Somtow's World

Don't Shoot the Shyster!

2010-07-29T19:40:00.000+07:00

Once again I've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into political punditry. For the past week now, friends of mine in America and elsewhere have been emailing me a document which appears to be by the controversial lawyer-apologist Robert Amsterdam. The header reads "The Bangkok Massacres: A Call for Accountability: The Thailand White Paper Final by Robert Amsterdam". These emails to me invariably include comments like "Do something about this!" Though what I am supposed to do, I am not quite sure. Procrastinating as long as I could — after all, I did have Mahler 3 to conduct — I finally got around to double-clicking the icon today. It was then that I learned that the document is seventy-five pages long.

As I started to read it, I realized that this document has something in common with a novel by my friend Norman Spinrad called The Iron Dream. In this book, Spinrad used novelistic license to alter one tiny moment in our past. He takes a real-life historical figure, a mediocre artist named Adolf Schickelgruber, and instead of leaving him in Europe, causes him to emigrate to the United States where he becomes a mediocre science fiction writer. The book, then, is the "award-winning novel" that might have been written by this person — and it's a bizarre epic fantasy about blonde, noble Aryans conquering evil, quasi-semitic lower orders of humanity to bring about a shining future. It's the Lord of the Rings version of the Third Reich.

Now, in real life, Schickelgruber didn't emigrate to America, but did change his surname to Hitler. The rest you know.

Mr. Amsterdam's White Paper has a great deal in common with Norman Spinrad's novel, although it doesn't purport to be a novel. Both pieces change a little bit of history and extrapolate an edifice of the imagination from that little change. The White Paper is, in its own way, as much of a masterpiece as The Iron Dream, but to understand why, one must first consider what it is that a novelist does, and what it is that a lawyer does.

Both novelists and lawyers build houses of cards. But although a novelist may invent anything that he likes, he is only successful insofar as the foundation he builds on is one of truth. A novel only truly speaks to the reader if in that novel the reader can recognize himself. As the Dutch novelist Gerard Reve said, "Ik lieg de waarheid."— "I lie the truth."

What a lawyer ostensibly does is very similar. He builds up, through what is hopefully an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, a viable, sequential story — a sort of novel, if you like. But a lawyer's primary loyalty is not to truth. It is to the client. His sole motivation is convincing the jury — you, the reader in this case — that whatever it is his client is supposed to have done, he didn't do it. The cards from which the house of cards is built may all be "truths" ... but the foundation of the house need not be the truth at all.

In other words, a novelist must use invention to reach a truthful conclusion ... whereas a lawyer may well use truth to get to a conclusion that is pure invention.

Of course, truth by itself seldom leads to untrue conclusions. This is where the lawyer must have recourse to the most important weapon in his armoury: the half-truth.

Recently, when Christiane Amanpour was badgering Mr. Abhisit on Hard Talk, she tried to ambush him with the challenging statement "You weren't elected." Our prime minister decided to respond by giving an elaborate explanation of Thailand's parliamentary process. This was not the ideal way of dealing with her. Although everything that the prime minister said was true, Ms. Amanpour did not make the statement in order to elicit the truth. It was to provoke drama, and the proper response should have been something like, "What a stupid statement: in a parliamentary democracy, the prime minister is never directly chosen by the electorate. Didn't you learn that in school? And you call yourself British!" Ms. Amanpour uttered a half-truth as though it were a whole one; she should have been called on it. To start explaining, to start justifying, is already to concede the validity of the half-truth. You're letting the other side choose the terms of discourse. You're agreeing to fight on their turf.

Let's not start by falling for this.

If I were to take every half-truth in the 75-page treatise and respond to it, I could probably win every single argument; but by then the war would have been lost. And that is, of course, what Mr Amsterdam wishes people to do. If he can set a few dozen officials in the Thai government to work denouncing his arguments and dredging up the facts, no one will notice what all this is actually about.

We will take Mr. Amsterdam at his word when he says that he is Mr. Thaksin's lawyer. But it may seem a little odd for him to be defending someone who has already been convicted. Nevertheless, Mr. Amsterdam has a history of doing just that. While one of his previous clients, Mr. Khordokhovsky of the Yukos case, was already in jail, he went on a international whitewashing binge. He was, in effect, Khordokhovsky's lobbyist, not his lawyer. His efforts were not entirely effective, however. There is no reason his methods would work any better now, unless we allow them to. Nevertheless, there is a real danger that Thailand's government will miss the point, rise to the bait, and waste a lot of valuable time trying "handle" Amsterdam's posturings.

I'm not a lawyer. Therefore, I see no reason to answer point for point, as a lawyer would. Rather, I would like to respond as a novelist. Because Amsterdam's White Paper is as fictitious as any novel. But if it somehow manages to illuminate some fundamental truth, it may still be considered valid. And that is the question we need to answer: is it valid? is it necessary? or are we simply being distracted from what we should be looking at?

So let's start by cutting to the chase. Who is Mr. Amsterdam working for, and what is the actual purpose of this so-called White Paper? The answer, of course, is that his employer is Mr. Thaksin, and Mr. Amsterdam has been employed to rehabilitate his boss's reputation with the eventual goal of returning him to Thailand with his wealth intact and without having to suffer any prison time.

Once we understand that the White Paper is not actually a serious call for this government to come to account, nor a genuine, balanced analysis of the political situation in Thailand, but simply one of the tools Mr. Amsterdam has fashioned in order to realize his employer's goals, it will all make very much more sense.

Let us examine this piece of Mr. Amsterdam's arsenal for what it is. You are the jury. Cutting through the PR and the rhetoric, Mr. Thaksin is, at present, a condemned criminal on the lam. The governments of the major powers have accepted the findings of Thailand's legal system. And by hiring Mr. Amsterdam, Mr. Thaksin himself has acknowledged what the terms of discourse are. It is up to Mr. Amsterdam to shift the war back to more congenial turf.

