I reckon that we need something different for the Thai junta. Maybe buying an island, putting a huge golf course and luxury mansions on it and replace them there. You have to admit, so far they haven’t burned down villages and raped villagers.
But who can stop China?
Allison, I’ve never studied Spanish history, but that is an interesting point you raise. I’ve yet to see anyone offer an example of how tourism can open up a country in a way that facilitates political change. Although it’s still difficult to think of how much more can be destroyed in 10 years, the current situation certianly doesn’t give much hope of quick change anyway.
The junta is fairly inefficient at the top, but I think Arakan State offers a good example of how the army can monopolize businesses. The government tells battalions they must earn so much revenue and save a certain amount every year. This has quickly led to them confiscating businesses – shrimp farms, plantations, brick kilns – in their areas. It’s decentralized, but still pretty effective at obliterating local businesses. Tourism would be harder to take over, as people can work without having to own buildings or land that could be taken away, but I still think we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which they could muck things up.
John – stop calling me Tamara. Do I really need to cite evidence that Burmese people are capable of thinking for themselves? Because that’s all I was saying. Your comment implicated to me that you think people in Burma need contact with foreigners to bring them knowledge, such that that mother would no longer think it rational to take her child to the monastery for medical treatment. I was merely challenging that implication. Would you like to cite evidence that Burmese people are passive and uninformed, in need of information from us? We are talking about tourism here – whether you wish to extrapolate to all other possible forms of contact with the outside world or not, my response was not directed at those issues.
And as Aiontay pointed out – all of those horrible things you mention are caused by the government. Seriously, you think they don’t have the money to fund hospitals? They can throw a 50 million dollar wedding for their daughter, but it’s the lack of contact that has caused their infrastructure to crumble?
Don’t make presumptions about what I think just because I disagree with your comments. I never said I support boycotting Burma, and never in my comments on this site have I said that I support such black and white stances as are often presented in the debates on boycotts or sanctions. Your credentials are all very impressive, John, but you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know, and as to why they would somehow preclude your comment from being patronizing I’m not sure.
As I was eating dinner (р╕Вр╣Йр╕▓р╕зр╕Ьр╕▒р╕Фр╣Др╕Бр╣И – if you must know), I had the misfortune of having my wife watch the news in the next room. The TV screen was filled with the smiling, infantile mug of Dr. Mongkol na Songkhla. As a wave of emotions (most of them disgust) splashed about in my brain, I accidentially stumbled upon the perfect solution to this patent dilemma:
As compensationfor the compulsory licensing of American produced HIV/AIDS drugs, the U.S. will ignore the Thai protectionist lobby and finally grow and patent Thai-strain Jasmine rice on U.S. soil.
Free Fair trade, no? Goose and ganders, my friend, goose and ganders.
All the horror stories you describe are the result of the policy of the regime, not the activists you rail against. If you want evidence of the regime’s acceptence of globalisation, look at their move to a remote area, known for its agricultural school, not for its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
As to Tara’s point, yeah, the Burmese people don’t need interaction with us; they already are well aware of what is going on. I was reading the New York Times Review of Books and the Asian version of Newsweek (uncensored) up in the Northern Shan State whe I was living there. They were a week behind, but still you could get if you knew the right house in Lashio to stop by to get your subscription.
As for Burma activists having the same clout as guys like Chalibi, you’ve got to be kidding me. On the other hand, if Dubya sees that new Rambo flick, that might all change. Personally, I’m for having Cheney invite the Burmese generals on a quail hunt.
It is VERY violent. I have seen the first one and must say that violence in films has become much more drastic over the years. The visual saturation on violence and more blood-spilling – a vicious circle? How much more ways to slit, crack, twist, burst and squeeze a human body to death?
But leaving this aside…
As ChinRambo said it in November, Rambo, please come and rescue all the villagers in all the “insurgent” areas who are raped, killed, tortured and whose houses burnt down. On your way back please drop by at Naypyidaw and terminate the junta themselves. And don’t forget to prevent any weapon supply ever coming from China.
