology – that perspective seems to be very much what the dominant discourse of canonical Buddhism would like us all to believe) – I worry that this risks a vision of value as naturally given epistemologically, ontologically and ethically / metaphysically within a particular socio-cultural world. And that this risks, in turn, a more anemic interpretive and analytical examination. One result being that the processual and praxis dimensions of ongoing social life are downplayed, even displaced, by reified representations of dominant ideologies of value that posit it as simply, unequivocaly there in the world, rather than a contingent product of collective social life and actions.
I think in general, Buddhist Studies has suffered from presuming a whole range of values and regimes of value as ‘given’ in mature Buddhist social worlds, and also from presuming these as being more or less coextensive with the canonical, orthodox, textual visions of the Buddhist imaginary. It has neither sought to explain how that regime of value – or better, hierarchical articulation of regimes of value – is a product of collective social action in general, or how the canonical, orthodox, textual Buddhist imaginary achieves – in actual social praxis and history – its dominance as a stable regime of socio-cultural value. Scholars of Buddhist Studies seem to simply presume that this is a natural result of survival of the ideological fittest. That the Buddhist imaginary – displaying greater complexity, comprehensiveness, and ideological subtlety – naturally wins out over other regimes of value. Until “modernization” arrives on the scene, when it is suddenly for some reason thrown into distress.
But again, all these thoughts betray my disciplinary biases and presumptions.
[…] has, in the past, been discussed at some length on New Mandala. Previous coverage is available here and here. Readers who follow debates about the merits of various rural development strategies in […]
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Cyclone-damaged rice production in Burma
http://jotman.blogspot.com/2008/07/burma-fao-issues-urgent-appeal.html
Dave Everett and fighting for the KNLA
Psych reports are notoriously ambiguous. They fit right in with voodoo witchcraft – you have to believe in it for it to have any effect. It’s like when a shrink diagnoses someone as passive/aggressive.
I suppose that now that Bleming has been flailed alive on New Mandala, some will next try to hang Dave Everett’s hide on the wall for being politically incorrect in the “New Improved Australia”. He did as he pleased, and you can’t have that.
While I have been unable to obtain a copy of his book, I have exchanged many emails with him, and I have read his posts on NM.
In a world of fakes, Dave Everett is the real deal. Not because he has said so, but because it’s been well documented by others.
Have you had enough of sufficiency?
Reasonableness, Moderation & Immunity – sound advice after the 1997 crash.
Simple concepts, but twisted to suit an underlying agenda – by both sides!
Time to go home
Reg: Can you answer Kuson’s question?
Reg says “It involves listening to the electorate, following the law (whether it suits or not and subjecting everyone equally to the law) and working for change peacefully, through reasoned and reasonable civic action and through parliament and the ballot box”
Kuson says “I am totally with you in principle…..In practice, can you get the Thaksinites to do the same, practicing on the same principle and lawful way that constitutes a good Democracy ….?
“Let the electorate judge”
karmablues is caught in the PAD trap. It is all about Thaksin and if you are not for the proto-fascist, elite-mongering, royal arse-polishers then you must be supporting Thaksin, the war on drugs, murder and so on. What a lot of poppycock. Frankly, I can hear all this stuff by simply viewing the potty mouths on ASTV.
BTW, a nice play on the Nation (Suthichai Yoon I think it was) in your style in post #20. I found the Nation’s contrived democracy dialogues similarly unconvincing and trite.
Have you had enough of sufficiency?
Vianney says that all the “conflicts in the world could be solved if each of us learn to be content in what we have.” Nice bit of buddhist theology but is it SE? Anyway, as I look out my window in Bangkok this morning and see yet another crane – a metal one, not the bird – rise close to my abode I know that all these Bangkok rich people are truly experiencing SE and putting it to work in concrete, steel and glass.
Time to go home
kuson: you see, there lies the problem: you accept these suggestions/ideas in principle but not in fact.
BTW, do you only watch ASTV for your news? You do have a very skewed perception of reality, where PAD = good. Do look a bit more broadly. Perhaps read the Chang Noi column in the Nation (21 July). I suspect that there view is not a minority opinion.
Time for AusAID to rethink Burma
There is one respected regional university which accepts bright Burmese students and provides scholarships to them without any consideration to who their parents are or what their political aspirations are.
The only criterion the university considers for the admission are the prospective student’s undergrad academic qualifications and his or her work experiences in the related fields.
The university is called Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand and she has been providing hundreds of young Burmese free post-graduate education for over four decades now.
Crown Prince scouting European airports
So calm down and let nature take its course.
Nature ?
Anyway. I believe that open information and public scrutiny are the best solutions. People should be informed.
