A deeply moving book, for its success in laying bear the concerns and life histories of people of a sort about whom we hear and read far too little. Very successful in conveying the social and historical distance of Isan from Bangkok, without exoticizing that difference.
J├╕rgen Udvang
The reason Thaksin didn’t pay tax when he sold AIS is no one pays tax on profit made on the Thai SE. The unDemocrats pretended to be outraged by this but when Abhisit was PM he did nothing about this , probably because he and his rich friends also do very well from this non law.
For once you have made some interesting points that most writers could appreciate. Now please give us your understanding of Suthep┬┤s or the Democrats┬┤ for that matter, for they are the same thing, view on so-called reform. “Reform” is just a slogan and redherring to dupe the middle- class to take to the streets, and to lend some kind of legitimacy to the aims of a party that wants to usurp power from a democratically elected government.Patronage and corruption is part and parcel of the Thai way,and to try and eliminate this would be a Herculean task. Thailand is no exception since the European Union is also rife with corruption and to claim otherwise one must be living in cuckoo-land.
I’m not sure whether there was a subtext to the article but even if not, perhaps I could point out explicitly the obvious correlation between the continuing popularity of the Vessantara Jataka in the Northeast and North – the “Lao” regions of the kingdom – and the popularity of Thaksin and his TRT / PPP / PT parties in these same regions.
It is tempting to see Thaksin as the new Prince Vessantara – the greatest giver in the kingdom. The royalist media and academics have criticized Thaksin’s “populism” but being able to “give big” has been the fundamental attribute of the virtuous ruler in premodern Thai political culture for seven hundred years. It’s the central message of the Vessantara Jataka. One can even see a parallel between Thaksin and Vessantara’s being sent into exile by the King at the demand of the citizens for “giving away the White Elephant”.
By contrast, I think the King’s “sufficiency economy” theory, reintroduced after the 2006 coup, was a public relations disaster. It basically meant that he was relinquishing the ancient Buddhist ideal of the ruler as the greatest giver.
In this older culture no-one cares if you are fabulously wealthy (or even how you accumulate it), as long as you give it away, as Vessantara did. Giving was the highest form of morality that could be achieved – since it enables the bodhisatta to be enlightened in his next earthly incarnation as the Buddha.
But if people know that you are fabulously wealthy and then you tell them that they have to make do with the little that they have, then you have a problem.
As Prof. Lefferts points out, today the ceremonial recitation of the Vessantara Jataka are very popular in the NE and the N, but comparatively less popular in the central region, Bangkok and the south. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Fifth Reign court formally removed the Vessantara Jataka and the other Jatakas from orthodox Thai Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century – even if this reform had relatively little impact beyond the court and was largely ignored in the NE and N – as McDaniel argues. The Vessantara Jataka is least popular, and probably largely unknown except in a superficial way, to most of the Westernized Thai elite that runs the country.
These are the constituencies in which Thaksin has little support, to say the least.
These constituencies have been exposed to the global economy for a much longer time than the N and NE. A modern economic morality has largely replaced the older moral culture attached to wealth accumulation and circulation, which is articulated in the Vessantara Jataka and associated Buddhist literature.
For the monarchy, I think this clash of political-economic-moral cultures is one of those “antinomy issues” that Christine Gray wrote about in her brilliant thesis. Since the rise of Western power in the middle of the nineteenth century the Thai monarchy has had to play a double game of pretending to be one thing to the Western powers and another to its domestic constituency. Both posed threats to its survival in the modern period. King Bhumibol was particularly skilled at playing this game. In fact, as Gray’s thesis showed, during the period of Thailand’s rapid economic development from the 1960s-80s he successfully cultivated the ideal of the ascetic bodhisatta ruler engaged in the practice of accumulating barami, of which the highest achievement was the Perfection of Giving. This took the form of highly publicized royal merit-making ceremonies, the royal projects, and presiding over Thailand’s booming economy more generally.