What are the methods by which a lawyer gets a rapist, corrupt politician, or mafia don off the hook? Well, there are several main ones, and the White Paper uses every single one of them.

(a) Put the victim on trial.

(b) Overwhelm the jury with irrelevant facts and figures.

(d) Use emotionally-charged "power words" to alter the jury's perspective on events.

(e) Engage the jury's sympathy for the perpetrator

(f) Try the case in the court of public opinion and the media.

Once the White Paper is examined from the point of view of its author's motivation, most of its blandishments become irrelevant.

I'd like to discuss how the White Paper adheres to the classic rulebook.

We'll start with (a): Put the victim on trial. Well, here's where the fun begins. "She made me do it" is the rapist's first line of defense and the white paper's title makes it quite clear that this will be the main thrust of Amsterdam's argument. A historically selective introduction soon leads to an equally selective rundown of the events we all lived through this year, culminating in the chapter heading "crimes against humanity" in which Mr. Amsterdam makes much of the legal definition of such crimes. He then tries to link this definition with the Rajprasong events, but by using the phrase "appears to be present", he manages to let himself off the hook. Indeed, the phrase "appears to" is a constant mantra here, because he's not really accusing the government of a perpetrating a massacre. He is saying that there is an appearance of a massacre. This legalistic hairsplitting allows him be as sensationalist as he wants, while affording himself deniability every turn.

When I say that Mr Amsterdam is putitng the victim on trial, I am not saying that the victim is the government, the democratic party, or Mr. Abhisit. The victim is Thailand.

Mr Thaksin has been convicted not of stealing from the democratic party, but of stealing from Thailand. It is the judiciary system of Thailand that has convicted him, not the yellow shirts and not the elite. When Mr Thaksin's government ordered the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers, when it permitted the torture and slaying of Muslims in the South of Thailand, these were crimes against Thailand. He has not yet been convicted of these latter crimes, but by painting Abhisit as a vicious murderer, Mr. Amsterdam is launching a preemptive strike against against the bringing of such charges against Mr. Thaksin.

As a lawyer Mr. Amsterdam knows perfectly well that the springtime violence does not rise to the level of a crime against humanity as defined by the laws he himself cites. If this were true, U.S. presidents would have been on the dock for Kent State and Waco. These were terrible tragedies — but hardly the Killing Fields or Buchenwald. Surely Mr Amsterdam knows better than to equate an attempt by a recognized government to restore order, when a city has been held hostage by lawless ruffians for months, with the Holocaust.

So let's return to the rapist analogy. What is Mr. Amsterdam's point? It is this: "Okay, so maybe my client raped Thailand. But Thailand was a bad girl. She brought it on herself."

Let's look at (b) now, the irrelevant facts and figures. I've already shown how Mr. Amsterdams quotes masses of legal data, makes it look as though it's relevant, then squirms out of the whole thing with the phrase "appears to." His second chapter, a reductionist summary of the history of Thailand's constitutional development, is full of indisputable facts, but for real analysis one might want to read the commentary of a genuine historian such as David Wyatt. This is the icing without the cake, and it's there to provide a cloak of verisimilitude to Mr. Amsterdam's specious arguments.

The flawed premise (c) is evident from the very opening sentence of Mr. Amsterdam's thesis. "For four years," he says, "the people of Thailand have been the victims of a systematic and unrelenting assault on their most fundamental right ... self determination through genuine elections."

Powerful stuff. But it is a half-truth. The entire logical thread of the White Paper leads outward from this half-truth. and as the truth gets halved again and again, recursively, we finally end up what I would call a near-lie. It is only the constant repetition of the word "appears" that prevents the paper from being actual lies.

You see, Mr. Amsterdam is protecting his client, but on a deeper level, he is protecting himself. Proud as he is of the elegance of his constructed arguments, he is forced to tell us, in the small print, that it's a house of cards.

To tell the whole truth version of this opening sentence would be to try to understand both sides of the issue, to comprehend not only that some people's rights were violated in the last four years, but that the reason they were violated may have been a reaction to similar, in many cases more egregious, violations during the Thaksin era. This is not about an evil military elitist monolith clamping down on a noble, pro-people regime. Rather it is the story of a regime that began with great optimism and with the highest of hopes, supported by almost everyone as a breath of fresh air ... a regime that moved steadily away from its professed principles towards repression, darkness, and corruption, until the only mechanism that could be found to stop the country's self-destruction was the unpopular and outmoded strategy of the military coup — a strategy that the military itself realized, almost immediately, was not working. That military came to its senses and restored an elected government almost immediately and has so far in fact resisted the temptation to have another coup — though it has been at times needlessly meddlesome. It is the story of groups of people, yellows and reds and others, unable to accept that a democracy thrives on diversity of opinion, and that in a mature democracy, when you lose an election, you don't seize airports or burn down shopping malls — you try to win the next one fair and square. It is also the story of a leader having to choose on a daily basis between unacceptable alternatives, and finally coming up with a plan that has pleased no one — and which is therefore almost certainly the only correct one.

To tell the whole truth would be to describe this last year as only one of a series of dramatic milestones in an arduous journey towards democracy that has had reverses in the past, but is still clearly, inexorably, moving in the right direction.

He may or may not be a lawyer in this case, but a historian he's clearly not.

Mr. Amsterdam does not have a responsibility to tell us the whole truth. His responsibility is to the source of his paycheck. His reasoning, by the very nature of who he is and what he does, is necessarily tainted.

Semantics are Mr. Amsterdam's stock in trade and this falls into category (d). Words like "dictatorship" are bandied about with reckless abandon. His use of the word "truth" in his conclusion (that there can be no reconciliation without truth) is positively Orwellian. And as this farrago of half-truths is destined to provoke conflict, his paper in fact proves his point.