I reckon George W. must be very envy of you. He might dream every night to sort the mess in Iraq the way you do.
Fun aside. I am curious to see the political impact once the film is released and aired in Thailand….
Vichai –
Criminally penalize vote selling is not a bad idea.
But it would be impractical, if not impossible.
Putting aside the problem of proving vote being sold per person. How does a policeman expect to catch people in a village while the person who buy vote win the election and, hence, power over the local police? Not to mention directly cutting the income stream of the kam-nan and canvasser. That righteous police will “disappear” in no time.
It is kind of like punishing a drug user. That kind of law would only instill fear in citizen, not order. May be need a little detail improvement?
It is not Thaksin who buys votes. It is the candidates in the provinces who operate within their own informal networks. Just as with locking up vote buyers, the locking up of vote sellers faces exactly the same problem, which is the lack of evidence. Of course, there are also more complicated problems. As an investigation officer of a provincial election commission told me after the 2005 election: “How can we expect the police to help us in gathering evidence of vote buying when they themselves help with the distribution of the vote buying money?”
Re. Somsak’s “Agatha Christie” story: I found Jon Fernquest’s reply rather strange: in what sense do you mean reading this topic is a “waste of time”?
Re. whether it’s “interesting” or not, the story has received over 3000 hits on Fa Dio Kan, about 10 times the number of hits for a normal “popular” posting (I understand that it was also posted on the more frequented Prachatai website before being pulled – for obvious reasons – does anybody have an update on that?) As Fa Dio Kan is the leading academic website for blog discussion of Thai politics and social sciences these days one would think that most of those in the field of Thai political studies (and the social sciences, history, etc. more generally) would find this topic at least, “interesting” – whatever they thought of Somsak’s argument.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and we all have our different interests. But whatever your politics and whatever you believe about the topic under discussion, one should understand the objective interest in this topic given the political circumstances after September 19. This topic is not only about history, it is about the present.
“While there’s certainly an element of truth to what you’re saying, John, the notion that Burmese people need interaction with us in order to somehow be enlightened or spurred to action is patronizing.”
It is always better to cite evidence than talk down to people patronizingly as you do, Tamara.
[Note: I have taught at universities and schools all over Asia with other foreign lecturers for well over a decade (Burma for two years), hundreds of students a semester. I now write at a newspaper where some of the most important articles are about international trade and Foreign Direct Investment. These are all **interactions with other countries including the west**. I speak, read, and translate Burmese and have published long papers based on these translations. I have an **active engagement with Burma and Asia**, Tamara, to claim that I am being “patronising” without citing any evidence to this effect is simply ridiculous]
Burma is a case of **almost no interactions with the outside world (i.e. no globalisation)**. If you think the results of no globalisation are good, I suggest that you live in Burma for a while, but you can’t do that because you want to boycott Burma. Do you understand the contradiction this presents, Tamara?
From no interaction with the outside world: There is no public water supply for even most of Yangon. The interprovincial roads are barely larger than a single lane. The telephone infrastructure is so bad that a phone when I lived there cost $2,000, a mobile phone, the price of an apartment. There are big piles of garbage near apartment complexes. Leave your houses unattended get robbed, that simple. The universities were closed for almost a decade. A old dilapidated plane crashed in Tachileik with students coming back from taking their exams in Yangon, including my wife’s best friend. It took two weeks for the government to find the plane, that lay almost right next to the airport with all the corpses dangling from it. The lucky students are sent by their parents to Singapore to study. Hospitals? I won’t even go into that it is so horrible. Such a lack of modern medicine and ethical standards, it is truly ridiculous. I spent months learning about this **living** in a private hospital in Yangon while my Burmese mother in law suffered first from kidney failure and then (when the private hospital had extracted as much money as they could from that) uterine cancer which took about 15 minutes to find in a very superficial examination, this after months of expensive medical tests and pushy attempts to get me to buy a kidney from India and hook my mother in law up to a dialysis machine.
You are the patronising one, Tamara, whether you realise it or not.