So why introduce the “sufficiency economy”?
I think that the sufficiency economy discourse worked during the 1997-98 financial crisis because the people who were most affected were the Westernized middle class. They understood the message of sufficiency economy, which actually came from a leftist nationalist, anti-colonial discourse they were familiar with from their education and the modern mass media, rather than from Thailand’s indigenous Buddhist tradition. So the King was able to display a solidarity with the economically distressed middle class, who were, by the 1990s, also the most politically influential class. So in actual fact, sufficiency economy is not particularly Buddhist at all, despite a lot of the commentary on it, by comparison with the economic morality of the Vessantara Jataka.
Sufficiency economy reared its head again after the 2006 coup, but the group which was most adversely affected this time was not the middle class, but the rural and lower-socio-economic groups, especially, but not exclusively, in the N and NE. Since the rise of Thaksin and the politicization of the masses, these groups were now politically crucial.
So relaunching “sufficiency economy” was a very bad misjudgment, either on the part of the king or perhaps more likely, some well-meaning royalists whose ideas owed more to socialism than Buddhism. Its moral message alienated what was now a politically crucial group.
So at one level, the conflict today is between two moral cultures, which is maybe why there seems to be no middle ground. There are many obvious examples of this, which I won’t go into here since this post is already too long.
Unlike at the end of the Vessantara Jataka, in Thaksin’s case the King seems unwilling to heed the citizens’ demands that be brought back from exile, so that he might, like Prince Vessantara, “give them all the things they desired”
But they did they send the 20 million upcountry to the actual *farms* or was the money used simply to sustain the protest?
By the way, for all the spaminess lengthiness and frequency of your posts, Jorgen, I do appreciate you consistently using ‘farmers’ as opposed to the ‘rice farmers’ used by nearly all foreign observers, including foreign journalists. What is it about the compulsion to add ‘rice’. It sounds rather effete to me, like something you’d expect to see in a gap year student’s travelogue. The Thai press simply call them farmers.
So of 1,000 tractors, they took the 20 best looking ones and placed them at the front. Big deal. That’s 100% according to Thai tradition: Thai farmers want to look their best when going to town, whatever the situation is. Farmers also take good care of their tools, so that their investment last longer. These are rice farmers from Central Thailand who mostly do three crops per year. How do you think they do that? Using water buffaloes?
There seems to be a misconception among many foreigners that most Thai farmers exists in some medieval age space. While farmers in some parts of the country are poor, farming is an industry, and the farmers use the tools available to them. Farmers in Thailand have used tractors and combine harvesters for decades. Harvesting by hand is still done in some of the poor areas, particularly where the yield is low, but that’s not where the bulk of the rice comes from.
In this article, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul states that the Thai government will go on a tour to 5 superpowers to explain what the real situation is. He names 5 countries: the US, Russia, China, France and England plus the UN. Interestingly, the largest industrial investor in Thailand for decades, and by a huge margin, Japan, is not on the list. Is that because they assume that the Japanese know “the truth” about Thailand, or is it yet another slip of memory.
When Thaksin became prime minister for the first time, he held a speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok. During that speech, he thanked the nations who had helped making the industrialisation of Thailand possible, USA and China, also he omitting Japan. When confronted with the omission, he looked and sounded very confused and the question about the fact had to be asked several times before he added something like “oh… and yes… Japan”. Maybe the Shinawatra family don’t like the Japanese?
And don’t forget, the tractors look like they have just been driven off the dealer lot. The real farmers are starving, while these lots of “wannabe” are playing with their borrowed toys. Huh…power of the Third Reich.
The yellows have been totally open about this. The moment the first farmers arrived in Bangkok, they collected 20 million baht and donated to the farmers. Still, the two groups of demonstrators have both stated that they do not want to mix their cases and the farmers now on their way to Bangkok have repeated that. Their spokesman is Khun Chada Thaiset, former Chat Thai Pattana Party MP.