Point (e) — to engage the jury's sympathy for the perpetrator — Mr. Amsterdam takes care of right at the beginning by trotting out our "rapist" in a nice clean suit, smelling like a rose. He has instructed his client, slayer of Muslims, to speak of inclusiveness. "We must renounce all violence", says the man under whose watch over two thousand alleged drug dealers appear (yes, I'm using legalspeak here too) to have been murdered to fulfill a quota requirement that could lead to a declaration of victory in a "drug war". I think we're also supposed to feel sorry that the coup took away Mr Thaksin's right to vote, but of course in countries like the U.S., criminals in many states lose that right.

My final item in my catalog of the shyster's arsenal is the "court of public opinion." In this case, it is the only court that matters, because the conviction has already taken place.

You may wonder why this long review doesn't actually take apart Mr. Amsterdam's arguments piece by piece. It is because, by and large, the arguments are perfectly sound —they are just based on incomplete or selective evidence.

Yes, of course, Mr. Amsterdam, there should be accountability. Yes, of course, the government has made some missteps, and the clumsy handling of internet censorship is one of them. Yes, of course Thailand has a duty to investigate and prosecute. Of course, actual accountability and actual investigation might land Mr. Amsterdam's client in more hot water. So why not turn off the hot air for a moment and think about what would really be good for your client?

In short, this seventy-five document is a waste of our time, and a bad use of Mr. Thaksin's money. It's unlikely to convince anyone except the already convinced. It fails to connect the dots. It's a failure as a logical construct, and it's a failure as fiction. It is, however, like Norman Spinrad's novel, a triumph of the imagination. Not only have the people of Thailand been had, but I fear that Mr. Thaksin has as well.

If Mr. Amsterdam cared a little more about his client and a little less about his paycheck, he would give him the following advice: Mr Thaksin, bend a little. You're not in exile, you know. Stop pretending that you were "kicked out of Thailand". Come home and do your time. Everyone will forgive you if you show just a little contrition. If you want to be a real saint, and not just "play one on TV", you must be prepared for a little real suffering. You did a lot of good things for this country, but you got greedy. You got careless. But the Thai people are actually pretty good at reconciliation — it's built into their culture. Put away your wallet and start trusting them.

In the meantime I will try to think of a practical use for this White Paper. I can only think of one so far, but it's not going to stay white for long.

Sneak Preview

2010-07-18T00:32:00.000+07:00

This video shows the orchestra sight-reading the first movement at the first rehearsal. So .... in three days, the Thailand premiere of one of the world's most spectacular symphonies is going to happen!

Go here for tickets:

FOR ENGLISH, please go to:

http://www.thaiticketmajor.com/concert/mahler-symphony-3-eng.php

FOR THAI, please go to:

http://www.thaiticketmajor.com/concert/mahler-symphony-3.php

Don't miss....

Mahisorn Hall, July 21 at 7:30 pm!
More info: (02) 231-5273

China (continued)

2010-07-10T23:04:00.040+07:00

Sorry to tell all these stories in the wrong order, but I think I should go back and continue the tale of the China summit while it's still relatively fresh in my mind.

The day after the curious production of La Traviata, the Chinese planned a long day of speeches in which all of us had to talk for 20 minutes about the state of opera in our countries. Interestingly enough, they had a lady with a bell to go "bong" when the minutes were up, but most speakers seemed to ignore her.

Some of the stories people had to tell were far removed from our experiences. Many of the European houses wanted to tell China to find its own voice, develop its own style, rather than spending this kind of money in imitating the west ... with the unspoken implication that no matter what the east does, it will never be the west. Which is of course quite true; insofar as opera companies attempt to be neo-colonial imitations of European companies, they will have little to contribute to progress in the arts.

Eventually the time came for my speech and I did mention some of the interesting things I had learned over the last few hours, including the fact that our annual budget is only 0.75% of that of our equivalent in Japanese, the New National Theatre of Tokyo's budget.

Our experience in Bangkok has been quite different from those of China on the one hand and Singapore on the other. China has made a concerted effort, deciding that it needs parity in opera to get international respect. Singapore, in its post-colonial way, has been slowly evolving its way towards a national opera, but in a more commercial perspective. Both countries have mostly been mounting "top ten" works, but China has also produced some of its own operas, though I cannot tell if these are sort of assigned by committee or whether they spring from a single person's vision.

As a person with a European sensibility myself in most ways I am more drawn to seeing the operas composed by Chinese composers. I don't want yet another Traviata. This is I suppose how the Bangkok Opera differs as well; we keep trying to exercise a uniquely Asian perspective.

Later came the signing of the "opera treaty".

It was amazing to be on this document, which pledges mutual cooperation between instiutions like the Deutsche Oper, La Fenice, and little old Bangkok.

Amazing, too, to be taken to the restaurant where Peking Duck was invented, though I must admit I found it a little dry.

Most fun of all — the sitting around at the bar when it was all over. A lot was achieved in terms of cooperation there. I discovered that Korea is producing Lulu. I'm going to organize a mass tourist trip to see it ... a weekend of Berg and Bulgogi sounds like just the thing ...

Of Kids and Compasses

2010-06-30T23:58:00.001+07:00

After the big Sinfonietta concert last Sunday, which raised money for those affected by the Bangkok's recent violence, I was feeling very good about our kids. I mean, here is this orchestra of 13-20 year olds, just four months old, and they're tackling really difficult music, like Beethoven 7, and sounding very believable indeed. And doing the concert for the city of Bangkok was the kids' own idea.

Then, an odd thing happened. One of our M.P.'s, Anik Amaranand of the democratic party, had the idea that this orchestra, assembled as it is from some of our most talented kids without any consideration of their social background, might provide be a sort of microcosm of our country -- in its best aspects -- and that the Sinfonietta might be almost a poster child for reconciliation.

I am opposed to using the Sinfonietta as a political tool, but I agreed to let her hand out an anonymous questionaire to test her theory. It is of course only a small sample, but there have been some fascinating results.

Are these, the most talented and creative young people (14-21) in our community, "yellow" or "red"?