These are the sort of facts that should be reported for Burma, not the umpteenth repetition of a story, always the same story, that people already know, know by heart. Or pseudo-issues like the big dilemna of whether I should spend a couple of hundred dollars in Burma.
Tourism is just the tip of iceberg as far as interaction with the outside world (globalisation) goes, but it is a very important **leading indicator**. For many a tourist or student visa is their initial in to a country that they later become involved with to a greater extent.
[Note: For the role Iraqi outsider dissidents played in the current fiasco in Iraq, check out George Baker’s “Assassin’s Gate”. Activists often believe the Burmese situation can be evaluated without looking at other cases outside of Southeast Asia, simply not so.]
Thanks for this link. The news begins to be rolled up to history that allows the reader to see the lay of the land. It’s difficult to discern patterns just following the news from day to day.
One message seems to be that protest movements can get out of hand and limited special interests can claim to have a much broader base, namely “the people”. [cf Burma]
Now I can see why media mogul Sondhi does not garner a lot of respect among people in the know.
The author does a balanced job and presents enough evidence and both sides to let us come to our own decision.
Well worth several readings but obviously some issues need to be looked at in more detail like the long election commission fiasco that ended in prison sentences for the election commissioners. It seemed that Thaksin had a wide spectrum of politicians and powerful people in his pocket.
There was a point when Ad started dancing with Big Jiew and his AK-47 armed entourage — some said he himself — were running around bullying people, acting like their own mafia, grabbing land (wasn’t there a protected forest scandal involving him?).
That’s a point when his politics did, and do, matter, as much as the music. I like the pleng of the 80s but not his kaan muang of the 90s. Compare it with how the Caravan people have carried themselves. I’ll take Nga anytime.
I have said this once and I have said it twice. So I’ll say it a third time.
Thailand should lock up people who sell their votes. Selling votes is criminal. If it is not that clear, then the new constitution should include one special article on this subject, saying IT IS CRIMINAL TO SELL YOUR VOTE.
I have no sympathy for people who sell their votes. They should be locked up along with Thaksin who buys their votes.
It should also be pointed out that it is pretty much impossible to do business in Burma without paying bribes, kickbacks etc as well as taxes. There may be private hotels, but they can’t exist without making payments to the regime.
Tara – I don’t entirely disagree, but I think there are two responses to what you’ve said: (1) the Burmese state, by pretty much every account, is pretty inefficient and has a hard time taxing any business – it would have to evolve quite a lot to be able to actually take over the tourist industry (without killing it first). The difference between tourism and say mining or natural gas is just that – its harder for the state to control and tax. There will be cronism, but not systematic control and profit. and (2) i use to work on Spanish history and remember what happened there – millions of tourists flooded Franco’s Spain in the 60s and 70s, it helped prop up the government, brought in lots of money for the generals, but then, in the end, it helped set up the conditions in which a peaceful transition to democracy was possible 10 years on.
[…] A trailer for the new Rambo film is now available on YouTube. The film was shot in Thailand. Previous New Mandala coverage of this Rambo film is available from our archive. […]
That is true, Allison, but I think it still doesn’t eliminate the distinct possibility that the more profitable tourism becomes, the more likely the junta is to push out small private businesses and install themselves or their cronies in their place. The rational that something is OK because it’s not as bad as something else is flawed. They might get loads more revenue from natural resources, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t also take over the tourism industry. I think the possibility that they’ll take steps to limit how much the little guys can benefit from tourism is a separate issue from how much profit they might make from it. The junta is more often greedy than it is rational. But it’s that issue in particular which will diminish the overall benefit that many argue tourism will bring.
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Rambo takes on the Tatmadaw
I reckon that we need something different for the Thai junta. Maybe buying an island, putting a huge golf course and luxury mansions on it and replace them there. You have to admit, so far they haven’t burned down villages and raped villagers.
But who can stop China?
A friendly reception
Vichai, that’s a stunning idea! Why haven’t our corrupt uneducated legislators thought about it before?
(scratches his head and looks over previous election laws)
Actually, somebody has thought about it before….