Apparently, their numbers have increased to 15,000 during the night, and more are joining them.
The Democrat Party showed during their latest period in office that they lacked the skill and ambitions to do anything with the most burning issues in the Thai society. They had the chance, but didn’t grab it. The list of issues is long, but obviously the farmers’ situation, education and corruption are those areas that are really sticking out. I don’t have much against Abhisit, although he suffers from a lack of communication skills, particularly when challenged by the “grassroots”, but he is probably not the man. Suthep is obviously not a good candidate for anything except holding long speeches. Korn is the man they could place their bets on, being far more direct and down to earth than Abhisit. But the real problem is that they, like Phuea Thai, carry a load of “old style elite” with them. Those are mostly ageing politician with fading appeal, but they have a strong network still, and they are above all incredibly greedy.
It’s tempting, but not very realistic, to disqualify all current politicians, and replace them with new, hopefully honest, people in all positions. From the first day I started discussing Thai politics, I’ve heard the same statement: Few become politicians in Thailand to serve the people. They become politicians to serve themselves. This is also the reason for changing ministers at short intervals, making any continuity more or less impossible: There are so many who demand a piece of the cake.
Particularly at the ministry of education, the bureaucrats complain about that. There are people there who have the knowledge and skill to improve the education system, but every sixth month or so, a new education minister arrives, more or less qualified, with new policies and ideas, scrapping all recent work.
Unfortunately, some good, potential politicians are hiding away at universities and private enterprises, simply because they are honest people and don’t want to have “Politician” stamped across their foreheads. It’s almost as bad as “Police Officer”. None of those titles are regarded very highly, and everybody knows that many or most of them are corrupt and steal from the people.
This is what has brought people in Bangkok to the streets. Not necessarily because they like Suthep, but because they think that he has a point and because they are extremely fed up with a system that is increasingly dysfunctional and designed to feed the crooks. It’s interesting that the amnesty bill was what brought this out. People don’t want any politicians off the hook, regardless of colour or opinion. They want reform, but they don’t know how to do it. So, they follow the man who cries “reform” the loudest, in this case Suthep. That has happened before, in other societies as well, and in a way, one can say that it was this that brought Thaksin to the top as well.
In a western society, and indeed in some of the neighbouring countries, situations like these have led to revolutions. But that is not the Thai way, at least not so far. It’s important then to remember the strong influence of Buddhism in Thailand. Although somewhat faded these days, particularly in the cities, this religion teaches attitudes that are totally alien to most westerners and that encourage the Thai people to reach conclusions which may seem very unlogical to an outsider.
Another fact is important to remember too: Those of us who are not Thai will always be outsiders in this society, even after decades in this country. The Thai people will follow their own recipe, whatever the outsiders opinions are.
Yes, but who’s paying for the gas, the food and drinks, the per diem, the coordination, the whistles, the Thai and royal flags, etc. etc.? You’re naive if you believe 10,000 farmers on 1,000 tractors can rally spontaneously. It’s almost as unbelievable as 1,250 Arhats meeting spontaneously on Makha Bucha.
Given all the discontent and policy failure you have documented Jorgen, the Democrats must be feeling pretty confident if it comes to another election. Yes?
Here, dear academics, is your Elite Farmers on their way to Bangkok from Uthai Thani. 10,000 of them passing Ayuttaya on 1,000 tractors. Or are they fake rice farmers on fake tractors?
Thanks for the insightful response. It was a glaring omission on my part not to include private Islamic schools on the list. I do look at private Islamic schools with the integrated curriculum, both in Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, I spent some time at Sekolah Al-Amin in Bangi.
Yes, you’re totally correct. Schools like Al-Amin attract mainly Muslims middle-class professionals who are looking for a curriculum that seamlessly blends aspects of modern life and Islamic values – and willing to pay it. The main objective of these parents is for their children to become devout Muslim professionals, not necessarily religious functionaries with Jakim, etc. So instead delving deep into the studying of old kitabs and writings of fuqaha (ahli fikih), these schools focus more on character building through putting Islamic values in action in everyday life. But the schools also require students to be well-versed in English and Arabic, along with BM. Al-Amin, for example, has an Arabic proficiency test as part of its application procedure.