It's a surprise.

42% of our kids don't sympathize AT ALL with the reds, and 35% don't sympathize AT ALL with the yellows. 15% are fairly sympathetic to the reds, while 21% are fairly sympathetic to the yellows. NONE OF THEM is "very sympathetic" with EITHER color.

What I found even more impressive was the answer to the question: "Would you do something illegal or immoral if asked to by a beloved and respected authority figure?" 44% strongly disagreed and 36% disagreed. This means that 80% of our kids have a problem with being asked by authority figures to do things they know are wrong.

63% strongly disagree that it is acceptable for a leader to be corrupt even if he benefits the country. The rest either disagree, or only agree "somewhat". NO ONE AT ALL agreed totally with the premise.

This proves to me that, among the brightest and most creative young people around me, there is a far more centered moral compass, and a far more balanced view of right and wrong, than we might have imagined.

This survey has given me an unexpected optimism about the future of this country.

What follows is the opening statement that I made at the kids' concert earlier this month. I was thrilled to discover that what I said has been proved by the results of M.P. Anik's survey. (I realize now that it was eccentric to be quoting Isaiah to an audience of Buddhists, but then again when I was a Buddhist monk, I preached a sermon comparing Phra Wetsandorn and Abraham and Isaac.)

WHAT I SAID AT THE CONCERT

When the young members of the Siam Sinfonietta, Thailand’s newest youth orchestra, told me that they wanted to do something special to help heal our wounded city, I was moved by their sincerity, their commitment, and the purity of their vision. Reconciliation is truly a pathway of which it can be said, “A child shall lead them.”

I was moved but I should not have been surprised, because this is a very special group of musicians. We spent an entire year finding them and they represent many segments of our society, many regions of this country, and an entire spectrum of religions and ideologies. They are united only in their superlative musicianship and their absolute determination to perform the greatest music ever written with the greatest commitment and passion they are capable of. In that these children have have come from such diversity towards a togetherness of purpose far greater than themselves, they are a microcosm of an entire nation.

We have all felt a special affinity with the governor’s initiative because he is a person who is clearly seen by all to be reaching out to all sides. M.R. Sukhumbhand, you have proved yourself to be a governor not just for one segment of this city, but for all of us. Every baht donated today will go toward your fund to help those affected by the crisis, regardless of color. You have our absolute trust and our abiding hope.

Finally, I would like to say to our young people that the world sees what you do. Your gesture of generosity and empathy has not only been noted by the media in Thailand. A reporter from the Associated Press filed a story, and two days ago news of this concert was carried in the New York Times. By yesterday morning, the news was in a dozen major newspapers around the world and by midnight last night I counted over a hundred mentions worldwide, including news organizations like NBC and Fox, and more than eighty newspapers.

From this we may learn that in the eyes of the world what these children believe, and what they have done, is as important as any pronouncement by a politician, or any act of a political entity. These children have a voice. The road to a peaceful future is difficult and dark, but their dedication and compassion may give us light enough to see our way.

China's NCPA

2010-06-18T02:01:00.001+07:00

The level of attention paid to us was astonishing. I had my own personal assistant, a very helpful young man named Zhang Ye, who told me had been on the security team for HRH Princess Sirindhorn during her recent trip to Beijing. I was escorted everywhere, my every need anticipated ... if there was a flavor of Big Brother here, it was soft-pedaled ... but let's just say I couldn't even go to the bathroom without a friendly smiling helper at my side.... Arriving desperate for a meal, I ended up going with the hotel's version of Hainanese Chicken Rice ... comfort food in an alien world.

Now, this National Center for the Performing Arts is absolutely staggering. It doesn't have the gaudy "chinoiserie" of some late Empire art ... it goes all the way back to the purity of form and sweeping lines of the art of the Song Dynasty in my opinion. The building itself is in the shape of a gigantic yin-yang, so it speaks to us of the balance of the cosmos. It has an opera house, concert halls, regular theatres, recital halls, and all sorts of nooks and crannies, as well as a lovely Chopin exhibit.

On the way to the NCPA I met my colleagues for the first time. I think we were all a little disoriented (except of course for those already working with the Chinese on coproduction.) I soon saw familiar faces, though. Toh Weng Cheong of the Singapore Lyric Opera and Warren Mok of Hong Kong were both there, as well as one of best friends, soprano Nancy Yuen.

We were escorted to an impressive opening ceremony, where Lorin Maazel gave a speech denouncing Regietheater and the dignitaries of the NCPA, such as Chen Ping, president of it all, were present. Then came the first entertainment of the weekend, a performance of Traviata in the new hall which certainly showed off all of its technical specs to great advantage, though some of the western opera company heads were less than enthralled about its musical aspects. Nevertheless, this was an ambitiously designed production and gave us a great taste of what the NCPA is capable of....

I'll try to catch up on this narrative tomorrow.

China....

2010-06-15T23:57:00.000+07:00

So, last week I found myself in Beijing, as a guest of the Chinese ministry of culture, representing the Bangkok Opera at an international summit which featured all sorts of Big Names ... the Deutsche Opera Berlin, La Fenice, Opera Australia, den Norske Opera and so on ... celebrities like Lorin Maazel ... a big production of Traviata in a huge architectural phantasmagoria of an opera house ... and so on.

I wanted to do a day by day blog about it from Beijing, but to my amazement I discovered that blogger was blocked in China, as were Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. So China was truly another universe. It was in a sense like a three-day mission to Mars. Yet it was an alien world that had many points in common with my own world. And shared many of our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions. Despite many differences, I felt welcomed and very much at home, and left China with a powerful feeling of wanting to help, and to accept their help. Clearly, our strengths and weaknesses complement each other well.