Rambo takes on the Tatmadaw
Holy heck, that was violent. You think that after Rambo takes out the Burmese junta, he’ll stop over and take out the Thai junta?
Burma tourism debate
Allison, I’ve never studied Spanish history, but that is an interesting point you raise. I’ve yet to see anyone offer an example of how tourism can open up a country in a way that facilitates political change. Although it’s still difficult to think of how much more can be destroyed in 10 years, the current situation certianly doesn’t give much hope of quick change anyway.
The junta is fairly inefficient at the top, but I think Arakan State offers a good example of how the army can monopolize businesses. The government tells battalions they must earn so much revenue and save a certain amount every year. This has quickly led to them confiscating businesses – shrimp farms, plantations, brick kilns – in their areas. It’s decentralized, but still pretty effective at obliterating local businesses. Tourism would be harder to take over, as people can work without having to own buildings or land that could be taken away, but I still think we shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which they could muck things up.
Burma tourism debate
John – stop calling me Tamara. Do I really need to cite evidence that Burmese people are capable of thinking for themselves? Because that’s all I was saying. Your comment implicated to me that you think people in Burma need contact with foreigners to bring them knowledge, such that that mother would no longer think it rational to take her child to the monastery for medical treatment. I was merely challenging that implication. Would you like to cite evidence that Burmese people are passive and uninformed, in need of information from us? We are talking about tourism here – whether you wish to extrapolate to all other possible forms of contact with the outside world or not, my response was not directed at those issues.
And as Aiontay pointed out – all of those horrible things you mention are caused by the government. Seriously, you think they don’t have the money to fund hospitals? They can throw a 50 million dollar wedding for their daughter, but it’s the lack of contact that has caused their infrastructure to crumble?
Don’t make presumptions about what I think just because I disagree with your comments. I never said I support boycotting Burma, and never in my comments on this site have I said that I support such black and white stances as are often presented in the debates on boycotts or sanctions. Your credentials are all very impressive, John, but you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know, and as to why they would somehow preclude your comment from being patronizing I’m not sure.
More on patents and capitalism
As I was eating dinner (р╕Вр╣Йр╕▓р╕зр╕Ьр╕▒р╕Фр╣Др╕Бр╣И – if you must know), I had the misfortune of having my wife watch the news in the next room. The TV screen was filled with the smiling, infantile mug of Dr. Mongkol na Songkhla. As a wave of emotions (most of them disgust) splashed about in my brain, I accidentially stumbled upon the perfect solution to this patent dilemma:
As compensationfor the compulsory licensing of American produced HIV/AIDS drugs, the U.S. will ignore the Thai protectionist lobby and finally grow and patent Thai-strain Jasmine rice on U.S. soil.
FreeFair trade, no? Goose and ganders, my friend, goose and ganders.Burma tourism debate
Jon,
All the horror stories you describe are the result of the policy of the regime, not the activists you rail against. If you want evidence of the regime’s acceptence of globalisation, look at their move to a remote area, known for its agricultural school, not for its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
As to Tara’s point, yeah, the Burmese people don’t need interaction with us; they already are well aware of what is going on. I was reading the New York Times Review of Books and the Asian version of Newsweek (uncensored) up in the Northern Shan State whe I was living there. They were a week behind, but still you could get if you knew the right house in Lashio to stop by to get your subscription.
As for Burma activists having the same clout as guys like Chalibi, you’ve got to be kidding me. On the other hand, if Dubya sees that new Rambo flick, that might all change. Personally, I’m for having Cheney invite the Burmese generals on a quail hunt.
Rambo takes on the Tatmadaw
It is VERY violent. I have seen the first one and must say that violence in films has become much more drastic over the years. The visual saturation on violence and more blood-spilling – a vicious circle? How much more ways to slit, crack, twist, burst and squeeze a human body to death?
But leaving this aside…
As ChinRambo said it in November, Rambo, please come and rescue all the villagers in all the “insurgent” areas who are raped, killed, tortured and whose houses burnt down. On your way back please drop by at Naypyidaw and terminate the junta themselves. And don’t forget to prevent any weapon supply ever coming from China.