It’s enough of those stupid little secrets that eventually fuel the rumors machine, over and over again.
Times of secrecy seem to be over. We don’t like it ? We regret the good old days ? Well, it’s the same price.
Now with Internet, a reader can tell us that he saw prince’s aircraft at the airport in Munich. We can cross informations with local medias, all over the world.
So eventually, it highlights the strange ways of doing of thai medias. And eventually, and unfortutanly, it deserves the royal family.
To be a public figure without public scrutiny… just can’t work anymore.
Surely, Thailand might be willing to avoid this reality… But the question is : is it possible ?
Khmer Rouge shock troops?
This is confusing indeed – the vast majority of ‘former Khmer Rouge’ fighters were given blanket amnesty (as indeed were highup leaders, including some who are now in the ECCC dock) as an attempt to prevent further bloodshed; many of those were incorporated in the state’s armed forces for the same reason, which resulted in an enormous and bloated (and deeply underpaid) military.
It is an undeniable fact that some current soldiers were at one point fighting for ‘khmer rouge’ groups (though it would be nice to see more precision on this, since Khmer Rouge is a term of deep imprecision when talking about the armed conflicts of the last four decades).
Further, given the location, and the existence of the Anlong Veng area as one of the Khmer Rouge’s last holdouts (Ta Mok remains a feared and respected name in the area, years after his death), it merely makes sense to assume that a fair number of the most local soldiers fought for the Khmer Rouge at one point.
It’s the sort of reporting on Cambodia that infuriates a lot of us – there could very well be important news in there, but it has been subordinated to the stereotypes of Cambodian trauma – “Khmer Rouge,” skulls, child sex workers – that are most appreciated by a Western audience.
Dave Everett and fighting for the KNLA
The book written by this man should be taken with a big grain of salt. While it is a well written and engrossing story, it is exactly that. He recounts his leaving the SASR as him being sick and tired of the attitude of senior officers and “management” as he puts it. This culminated when he was told to cut his hair. He fails to make any mention of his psych reports which, to say the least, were interesting reading.
More Japanese tales
In all these books about cross-border adventures deep into Burmese jungles the authors often mentioned the dangerous malaria and how they themselves had suffered from it. But Burmese soldiers seem to be immune from that scourge of the jungle. Are they genetically different from the foreigners? No, but they have a secret weapon no one seems to know about it.
As part of their rations every Burmese soldier on the front line is issued a bottle of army rum heavily laced with quinine and no one knows what else every week, for the battalions in Kachin State almost every day, as a preventive measure against malaria. It really works. So my advice to anyone planning to cross into Burma should buy that army rum bottles at the border and carry it along with them. It has a very bitter taste though, but if one drinks it long enough one can easily get addicted like Takano to the brown opium.
Liberal intervention, Burma and going beyond the pale
Dannatt was born a hundred years too late. A century earlier and he would have been in there with his boots on. If not “sphere of influence” then “sphere of influenced”.
The Irrawaddy River in winter
Seasonal islands appear in the Irrawaddy during winter ‘when the water is small’ leaving narrow channels for rivercraft. These islands are a frequent cause for dispute among neighbouring villages over which one has the right to grow crops on them and it could come to blows.
Here’s some info on gold mining in Kachin State. It’s only done along its parent streams.
http://burmalibrary.org/docs/gold%20pdf1.pdf
The Irrawaddy River in winter
The seasonal differences of water levels in Irrawaddy is much more pronounce in Middle Burma in places like Minbu and Myingyan than in Myitkyina. I used to work as a mechanical engineer for Burma Irrigation Department and was involved in the design, building, and commission of first ever River Water Pumping Project at Kanni near Minbu on the west bank of Irrawaddy in 1980s.
We had to mount the large German pumps on the barge floating on the river and the huge reservoir was on the deep bank, and the rubber flexible pipes between the centrifugal pumps and almost vertical, permanent 24″ CI pipes to the reservoir were at least 100 foot in length to accommodate the seasonal slacks, if I still remember correctly.
More Japanese tales
Takano’s book is incredible. The way the Wa administrative and poppy based agricultural system works and was effectively administered was acutely observed and written so clear that I felt like I was in his place there. (The Khin Nyunt’s story must be true as the book is packed with valuable information for both friends or foes of very militant Wa.)
But I’ve never heard of Yoshida’s book. I tried Goggling, but nothing came out save this posting. Can you please post the title of it and whether it is available in English translation. Thanks.
Time to go home
Reg, I do not totally disagree with you – in fact, I am totally with you in principle: “It involves listening to the electorate, following the law (whether it suits or not and subjecting everyone equally to the law) and working for change peacefully, through reasoned and reasonable civic action and through parliament and the ballot box” which is everything you said! 🙂
In principle only. The same way people at trouble spots feel when thousands and thousands of kms away a group of UN diplomats talk about principle while the sufferers lay dying.