The Chinese have built an incredible cultural center and are investing enormous amounts of money into creating an internationally viable opera. Thailand, on the other hand, has an ageing cultural center and have invested very little money in creating an opera company ... yet its opera company has a surprising amount of international traction, with real coverage in Opera, Opera News, the New York Times, and all those "real" media. It does seem that we have things we can offer each other, and by the end of the conference we were figuring out what those things might be.

So, from a wild opening ceremony where Lorin Maazel gave a speech blasting Regietheater to a closing dinner featuring duck done a dozen ways, from stuffy panels to deals in hotel bars, there's a lot to tell about those three days in China. But now that I have almost daily rehearsals for our forthcoming kids' concert this Sunday, I can only blog in bits and pieces, so I'll have to tell more tomorrow....

My Own Private Road Map

2010-06-13T23:48:00.001+07:00

Before I went to China last week, M.R. Usnisa of the Bangkok Post happened to ask me "Well ... if you were prime minister, what would you do?"

This is the kind of question we all ask ourselves sometimes. And most of the time, we realize that, much as we would want to change the world, we ourselves would rather have that responsibility belong to someone else.

Nevertheless, it's true that, just as a private little fantasy, I had already drawn up a road map of my own. When she found out, she asked me to email it her ... which forced me to dig it out and look at it.

Well ... it is impossible, and it would cost too much, and it would annoy too many people, and it would shake too many monkeys out of too many trees, but here it is. Anyone can play at this game.

Somtow's Road Map

1. A Complete Overhaul of the Educational System.
Make high-quality education genuinely universal. Work to end the "unquestioning rote learning" philosophy of education that pervades even the best institutions in the country. Take a good look at revisionist textbooks. Encourage schools to teach openmindedness in analysing the lessons of history. Teach kids to question their teachers. Teach teachers how to teach.

2. Work towards inclusivity by battling linguistic and ethnic prejudices and by decentralizing.
Dialects shouldn't be treated as "second class". Speakers should be empowered and not made to feel inferior. It should be acceptable to teach school and make official pronouncements both in standard Thai and in regional dialects. Speakers of standard Thai should be taught the linguistic principles of these dialects in school so that they stop being able to pretend they don't understand them. This should extend towards minorities as well. If a country has a single center, that center is an Achilles heel. Make regional centers more important and give them the ability to decide for themselves how local issues should be handled. In giving up some control, the center in the end becomes stronger and more credible.

3. Prosecute all sides equally if egregious breaches of law have occurred.
Don't let anyone who performs acts of vandalism get away with it even if the government thinks their viewpoint supports their own. If the government does decide it should deal gently with those who break the law, it should still set clear limits, boundaries that no side may cross. Such limits should include seizing airports, city centers, arson, and intimidating people with opposing viewpoints with physical threats.

4. Make corruption socially unacceptable.
But don't just keep saying it's a bad thing. Attack the root causes. Make sure officials have real salaries instead assuming they will eke them out with bribes.

5. Make freedom of speech a central tenet of policy.
This doesn't mean endorsing hate speech or speech that incites violence. But when such speech occurs, it should be dealt with through legal channels or with clear, unambiguous guidelines, and there should be judicial review of any government attempt to deal with such speech before any action can be taken by the government.

***
I sincerely believe that if those five points are addressed, the end result would be to address most of the things that people find problematic about Thailand's society today. Elections would become real expressions of the well-thought-out opinions of real majorities — something that has never been true in any election in the history of Thailand. Society would understand that agreeing to disagree is already a step forward. It's not just that parts of this country are way behind the education curve; it's also that the parts that are ahead are not always told that thinking for yourself should be education's ultimate goal. Real education is the key to narrowing the income gap as well.

In fact, I would submit that everything may well derive from this point, so perhaps the road map should actually consist only of a single item. Too simplistic? Yeah....

Truth About Thailand

2010-06-12T11:19:00.001+07:00

As a result of certain things I've written in this blog, I was invited to a meeting at Thammasat University a couple of weeks ago. Members of the Thai press and other media were there. The purpose of the meeting was whether something could be done about what many people around here believe to be highly unbalanced coverage of Thailand in some of the western media.

Although the exchange of views started off in a pretty sane way, it was clear that there was a lot of anger and eventually one part of the group got into how we should all direct our energies in punishing CNN, banning it, and so on.

I got up and I explained my view, which is that this is precisely the kind of thinking that feeds into the preexisting prejudice that this country must necessarily have an evil military regime going around oppressing everyone. I said, "What you are complaining about is that these people provide only a half-open window to the truth. The answer to this problem is not to slam shut that window, but to open all the other windows and let in all the light. If you do so, you have to trust that most people are smart enough to form a balanced opinion."

The combination of my plain speaking and humorously quirky Thai must have got through to some people because I suddenly found myself being nominated to lead a task force to do just that ... "open the windows". Well, it's more of a think tank and I don't "lead" it, because I don't think there should be a leader. It's more of a group effort.

One thing I did do was put up a website, truth-about-thailand.com, and invited several people who (a) could communicate well in English and (b) weren't affiliated with the government or any news station strongly identified with a political party ... to post any articles or letters to that site. So far I've invited half a dozen people and about four have put up material. The idea is that if all this material is in one place, it reduces the amount of time needed for a responsible journalist to round out his story.

The site is not a chat board, so comments are disabled. There will be links to a variety of news clips as well once they are identified and made available.

While I was away in China last week, I felt quite incapacitated at times, as someone who is used to constantly blogging, leaving messages on FB, and tweeting; all three things are blocked in China as is youtube. It was strange to be in a situation so techologically advanced, so similar to our society in some ways, yet so cut off at the same time. The internet at the Regent was faster and less quirk-ridden than the Internet here in Bangkok, yet I couldn't reach many of the sites that are my daily bread.

It did make me appreciate the fact that Thailand is a far more open and tolerant society than most of its neighbors, despite the recent horror. Anyway, I couldn't blog about China although my trip there may well have huge consequences for the arts in this country and the way this country can be perceived by others. Now that I'm back, however, I'll talk about all that soon. There is so much on my plate now that I have to snatch the time to write this blog.