I reckon George W. must be very envy of you. He might dream every night to sort the mess in Iraq the way you do.
Fun aside. I am curious to see the political impact once the film is released and aired in Thailand….
A friendly reception
Vichai –
Criminally penalize vote selling is not a bad idea.
But it would be impractical, if not impossible.
Putting aside the problem of proving vote being sold per person. How does a policeman expect to catch people in a village while the person who buy vote win the election and, hence, power over the local police? Not to mention directly cutting the income stream of the kam-nan and canvasser. That righteous police will “disappear” in no time.
It is kind of like punishing a drug user. That kind of law would only instill fear in citizen, not order. May be need a little detail improvement?
A friendly reception
It is not Thaksin who buys votes. It is the candidates in the provinces who operate within their own informal networks. Just as with locking up vote buyers, the locking up of vote sellers faces exactly the same problem, which is the lack of evidence. Of course, there are also more complicated problems. As an investigation officer of a provincial election commission told me after the 2005 election: “How can we expect the police to help us in gathering evidence of vote buying when they themselves help with the distribution of the vote buying money?”
Somsak on Ananda Mahidol
Re. Somsak’s “Agatha Christie” story: I found Jon Fernquest’s reply rather strange: in what sense do you mean reading this topic is a “waste of time”?
Re. whether it’s “interesting” or not, the story has received over 3000 hits on Fa Dio Kan, about 10 times the number of hits for a normal “popular” posting (I understand that it was also posted on the more frequented Prachatai website before being pulled – for obvious reasons – does anybody have an update on that?) As Fa Dio Kan is the leading academic website for blog discussion of Thai politics and social sciences these days one would think that most of those in the field of Thai political studies (and the social sciences, history, etc. more generally) would find this topic at least, “interesting” – whatever they thought of Somsak’s argument.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and we all have our different interests. But whatever your politics and whatever you believe about the topic under discussion, one should understand the objective interest in this topic given the political circumstances after September 19. This topic is not only about history, it is about the present.
Burma tourism debate
“While there’s certainly an element of truth to what you’re saying, John, the notion that Burmese people need interaction with us in order to somehow be enlightened or spurred to action is patronizing.”
It is always better to cite evidence than talk down to people patronizingly as you do, Tamara.
[Note: I have taught at universities and schools all over Asia with other foreign lecturers for well over a decade (Burma for two years), hundreds of students a semester. I now write at a newspaper where some of the most important articles are about international trade and Foreign Direct Investment. These are all **interactions with other countries including the west**. I speak, read, and translate Burmese and have published long papers based on these translations. I have an **active engagement with Burma and Asia**, Tamara, to claim that I am being “patronising” without citing any evidence to this effect is simply ridiculous]
Burma is a case of **almost no interactions with the outside world (i.e. no globalisation)**. If you think the results of no globalisation are good, I suggest that you live in Burma for a while, but you can’t do that because you want to boycott Burma. Do you understand the contradiction this presents, Tamara?
From no interaction with the outside world: There is no public water supply for even most of Yangon. The interprovincial roads are barely larger than a single lane. The telephone infrastructure is so bad that a phone when I lived there cost $2,000, a mobile phone, the price of an apartment. There are big piles of garbage near apartment complexes. Leave your houses unattended get robbed, that simple. The universities were closed for almost a decade. A old dilapidated plane crashed in Tachileik with students coming back from taking their exams in Yangon, including my wife’s best friend. It took two weeks for the government to find the plane, that lay almost right next to the airport with all the corpses dangling from it. The lucky students are sent by their parents to Singapore to study. Hospitals? I won’t even go into that it is so horrible. Such a lack of modern medicine and ethical standards, it is truly ridiculous. I spent months learning about this **living** in a private hospital in Yangon while my Burmese mother in law suffered first from kidney failure and then (when the private hospital had extracted as much money as they could from that) uterine cancer which took about 15 minutes to find in a very superficial examination, this after months of expensive medical tests and pushy attempts to get me to buy a kidney from India and hook my mother in law up to a dialysis machine.
