Comments

I hope that with the new government things are going to change!
Go away censorship!

What it sounds like from this and the Reuters report is that the academics who talked about the Handley book really do not like it or they do not think it is any good except it broke the silence about the monarchy. It would be interesting to know if in fact they only like it because it broke the silence, so they are just selfish about this, or they don’t like it for its content, but like the government were too cowardly like in the past to say just why. Or maybe they like the book but were also too cowardly like in the past to say so so they gave little criticisms of it. But Chang Noi says ” the importance of the moment” and then has people calling the book silly or ordinary. So it sounds to me like the academics are still being complete cowards to talk about real things rather than their own problems and hangups.

“Why do they have to have different fees…?”

Fee differentiation seems like a moot point.

Isn’t the basic idea to get knowledge flowing and people collaborating with each other, and to do whatever it takes to achieve this objective.

Meeting frequently at low cost, either face to face at some venue that is close to free, and following it up with meeting over the internet, which is definitely free.

My favorite is the counterintuitive charging people to speak and charging them even more for the projector if they take the time to do a professional Powerpoint presentation. (??!?!?!)

What this ultimately leads to is a bunch of westerners teaching in Japan who need to fulfill some conference requirement at their university.

Talked last year to a senior university lecturer from Tel Aviv who specialized in teaching nurses medical English and she said they’re cutting this kind of conference junket stuff out (along with academic tenure) and moving to a leaner temp-outsourcing way of running their departments, so this sort of thing might eventually become history many places. Better start planning for the fully networked age now before it’s too late.

[System not giving feedback to poster so it looks like post not being accepted]

Samak becoming Prime Minister and Marxist Ji Ungpakorn’s book being banned at Thammasat bookstore, all on one day, or within the space of a few days, a coincidence?

“Following the massacre of students at Thammasat University and the subsequent coup of October 6, 1976, Samak became Interior Minister in the government of Tanin Kraivixien, an anti-communist with a reputation for honesty. Hundreds of supposed leftists, many of them intellectuals, were arrested in the witch-hunt that followed. ” (Bangkok Post, Sunday, Perpsective)

Like Michael Connors pointed out “The picture of coup and anti-coup forces contending in Thailand is simplistic at best.”

The military government allowed the book but the democratically elected Samak government is not going to? Or was this planned beforehand? Or did this originate from some independent source within the bureaucracy?

The book seemed to suffer a little in the objectivity department and didn’t seem to read like straight reportage, to such an extent that I didn’t finish reading it, but IMHO banning it, particularly in such an untransparent fashion in which no one knows exactly why it was banned, as is so typical in lese majeste cases, seems like a strategy of generalized fear emanating from somewhere in the police or interior ministry bureaucracy, that is very reminiscent of how the regime in Burma works.

In Response

In response to Andrew Walker’s discussion of my piece “Coup by Stealth or Something Else?” in Asia Sentinel I’d like to make a few points.

First, I’ll restate my basic argument as it was made three weeks ago (before it was clear that a PPP government would be formed and while everyone was waiting for mass disqualifications or even party dissolution at the behest of ‘dirty hands’). I made a case that more was going on than Thaksin/PPP versus the CNS; that the ECT was open to influence from both sides (and it was and is); that ongoing elite struggles were not about genuine democracy. I would stand by my argument that neither of these forces are democratic (Thaksin/CNS), though they are willing, in different measure, to use democratic and undemocratic mechanisms in pursuit of their objectives. To be something and to use something is a different matter.

I wrote the piece because media discourse was insufficiently paying attention to the nature of a conflicted state in Thailand – a conflict that accounts for the very unsuccessful outcome of the coup (judged by the coup objectives). There was, intentionally or not, in the international media a whitewashing of the PPP by explicitly or implicitly supporting its claims of dirty hands imposing on the ECT/courts without doing sufficient work on the complexity of just how numerous are the dirty hands in both camps.

Andrew ignores the point I made about the ECT. On the ECT let me add to the points made in the article. Any attempt to make sense of the ECT’s role in the election has to come to terms with the fact that it was dependent on police and other networks who remained sympathetic to Thaksin, as did many officials. The centralization of the complaints process during the election meant that many complaints never made it to the Central ECT, having been ruled by sympathetic officials as lacking in substance. Thus the organizational politics of the ECT at the centre that I pointed to in the Asia Sentinel article were also reflected in the regions – this observation comes from fieldwork in the Northeast during the election. Different forces work through the ECT, including ‘clean forces’.