It’s hard to see the kind of impacts these private Islamic schools have on their students. On one hand, the integrated education does offer them the ability to better navigate and confront the problems of modern world without compromising their identity as Muslims. But on the other hand, what kind of “Islamic values” are being inculcated in these students: is it the kind of values that promote tolerance, diversity and equality or instill a strong sense of religious supremacy and obliviousness to other perspectives? The alumni of these schools will potentially form a powerful political bloc that can shape government policies especially when it comes to religious harmony and ethnic relations, both are somehow sadly intertwined in Malaysia.
My fear is that the intolerance and radicalism might not come in the form of Quran-thumping bearded guys in a robe but in clean-shaven men in pressed shirts and hijabi women in colorful baju kurung staffing the mid- and upper-level management of private and public sectors. Their social impacts are more surreptitious and yet more far-ranging.
It’s easy to “otherize” SAR grads who rebel against the federal government as unsophisticated and misguided by their heavy reliance on and simplistic, outmoded interpretation of Islamic texts. Meanwhile, the alumni of private Islamic schools are professionals who occupy the same socio-economic space as us, and therefore deemed to be “normal” and “non-threatening,” their radicalism notwithstanding. Mind you that this is merely hypothetical and of course it’s not as black-and-white as I have just illustrated.
The point is the heavy inculcation of a sole interpretation of values of a single faith can potentially be detrimental to the students ability to appreciate diversity of opinions and to think critically about the pressing issues of our time. It creates a generation of students who are indoctrinated to only view life through a single lens, that is their own strict irrevocable version of the Truth. This will not only hold the country back in scientific and technological development but also the very nature of Islam itself in Malaysia.
– In current Thailand, there is a tiny economic elite, the families that own the businesses, land in Bangkok and surroundings etc. While they used to have a lot of political power, that power is fast eroding if there’s much left at all.
– Until recently, you could also talk about a royalist elite, but the development the last few years have changed that dramatically. Many are still loyal to the King, but that is probably much stronger upcountry than in Bangkok. The strongest exponent for the royalist elite are fading out for natural reasons and in Bangkok, “traditional Thai values” are disappearing at a speed few thought was possible only five years ago.
– Then there is the Bangkok middle class. They can hardly be called an elite. Most of them have an education, many of them are ambitious, but although they earn much better than farmers, cost of living and the commercial pressure makes them run fast to survive. So fast that few of them get children. The fertility rate in Thailand is 1.6, but most of those children are born in rural communities. These are the ones that have been on the streets in Bangkok the last few months. Many of them come from Isan and other upcountry provinces and many have farmer parents.
Thaksin himself is a typical representative of the traditional elite. He comes from a relatively rich family and has expanded the family fortune by using connections within the business world, political life, the police and the military. The biggest difference between him and other successful business people in Thailand is that he chose to follow a political path while still maintaining his business interests.
So if you ask me, if there is a Thai elite, it’s people like Thaksin; extremely rich, able to make money on everything he does, politically influential even from his exile, and totally ruthless.
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The weakness of the Thai royalists
it was uttered 2000 years before me.