You are the patronising one, Tamara, whether you realise it or not.
These are the sort of facts that should be reported for Burma, not the umpteenth repetition of a story, always the same story, that people already know, know by heart. Or pseudo-issues like the big dilemna of whether I should spend a couple of hundred dollars in Burma.
Tourism is just the tip of iceberg as far as interaction with the outside world (globalisation) goes, but it is a very important **leading indicator**. For many a tourist or student visa is their initial in to a country that they later become involved with to a greater extent.
[Note: For the role Iraqi outsider dissidents played in the current fiasco in Iraq, check out George Baker’s “Assassin’s Gate”. Activists often believe the Burmese situation can be evaluated without looking at other cases outside of Southeast Asia, simply not so.]
Nelson paper on “people’s sector politics”
Thanks for this link. The news begins to be rolled up to history that allows the reader to see the lay of the land. It’s difficult to discern patterns just following the news from day to day.
One message seems to be that protest movements can get out of hand and limited special interests can claim to have a much broader base, namely “the people”. [cf Burma]
Now I can see why media mogul Sondhi does not garner a lot of respect among people in the know.
The author does a balanced job and presents enough evidence and both sides to let us come to our own decision.
Well worth several readings but obviously some issues need to be looked at in more detail like the long election commission fiasco that ended in prison sentences for the election commissioners. It seemed that Thaksin had a wide spectrum of politicians and powerful people in his pocket.
Carabao covered
There was a point when Ad started dancing with Big Jiew and his AK-47 armed entourage — some said he himself — were running around bullying people, acting like their own mafia, grabbing land (wasn’t there a protected forest scandal involving him?).
That’s a point when his politics did, and do, matter, as much as the music. I like the pleng of the 80s but not his kaan muang of the 90s. Compare it with how the Caravan people have carried themselves. I’ll take Nga anytime.
A friendly reception
I have said this once and I have said it twice. So I’ll say it a third time.
Thailand should lock up people who sell their votes. Selling votes is criminal. If it is not that clear, then the new constitution should include one special article on this subject, saying IT IS CRIMINAL TO SELL YOUR VOTE.
I have no sympathy for people who sell their votes. They should be locked up along with Thaksin who buys their votes.
Burma tourism debate
It should also be pointed out that it is pretty much impossible to do business in Burma without paying bribes, kickbacks etc as well as taxes. There may be private hotels, but they can’t exist without making payments to the regime.
Burma tourism debate
Tara – I don’t entirely disagree, but I think there are two responses to what you’ve said: (1) the Burmese state, by pretty much every account, is pretty inefficient and has a hard time taxing any business – it would have to evolve quite a lot to be able to actually take over the tourist industry (without killing it first). The difference between tourism and say mining or natural gas is just that – its harder for the state to control and tax. There will be cronism, but not systematic control and profit. and (2) i use to work on Spanish history and remember what happened there – millions of tourists flooded Franco’s Spain in the 60s and 70s, it helped prop up the government, brought in lots of money for the generals, but then, in the end, it helped set up the conditions in which a peaceful transition to democracy was possible 10 years on.
Burma tourism debate
Farmaner’s rhetoric is just that. Is he Burmese or does he just speak for all Burmese people?
New Rambo and Free Burma
[…] A trailer for the new Rambo film is now available on YouTube. The film was shot in Thailand. Previous New Mandala coverage of this Rambo film is available from our archive. […]
Burma tourism debate
That is true, Allison, but I think it still doesn’t eliminate the distinct possibility that the more profitable tourism becomes, the more likely the junta is to push out small private businesses and install themselves or their cronies in their place. The rational that something is OK because it’s not as bad as something else is flawed. They might get loads more revenue from natural resources, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t also take over the tourism industry. I think the possibility that they’ll take steps to limit how much the little guys can benefit from tourism is a separate issue from how much profit they might make from it. The junta is more often greedy than it is rational. But it’s that issue in particular which will diminish the overall benefit that many argue tourism will bring.