*** In practice, can you get the Thaksinites to do the same, practicing on the same principle and lawful way that constitutes a good Democracy we so agree? I think in Essence this is where we don’t agree. I don’t think it is possible to do that– and being polite do the job (unlike the impolite and fed up, misguided PADites). Do you have a solution for this, or how do you think its best done?
My point is, if peaceful reasoning cannot happen, police force is necessary. If Thaksin did his homework well, he’d have the police in his hands (oh I forgot he was a police). But if the police are not up to it, then what?
I am not citing for all out violence (like what the Thaksinites are doing very brutally in Chiang Rai against the Academic PADites) as I mentioned they are not fruitful, but this is where PADites come in— to ensure that the Police are being Lawful and Courts are carrying out the Thaksin Trials. PADites are obviously the last buffer before something you like less comes in : A coup.
Conclusion: I accept what you say practically, if and only if Thaksin complies what you’ve said. Can he? But perhaps the Courts will put him in Jail, PAD has no more political agenda, and everyone has a happy ending and everyone goes for a Red Bull and Thai corn booze!
“The treasures of man are women, wine, cars and villas…”
@Erick,
No, no, we’re in total agreement here – hilariously, to me, your last comment sounds like a briefer (and in some ways, better) version of a paper I wrote a few years back, right down to the name dropping of the three thinkers on value I consider most foundational (well, after the earliest sociological ones, like Marx et al.) – Munn, Graeber, and Turner.
I find Turner’s stuff inspiring but extraordinarily difficult to get through, and his focus on media largely irrelevant to my own work, but Graeber’s big book on value remains one of the best current approaches to value thinking in anthropology.
Munn’s work is even better in her focus on the transformations of value, though I find her definition of symbol (paraphrase: a symbol is something that means something) difficult to take too seriously – that doesn’t damage the importance of her work, just betrays my own preference for a certain version of symbolic anthropology.
Value appears to me as something constantly in conflict and contest, always fluctuating. There are, however, institutions (‘regimes,’ as you put it) which attempt (not always successfully) to stabilize and control these meanings. Buddhism has been a profoundly successful strategy of value stabilization, for reasons I think revolve around their emphasis on death and the particular manner in which they integrate with sovereign regimes.
“Modernity” needs to be better defined or else tossed out, but I’m disinclined (and don’t take you to be pushing this idea) to agree that the Buddhist regime of values is tossed into distress by modernity. Cheers,
“The treasures of man are women, wine, cars and villas…”
So Erik,
While I agree transactional exchange models are not the only way to analytically and theoretically think about value in a productive fashion, I am predisposed to a general anthropological take on value. And since the mid-80s to 90s and the practice turn, that has more and more tended towards models that attempt to account for the production, reproduction and transformation of value, in either their specific or general sense – Munn, Turner, Graeber, etc.
While I agree substantively with your approach at a descriptive level – i.e. distinct domains of value within a single world (although I’m not sure I would argue that this necessarily implies a single cosmology – that perspective seems to be very much what the dominant discourse of canonical Buddhism would like us all to believe) – I worry that this risks a vision of value as naturally given epistemologically, ontologically and ethically / metaphysically within a particular socio-cultural world. And that this risks, in turn, a more anemic interpretive and analytical examination. One result being that the processual and praxis dimensions of ongoing social life are downplayed, even displaced, by reified representations of dominant ideologies of value that posit it as simply, unequivocaly there in the world, rather than a contingent product of collective social life and actions.
I think in general, Buddhist Studies has suffered from presuming a whole range of values and regimes of value as ‘given’ in mature Buddhist social worlds, and also from presuming these as being more or less coextensive with the canonical, orthodox, textual visions of the Buddhist imaginary. It has neither sought to explain how that regime of value – or better, hierarchical articulation of regimes of value – is a product of collective social action in general, or how the canonical, orthodox, textual Buddhist imaginary achieves – in actual social praxis and history – its dominance as a stable regime of socio-cultural value. Scholars of Buddhist Studies seem to simply presume that this is a natural result of survival of the ideological fittest. That the Buddhist imaginary – displaying greater complexity, comprehensiveness, and ideological subtlety – naturally wins out over other regimes of value. Until “modernization” arrives on the scene, when it is suddenly for some reason thrown into distress.
But again, all these thoughts betray my disciplinary biases and presumptions.
Cheers.
Contract farming
[…] has, in the past, been discussed at some length on New Mandala. Previous coverage is available here and here. Readers who follow debates about the merits of various rural development strategies in […]