Follow the money
Review of Isan Writers, Thai Literature
A deeply moving book, for its success in laying bear the concerns and life histories of people of a sort about whom we hear and read far too little. Very successful in conveying the social and historical distance of Isan from Bangkok, without exoticizing that difference.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
J├╕rgen Udvang
The reason Thaksin didn’t pay tax when he sold AIS is no one pays tax on profit made on the Thai SE. The unDemocrats pretended to be outraged by this but when Abhisit was PM he did nothing about this , probably because he and his rich friends also do very well from this non law.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
J.Udvang,
For once you have made some interesting points that most writers could appreciate. Now please give us your understanding of Suthep┬┤s or the Democrats┬┤ for that matter, for they are the same thing, view on so-called reform. “Reform” is just a slogan and redherring to dupe the middle- class to take to the streets, and to lend some kind of legitimacy to the aims of a party that wants to usurp power from a democratically elected government.Patronage and corruption is part and parcel of the Thai way,and to try and eliminate this would be a Herculean task. Thailand is no exception since the European Union is also rife with corruption and to claim otherwise one must be living in cuckoo-land.
Travails of the khon dii
Thanks for this thought-provoking piece.
I’m not sure whether there was a subtext to the article but even if not, perhaps I could point out explicitly the obvious correlation between the continuing popularity of the Vessantara Jataka in the Northeast and North – the “Lao” regions of the kingdom – and the popularity of Thaksin and his TRT / PPP / PT parties in these same regions.
It is tempting to see Thaksin as the new Prince Vessantara – the greatest giver in the kingdom. The royalist media and academics have criticized Thaksin’s “populism” but being able to “give big” has been the fundamental attribute of the virtuous ruler in premodern Thai political culture for seven hundred years. It’s the central message of the Vessantara Jataka. One can even see a parallel between Thaksin and Vessantara’s being sent into exile by the King at the demand of the citizens for “giving away the White Elephant”.
By contrast, I think the King’s “sufficiency economy” theory, reintroduced after the 2006 coup, was a public relations disaster. It basically meant that he was relinquishing the ancient Buddhist ideal of the ruler as the greatest giver.
In this older culture no-one cares if you are fabulously wealthy (or even how you accumulate it), as long as you give it away, as Vessantara did. Giving was the highest form of morality that could be achieved – since it enables the bodhisatta to be enlightened in his next earthly incarnation as the Buddha.
But if people know that you are fabulously wealthy and then you tell them that they have to make do with the little that they have, then you have a problem.
As Prof. Lefferts points out, today the ceremonial recitation of the Vessantara Jataka are very popular in the NE and the N, but comparatively less popular in the central region, Bangkok and the south. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the Fifth Reign court formally removed the Vessantara Jataka and the other Jatakas from orthodox Thai Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century – even if this reform had relatively little impact beyond the court and was largely ignored in the NE and N – as McDaniel argues. The Vessantara Jataka is least popular, and probably largely unknown except in a superficial way, to most of the Westernized Thai elite that runs the country.
These are the constituencies in which Thaksin has little support, to say the least.
These constituencies have been exposed to the global economy for a much longer time than the N and NE. A modern economic morality has largely replaced the older moral culture attached to wealth accumulation and circulation, which is articulated in the Vessantara Jataka and associated Buddhist literature.
For the monarchy, I think this clash of political-economic-moral cultures is one of those “antinomy issues” that Christine Gray wrote about in her brilliant thesis. Since the rise of Western power in the middle of the nineteenth century the Thai monarchy has had to play a double game of pretending to be one thing to the Western powers and another to its domestic constituency. Both posed threats to its survival in the modern period. King Bhumibol was particularly skilled at playing this game. In fact, as Gray’s thesis showed, during the period of Thailand’s rapid economic development from the 1960s-80s he successfully cultivated the ideal of the ascetic bodhisatta ruler engaged in the practice of accumulating barami, of which the highest achievement was the Perfection of Giving. This took the form of highly publicized royal merit-making ceremonies, the royal projects, and presiding over Thailand’s booming economy more generally.
So why introduce the “sufficiency economy”?
I think that the sufficiency economy discourse worked during the 1997-98 financial crisis because the people who were most affected were the Westernized middle class. They understood the message of sufficiency economy, which actually came from a leftist nationalist, anti-colonial discourse they were familiar with from their education and the modern mass media, rather than from Thailand’s indigenous Buddhist tradition. So the King was able to display a solidarity with the economically distressed middle class, who were, by the 1990s, also the most politically influential class. So in actual fact, sufficiency economy is not particularly Buddhist at all, despite a lot of the commentary on it, by comparison with the economic morality of the Vessantara Jataka.