While I was gone, I did receive some emails congratulating me ... but didn't know what I was being congratulated for.

I found out from Bruce Gaston on my return than many people were crediting me and my "Dan Rivers" article (which seemed to have gone viral) for the fact that CNN has in fact started to acknowledge the existence of more complex issues and that the issue of the armed militants has finally been discussed. Even though the acknowledgement seems to have come almost "through gritted teeth" it is nevertheless real progress.

Of course, my blog was only one of probably hundreds of reactions that may have come to their attention, but it may have put the issues in terms that someone there could appreciate. Anyway, I received an email from no less a figure than the secretary-general of ASEAN, offering an appeciation of my help ... and also reminding us all that Thailand's international perception is far from salvaged at this stage.

On my return, the kids in our youth orchestra told me they wanted to do something to help those affected by the recent tragedy (of whatever political color) and they wanted it to be the thing they do best. So, on June 20, a Sunday afternoon so that the whole family can come, they will perform a concert at the Thailand Cultural Center ... a REAL concert, with big works like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. All the income from this concert will be handed to the Governor of Bangkok to help his "Together we can" fund. I've agreed that giving it directly to the Governor is okay because I saw that during the troubles, despite his political affiliation, he clearly tried to function as the Governor of all Bangkokians, not some of them.

So, you can reserve seats by calling Ratana at (02) 231-5273 or send an email to ratana@bangkokopera.com.

Birth of an Orchestra

2010-05-31T22:29:00.001+07:00

Jay receiving flowers from the Executive VP of Siam Commercial Bank after the premiere of Aldebaran

From today's THE NATION ... I suspect that from the words "Last Week" they must have held this piece for a while owing to a few slightly more newsworthy happenings in Bangkok....

BIRTH OF AN ORCHESTRA18-year-old composer’s astronomical creation highlights youth orchestra’s debut

The Siam Sinfonietta, a new symphony orchestra considering entirely of teenagers, made a splashy debut last week with concerts at Rajabhat University in Korat and the Mahisorn Hall at SCB Plaza in Bangkok. Both events played to full houses and featured ambitious programming including two complete symphonies.

The orchestra first came together in March as a result of a widespread talent search by Somtow Sucharitkul, whose “adult” orchestra, the Siam Philharmonic, has been getting a lot of international attention lately for its bold programming and ecstatic musicianship. But auditions and scouting had been going for at least a year beforehand. At the “Bach to the Future” camp, a symphony orchestra was forged after three intense days.

“It’s a new approach to education,” says Somtow, “geared towards the most highly motivated, creative and talented young individuals in our society, who often find themselves stifled in an over-regimented teaching environment.” A visit to a rehearsal finds Somtow touching on aspects of philosophy and music history more commonly found at an advanced university level. In the middle of the famous first movement of Mozart’s 40^th Symphony, he stops to ask the kids, “What key are we in?” Winry, a lanky 15-year-old cellist, scratches his head “F sharp minor?” “Right,” Somtow says. “Why is that important? What is about F sharp minor that is so shocking?” “Because …” Jay, in the first violin section, stops to think, “it’s as far as you can get from G minor.” “That’s it!” Somtow says. “Mozart’s jolting the audience. He’s saying, ‘Here we are, adrift, lost, far from the home key … and daring us to find our way home. Now do you understand why it’s pianissimo?

The kids have been listening in a way you rarely see kids listen in a classroom. He picks up his baton. The development section of the movement begins. It’s hushed, magical.

“Kids can play real music,” says Somtow, “with all the passion and intensity of a world-class orchestra. The technique may not be all there yet, but they will learn it. But they won’t play that way for you unless you respect their musicianship and show them how the act of creation is coming from them.”

In Korat last Sunday, and again on May 4^th in Bangkok, the Siam Sinfonietta played with a maturity and sense of style not often found in Bangkok even in adult orchestras. The programme contained two entire symphonies: Mozart’s Fortieth and what may have been the Thailand premiere of Haydn’s 83^rd, “The Hen.” Intonation was above average and sforzandi were crisp. The Mozart was played with such radiant intensity that it led recording engineer Prateep, who records almost all classical concerts in Bangkok, to remark that it was “the best live No. 40 I’ve ever heard.”

Highlights of the concert, and showing that this is no ordinary youth orchestra, were works by Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question) and the world premiere of 18-year-old Jay’s minimalist composition Aldebaran. This colorful, sci-fi flavored piece, while clearly showing the influence of Phillip Glass, had its own unique tonal flavor and was at times startlingly original.

This is a very special orchestra which benefits from the attentions of internationally known musicians such as Somtow and Bruce Gaston (under whom they worked at camp in March) as well as coaching from Thailand’s top instrumentalists like Siripong Tiptan and Lertkiat Chongjirajitra.

The Siam Sinfonietta will soon be featured in a weekly reality show from the new @home channel on Truevisions and is planning regular concerts and tours both in this country and in exchange with other youth orchestras in Europe.

The Sinfonietta is still auditioning for a few daring and highly talented young musicians, especially in the string section. Committed young musicians (age 12 and up) should contact K Pongsatorn, orchestra administrator, at orchestramanagerspo@gmail.com, tel (081) 498 8864.

Permission to Quote

2010-05-22T21:42:00.000+07:00

In response to the requests I have had to reprint some of the entries in this blog, I would like to say this: anyone may reprint individual blog entries, quote from the blog or translate it as long as the author's name and the original site is credited and the words "quoted by permission of the author" or other such language is included. Thank you.

จดหมายเปิดผนึกถึงกลุ่มคนเสื้อแดง

2010-05-22T11:25:00.000+07:00

A group of people have worked to translate my words into Thai. I'm told it was a "team effort involving lots of brilliant people" but the person who initiated the translation didn't identify them. It gets across what I have been trying to say very well, and I hope that it can reach those it is intended for.