None of this means that I think the result of the 2007 election should be discounted. I hold to the idea that many people quite reasonably voted for PPP, given what else was perceived to be on offer and given the unpopular (in the Northeast) illegitimate assumption of power by the CNS and its appointed government. As for vote-buying, electoral rigging and the like, these features of Thai politics have no doubt in different measure impacted on the outcome, but only as aspects of a broader politics of mobilising electoral support. I do find the list-votes interesting in this regard, and we await a proper treatment of what those lists indicate.

I would also hold that we are required to make sense of electoral support not simply as the normative mandate of democracy, but also as part of a struggle for hegemony that ultimately rests on undemocratic means, incorporation, response and the structuring by and of subject positions within the political system. This is I think what Andrew is getting at when he says I do not see the local; I tend to see things through this prism.

I guess if Andrew sees the resilience of the local and its ability to work to its own advantage with the centre, at this moment in time I see the power of the centre (I include in that not just the state but the political system of big capital and its rents) and its mechanisms of control. I think the forces of popular resistance and integration can be idealised and over-emphasised given the current circumstances of Thai politics and the historic repression of those forces. This, despite the heroic struggles of many people in Thailand. On a more positive note, one of the interesting outcomes of the election was the modest electorate support given to the Thai Farmers Network party, which garnered several hundred thousand votes. Such parties, rather than rightwing networks of capital hold out the hope for progressive social change in Thailand.

Now, because I have been accused of not caring about the ballot and “the electorate”, I will state the obvious – the vote is a historic gain resulting from struggles to expand the democratic franchise and the coup was a set back to that gain. The return of electoral means of elite competition is an advance, the coup was always wrong and a set back, things I argued in October 2006 in the postscript to the new edition of Democracy and National Identity in Thailand. Andrew is right to note my lack of discussion of this point in the Asia Sentinel article, and I stand corrected.

If I look at things too generally and my attention to the local is lacking – something that I am not willing to fully concede – I would argue that Andrew’s approach to the national level is similarly lacking. His approach of reading local politics as complex and multifaceted might also be used in his reading of national level politics – a realm given to multifaceted interpretation, given its scale. In doing that he might not so obviously drift into a position that overly associates democracy with the return of the PPP.

I will also take this opportunity to offer a few comments on Republican’s post regarding the same Asia Sentinel article. This will be my only post on this matter, as I do not see the point of discussing politics with someone who wields a blunt axe.

The charges that Republican lays against me in his post have something of a show-trial mentality about them. His dissembling assemblage and misrepresentation of my arguments result either from a jaundiced reading or he is not interested in real debate. I am not going to respond to the various charges. These include: I supported the coup, I wanted it to be a harder coup, I support a royalist ruse on democracy, I buy into the king’s appeals to judicial integrity and believe that judges do too, I think people are stupid etc.

My decision not to respond directly to these charges rests on the fact that they are advanced by the use of a systematically twisted logic of selective mis-reading and quotation, the kind that was perfected into an art form during various show trials. Fortunately we are operating at a much smaller scale, both being marginal academics in the university system with an audience of dozens so I need not face the firing squad.

I am happy for anyone to make their own assessment of Republican’s charges by reading the Asia Sentinel article, and other work.

The tone of, and misrepresentation by, Republican’s post continues an agenda on these pages and elsewhere; that agenda is that everyone should take a position that Republican asserts to be true; that we (anyone who has been at the end of this particular stick) should only attack the monarchy, that we lay down before a “democratic mandate” and remove judicial process in the determination of guilt.

The oddest aspect of this agenda is that in offering thoughts and exchanges on the complexities of Thai politics, and being critical of both sides – in exercising deliberative capacities – we are accused of being elitists, usurping the good common sense of the “folk” (filtered through Republican); perhaps a few years serving as ex-educated youth (if you will allow) among the rural masses might set us on the right track?

Michael Connors 28 January, 2008.

Yes, more pictures and commentary would be welcome, as would information about interactions of all the contending ceasefire groups and their interactions with the Burmese military.

Republican (#44): I agree with your view that the role of actors who adopt “foreign” social models is often played down by those who apply a merely hierarchical model of globalization or world culture in which both are reduced to outcomes of power relationships. Governments, the mass media, civil society, business organizations, individuals etc. actively observe what kind of solutions are developed elsewhere that might be of use in their own social environments. Moreover, these actors are often involved in supra-national networks dealing with finding solutions to common problems. Obviously, individual actors at the receiving end also make their choices. Simply speaking, why should a Thai let his root canal be treated by a traditional healer instead of by a bio-medical dentist? The issue of empowerment is a tricky one, because, in modern society, function systems open up enormous opportunities, but they also make us dependent on them for our individual and family advancement. Part of the uneasiness with this problem is probably due to an outdated understanding of the “subject” as a self-determined being, which negates the fact that individuals have to live in pre-determined social structures and cultures.