Sufficiency economy reared its head again after the 2006 coup, but the group which was most adversely affected this time was not the middle class, but the rural and lower-socio-economic groups, especially, but not exclusively, in the N and NE. Since the rise of Thaksin and the politicization of the masses, these groups were now politically crucial.
So relaunching “sufficiency economy” was a very bad misjudgment, either on the part of the king or perhaps more likely, some well-meaning royalists whose ideas owed more to socialism than Buddhism. Its moral message alienated what was now a politically crucial group.
So at one level, the conflict today is between two moral cultures, which is maybe why there seems to be no middle ground. There are many obvious examples of this, which I won’t go into here since this post is already too long.
Unlike at the end of the Vessantara Jataka, in Thaksin’s case the King seems unwilling to heed the citizens’ demands that be brought back from exile, so that he might, like Prince Vessantara, “give them all the things they desired”
Thanks again for the post.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Actually, the 25 million baht donation for farmers were all given to lawyers to sue the PT government for not having the money to pay the farmers.
Still could be consider an indirect help, all minor details, details.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Those farmers probably grew sugar cane this year.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
But they did they send the 20 million upcountry to the actual *farms* or was the money used simply to sustain the protest?
By the way, for all the
spaminesslengthiness and frequency of your posts, Jorgen, I do appreciate you consistently using ‘farmers’ as opposed to the ‘rice farmers’ used by nearly all foreign observers, including foreign journalists. What is it about the compulsion to add ‘rice’. It sounds rather effete to me, like something you’d expect to see in a gap year student’s travelogue. The Thai press simply call them farmers.The weakness of the Thai royalists
But if you really want to see a photo of a fake farmer, there’s a photo of one at the top of this article 😉
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/politics/Hounded-premier-adapts-to-work-on-the-run-30227371.html
The weakness of the Thai royalists
So of 1,000 tractors, they took the 20 best looking ones and placed them at the front. Big deal. That’s 100% according to Thai tradition: Thai farmers want to look their best when going to town, whatever the situation is. Farmers also take good care of their tools, so that their investment last longer. These are rice farmers from Central Thailand who mostly do three crops per year. How do you think they do that? Using water buffaloes?
There seems to be a misconception among many foreigners that most Thai farmers exists in some medieval age space. While farmers in some parts of the country are poor, farming is an industry, and the farmers use the tools available to them. Farmers in Thailand have used tractors and combine harvesters for decades. Harvesting by hand is still done in some of the poor areas, particularly where the yield is low, but that’s not where the bulk of the rice comes from.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
In this article, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul states that the Thai government will go on a tour to 5 superpowers to explain what the real situation is. He names 5 countries: the US, Russia, China, France and England plus the UN. Interestingly, the largest industrial investor in Thailand for decades, and by a huge margin, Japan, is not on the list. Is that because they assume that the Japanese know “the truth” about Thailand, or is it yet another slip of memory.
When Thaksin became prime minister for the first time, he held a speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok. During that speech, he thanked the nations who had helped making the industrialisation of Thailand possible, USA and China, also he omitting Japan. When confronted with the omission, he looked and sounded very confused and the question about the fact had to be asked several times before he added something like “oh… and yes… Japan”. Maybe the Shinawatra family don’t like the Japanese?
http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/government-tell-super-powers-un-political-situation/
The weakness of the Thai royalists
And don’t forget, the tractors look like they have just been driven off the dealer lot. The real farmers are starving, while these lots of “wannabe” are playing with their borrowed toys. Huh…power of the Third Reich.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
The yellows have been totally open about this. The moment the first farmers arrived in Bangkok, they collected 20 million baht and donated to the farmers. Still, the two groups of demonstrators have both stated that they do not want to mix their cases and the farmers now on their way to Bangkok have repeated that. Their spokesman is Khun Chada Thaiset, former Chat Thai Pattana Party MP.