จดหมายเปิดผนึกถึงกลุ่มคนเสื้อแดง

ผมเขียนจดหมายฉบับนี้ถึงพวกคุณเพราะในช่วงหกสัปดาห์ที่ผ่านมาหลายครั้งที่ผมโกรธ บ่อยครั้งที่ผมผิดหวัง ฝันสลายและอึดอัดใจ แต่มีครั้งเดียวในห้วงเหตุการณ์อันน่าเจ็บปวดทั้งหมดนี้ที่ทำให้ผมน้ำตาไหล นั่นคือเมื่อแกนนำของคุณ คุณวีระ มุสิกพงศ์ เข้ามอบตัวกับเจ้าหน้าที่ และพูดเรื่องความฝัน ความผิดหวัง ความหวังที่ยังเหลืออยู่ของเขา

เมื่อควันจาง จะมีคนบอกคุณว่าพวกคุณถูกหลอก ถูกล่อลวง ถูกซื้อและถูกทรยศ ว่าคุณเป็นแค่เครื่องมือของพวกคนชั่วที่จริงๆ แล้วไม่สนใจว่าคุณจะมีชะตากรรมยังไง ว่าคุณเป็นผู้ก่อการร้าย นักวางเพลิง พวกทำลายวัฒนธรรม พวกเกลียดเจ้า จะมีคนกล่าวว่าคุณทำลายภาพลักษณ์ของประเทศในสายตาต่างชาติและขวางการฟื้นตัวของเศรษฐกิจ ที่ร้ายที่สุดคือเขาจะบอกว่าคุณทุกคนเป็นพวกไม่รู้เรื่องราวที่ใช้สิทธิใช้เสียงทางการเมืองอย่างผิด ๆ เพราะคุณไม่เข้าใจประชาธิปไตย

ผมเกรงว่าคำพูดของคนเหล่านั้นเป็นจริงอยู่หลายกรณี การเกิดใหม่ชั่วข้ามคืนของประเทศเราที่คุณอยากเห็น กลายเป็นเพียงอรุณรุ่งอันจอมปลอม อาชญากรรมมากมายถูกก่อขึ้น และทั้งสองฝ่ายก็ซ่อนความจริงสำคัญหลายเรื่องไว้ใม่ให้อีกฝ่ายรู้

ถึงแม้เรื่องเหล่านี้จะเป็นจริงในหลายกรณี ผมก็อยากให้พวกคุณรู้ว่ามันไม่ได้ลบล้างความจริงข้ออื่น ความจริงที่ฝังอยู่ในใจคุณ เมื่อคุณก้าวออกมาร้องทุกข์ด้วยการประท้วงอย่างสันติ

ประตูที่ควรเปิดรับคุณเมื่อหลายปีก่อน เมื่อประเทศนี้ก้าวสู่ระบอบประชาธิปไตย เปิดออกช้าเกินไป การศึกษาที่คุณต้องใช้เพื่อจะได้มีส่วนร่วมในสังคมอย่างเท่าเทียม ถูกปิดกั้นไว้นานเกินไป เสียงที่พวกคุณมีมาโดยตลอดนั้นก็ถูกพบช้าเกินไป และเพราะว่าถูกเก็บกักไว้นานเช่นนั้น เมื่อแสดงออกได้มันจึงทำลายสิ่งต่าง ๆ จนพินาศ และความพินาศร้ายแรงที่สุด ไม่ใช่สิ่งที่เกิดขึ้นกับห้างสรรพสินค้าและธนาคารไม่กี่แห่ง แต่เป็นความพินาศที่คุณก่อขึ้นกับตัวเอง

แต่ผมอยากให้คุณรู้ว่าเมื่อพูดถึงการปลดปล่อยจิตวิญญาณของมนุษย์ ประวัติศาสตร์อยู่ข้างคุณ หนทางสู่ประชาธิปไตยที่สมบูรณ์กว่านี้อาจจะยากลำบาก แต่ไม่มีสิ่งใดหยุดยั้งได้ คุณไม่ได้แพ้สงครามครั้งนี้ แต่ผมหวังว่าคุณจะได้เรียนรู้จากมัน คำถามคือไม่ใช่ว่าคุณจะชนะสงครามนี้ไหม แต่จะชนะอย่างไรต่างหาก จะด้วยความวุ่นวายและการนองเลือด หรือการเจรจาประนีประนอมอันยาวนานและเจ็บปวด ด้วยการพัฒนาทีละขั้นอันเป็นวิถีอารยะ

อาจยากที่คุณจะเชื่อ แต่หลายคนที่ถูกป้ายสีว่าเป็นศัตรู ล้วนมีความฝันสูงสุดร่วมกันกับคุณ ยกตัวอย่างเช่น ผมเชื่ออย่างจริงใจว่านายกรัฐมนตรี คุณอภิสิทธิ์ เข้าใกล้ฝันเหล่านั้นในเชิงความคิดมากกว่าแกนนำจำนวนหนึ่งของคุณ หากเขาไม่ได้เป็นเช่นนั้น ถ้าเขามีกรอบความคิดเหมือนผู้นำเผด็จการทหารหลายคนที่เคยมีมาในอดีต ซากศพจากเหตุเมื่อสองสามวันก่อนคงมากมายเกินกว่าจะทำใจได้

ผมยังเชื่อว่าผู้นำหลาย ๆ คนของคุณ อย่างคุณวีระ มีความฝันและความหวังเช่นเดียวกับเหล่าคนที่ไม่มีส่วนเกี่ยวข้องกับการเคลื่อนไหวของคุณ เพราะที่สุดแล้วมันเป็นฝันและหวังของคนไทยทุกคน ที่จะได้อยู่อย่างสันติ ไม่ต้องใช้ชีวิตดิ้นรนเอาตัวรอดอย่างไร้จุดหมาย ได้มีโอกาสเหมือนคนอื่นที่จะบรรลุความฝันที่ตั้งใจเอาไว้และจะได้มีชีวิตที่สมบูรณ์