Apparently, their numbers have increased to 15,000 during the night, and more are joining them.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
The Democrat Party showed during their latest period in office that they lacked the skill and ambitions to do anything with the most burning issues in the Thai society. They had the chance, but didn’t grab it. The list of issues is long, but obviously the farmers’ situation, education and corruption are those areas that are really sticking out. I don’t have much against Abhisit, although he suffers from a lack of communication skills, particularly when challenged by the “grassroots”, but he is probably not the man. Suthep is obviously not a good candidate for anything except holding long speeches. Korn is the man they could place their bets on, being far more direct and down to earth than Abhisit. But the real problem is that they, like Phuea Thai, carry a load of “old style elite” with them. Those are mostly ageing politician with fading appeal, but they have a strong network still, and they are above all incredibly greedy.
It’s tempting, but not very realistic, to disqualify all current politicians, and replace them with new, hopefully honest, people in all positions. From the first day I started discussing Thai politics, I’ve heard the same statement: Few become politicians in Thailand to serve the people. They become politicians to serve themselves. This is also the reason for changing ministers at short intervals, making any continuity more or less impossible: There are so many who demand a piece of the cake.
Particularly at the ministry of education, the bureaucrats complain about that. There are people there who have the knowledge and skill to improve the education system, but every sixth month or so, a new education minister arrives, more or less qualified, with new policies and ideas, scrapping all recent work.
Unfortunately, some good, potential politicians are hiding away at universities and private enterprises, simply because they are honest people and don’t want to have “Politician” stamped across their foreheads. It’s almost as bad as “Police Officer”. None of those titles are regarded very highly, and everybody knows that many or most of them are corrupt and steal from the people.
This is what has brought people in Bangkok to the streets. Not necessarily because they like Suthep, but because they think that he has a point and because they are extremely fed up with a system that is increasingly dysfunctional and designed to feed the crooks. It’s interesting that the amnesty bill was what brought this out. People don’t want any politicians off the hook, regardless of colour or opinion. They want reform, but they don’t know how to do it. So, they follow the man who cries “reform” the loudest, in this case Suthep. That has happened before, in other societies as well, and in a way, one can say that it was this that brought Thaksin to the top as well.
In a western society, and indeed in some of the neighbouring countries, situations like these have led to revolutions. But that is not the Thai way, at least not so far. It’s important then to remember the strong influence of Buddhism in Thailand. Although somewhat faded these days, particularly in the cities, this religion teaches attitudes that are totally alien to most westerners and that encourage the Thai people to reach conclusions which may seem very unlogical to an outsider.
Another fact is important to remember too: Those of us who are not Thai will always be outsiders in this society, even after decades in this country. The Thai people will follow their own recipe, whatever the outsiders opinions are.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Yes, but who’s paying for the gas, the food and drinks, the per diem, the coordination, the whistles, the Thai and royal flags, etc. etc.? You’re naive if you believe 10,000 farmers on 1,000 tractors can rally spontaneously. It’s almost as unbelievable as 1,250 Arhats meeting spontaneously on Makha Bucha.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Given all the discontent and policy failure you have documented Jorgen, the Democrats must be feeling pretty confident if it comes to another election. Yes?
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Here, dear academics, is your Elite Farmers on their way to Bangkok from Uthai Thani. 10,000 of them passing Ayuttaya on 1,000 tractors. Or are they fake rice farmers on fake tractors?
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/politics/1000-farm-tractors-15000-farmers-head-to-Bangkok-30227355.html
Nah, since The Nation is writing about this, it must be fake, don’t you think?
The ups and downs of Islamic education in Malaysia
Thanks for the insightful response. It was a glaring omission on my part not to include private Islamic schools on the list. I do look at private Islamic schools with the integrated curriculum, both in Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, I spent some time at Sekolah Al-Amin in Bangi.
Yes, you’re totally correct. Schools like Al-Amin attract mainly Muslims middle-class professionals who are looking for a curriculum that seamlessly blends aspects of modern life and Islamic values – and willing to pay it. The main objective of these parents is for their children to become devout Muslim professionals, not necessarily religious functionaries with Jakim, etc. So instead delving deep into the studying of old kitabs and writings of fuqaha (ahli fikih), these schools focus more on character building through putting Islamic values in action in everyday life. But the schools also require students to be well-versed in English and Arabic, along with BM. Al-Amin, for example, has an Arabic proficiency test as part of its application procedure.
It’s hard to see the kind of impacts these private Islamic schools have on their students. On one hand, the integrated education does offer them the ability to better navigate and confront the problems of modern world without compromising their identity as Muslims. But on the other hand, what kind of “Islamic values” are being inculcated in these students: is it the kind of values that promote tolerance, diversity and equality or instill a strong sense of religious supremacy and obliviousness to other perspectives? The alumni of these schools will potentially form a powerful political bloc that can shape government policies especially when it comes to religious harmony and ethnic relations, both are somehow sadly intertwined in Malaysia.
My fear is that the intolerance and radicalism might not come in the form of Quran-thumping bearded guys in a robe but in clean-shaven men in pressed shirts and hijabi women in colorful baju kurung staffing the mid- and upper-level management of private and public sectors. Their social impacts are more surreptitious and yet more far-ranging.
It’s easy to “otherize” SAR grads who rebel against the federal government as unsophisticated and misguided by their heavy reliance on and simplistic, outmoded interpretation of Islamic texts. Meanwhile, the alumni of private Islamic schools are professionals who occupy the same socio-economic space as us, and therefore deemed to be “normal” and “non-threatening,” their radicalism notwithstanding. Mind you that this is merely hypothetical and of course it’s not as black-and-white as I have just illustrated.
The point is the heavy inculcation of a sole interpretation of values of a single faith can potentially be detrimental to the students ability to appreciate diversity of opinions and to think critically about the pressing issues of our time. It creates a generation of students who are indoctrinated to only view life through a single lens, that is their own strict irrevocable version of the Truth. This will not only hold the country back in scientific and technological development but also the very nature of Islam itself in Malaysia.
The weakness of the Thai royalists
Yes, it’s Michael Yon, who as opposed to you academic guys is at the demonstration sites every day, talking and discussing with the people involved.
A Gramscian take on Thai politics
That’s actually a valid question.
– In current Thailand, there is a tiny economic elite, the families that own the businesses, land in Bangkok and surroundings etc. While they used to have a lot of political power, that power is fast eroding if there’s much left at all.
– Until recently, you could also talk about a royalist elite, but the development the last few years have changed that dramatically. Many are still loyal to the King, but that is probably much stronger upcountry than in Bangkok. The strongest exponent for the royalist elite are fading out for natural reasons and in Bangkok, “traditional Thai values” are disappearing at a speed few thought was possible only five years ago.
– Then there is the Bangkok middle class. They can hardly be called an elite. Most of them have an education, many of them are ambitious, but although they earn much better than farmers, cost of living and the commercial pressure makes them run fast to survive. So fast that few of them get children. The fertility rate in Thailand is 1.6, but most of those children are born in rural communities. These are the ones that have been on the streets in Bangkok the last few months. Many of them come from Isan and other upcountry provinces and many have farmer parents.
Thaksin himself is a typical representative of the traditional elite. He comes from a relatively rich family and has expanded the family fortune by using connections within the business world, political life, the police and the military. The biggest difference between him and other successful business people in Thailand is that he chose to follow a political path while still maintaining his business interests.
So if you ask me, if there is a Thai elite, it’s people like Thaksin; extremely rich, able to make money on everything he does, politically influential even from his exile, and totally ruthless.