อาจเร็วเกินไปที่จะหวังเช่นนี้ เพราะความโกรธแค้นและไม่ไว้ใจของทั้งสองฝ่ายยังมีมากเกินไป ถ้าคุณวีระได้รับการพิพากษาว่ากระทำผิดจริง ก็ต้องได้รับโทษตามกระบวนการยุติธรรม เช่นเดียวกับคุณสุเทพ หากพบว่าเขาใช้อำนาจหน้าที่โดยมิชอบก็ต้องถูกตัดสินลงโทษเช่นเดียวกัน แต่คงงดงามยิ่งหากได้เห็นนักอุดมคติอย่างคุณวีระได้มีบทบาทในรัฐบาลของคุณอภิสิทธิ์สักชุด การประนีประนอมเช่นนี้เคยเกิดขึ้นในอิตาลีเมื่อหลายสิบปีก่อน และมันช่วยให้ประเทศนั้นพ้นจากปัญหาความขัดแย้งภายในที่อาจนำไปสู่หายนะ

คุณเปลี่ยนเมืองไทยไปแล้วชั่วนิรันดร์ ด้วยการได้ค้นพบและแสดงให้พี่น้องประชาชนของคุณเห็นว่าคุณมีสิทธิ์ที่จะคิด พูด และทำ ผมขอสนับสนุนให้คุณก้าวต่อไป คิดต่อไป แต่คิดเพื่อตัวคุณเอง อย่าคิดสิ่งที่ผู้อื่นบอกให้คุณคิด พูดในสิ่งที่คุณคิด ไม่ใช่สิ่งที่ผู้อื่นบอกให้คุณพูด และทำด้วยสติเช่นเดียวกับด้วยหัวใจ เพื่อผลประโยชน์ของทุกคน แม้แต่คนซึ่งมีความเห็นไม่ตรงกับคุณ

ในเวลานี้ คงมีคนไม่เท่าไรในกรุงเทพฯที่จะนึกขอบคุณในสิ่งที่คุณทำ แต่ผมอยากจะขอบคุณจริงๆ สิ่งที่คุณทำลงไปนั้นสำคัญมาก แม้อาจไม่ใช่เพราะเหตุผลที่คุณคิด และผมก็อยากอธิบายว่าทำไม

เวลาคุณตัดถนน บางครั้งคุณอาจไปเจอภูเขา เพื่อจะให้ผ่านไปได้ คุณอาจต้องหาทางอ้อมมันไป คุณอาจต้องขุดอุโมงค์ลอดหรือระเบิดทำลายภูเขาทั้งลูกเสีย

เมืองไทยได้มาถึงภูเขาลูกนั้นแล้ว เป็นเวลาอย่างน้อยสองทศวรรษที่ไม่มีใครยอมอ้อมมันไป ขุดอุโมงค์หรือระเบิดภูเขานั่นแม้แต่คนเดียว แต่ทุกคนก็รู้ว่าเราต้องผ่านมันไป ภูเขามันขวางทางเราอยู่ รัฐบาลบางรัฐบาลที่ผ่านมา ขโมยเงินของคุณไป สร้างบอลลูนสีทองงดงามขึ้นมา เพื่อพาคนบางกลุ่มข้ามภูเขาไป โดยไม่สนใจว่าที่เหลือจะถูกทิ้งไว้เลย รัฐบาลอื่น ๆ ก็เอาแต่พูด พูด พูด แต่ภูเขาก็ยังไม่ได้ไปไหน ก็แน่อยู่แล้วว่าคุณต้องหมดความอดทน

คุณไม่ได้ระเบิดภูเขานั่นทิ้ง แต่โศกนาฎกรรมที่เกิดขึ้นนั้นจะทำให้ทุกคนทราบว่า ได้เวลาแล้วที่เราจะต้องก้าวไปข้างหน้า คนของคุณและเหล่าทหาร ต่างไม่ได้ทนทุกข์และตายเปล่า แม้ดูเหมือนว่าเรากำลังอยู่ท่ามกลางความมืดและความวุ่นวาย วันนี้เราได้เข้าใกล้ประชาธิปไตยที่เต็มใบกว่าครั้งไหน ๆ ในยุคของรัฐบาลทักษิณและรัฐบาลต่อ ๆ มา สักวันหนึ่งผู้คนจะตระหนักว่าคุณได้เปิดตาพวกเขา ว่าพวกคุณมีส่วนอย่างยิ่งในการร่วมสร้างจุดเปลี่ยนของประวัติศาสตร์ไทย สุดท้ายแล้วคนอื่น ๆ ในประเทศก็จะเข้าใจและยอมรับมัน หรือกระทั่งอ้าแขนเพื่อโอบรับมันไว้ เพราะการโอบกอดผู้ที่เราคิดว่าเป็นศัตรูนั้น แท้จริงแล้วก็คือการโอบรับตัวตนของเราเอง

In Thai

2010-05-22T11:14:00.001+07:00

I knew that if I said what I actually think, I would be attacked from both sides. It's certainly interesting to be accused of being a flaming pinko and a vicious fascist in the same day, or to be characterized in tweets as being no better than Joseph Goebbels. The fellow who said that by condoning "Abhisit's Massacre" I'm clearly a supporter of the holocaust, female genital mutilation, the Taliban throwing acid in schoolgirls' faces, and apartheid is clearly unfamiliar with the things I have worked for all my life.

The level of vituperation has been equalled only by the failure to actually read the letter before launching the attack. And I'm also appalled by the stereotypical characterization by people who don't know me, talking about by wealth (I had to borrow money this week to pay the electricity bill to keep my computer on), my Porsche (I don't even own a car), and so on. I may have been born into privilege, but my choice of career has obliterated most of the advantages of that.

One criticism is unfortunately very true and I'm trying to fix it. That is the fact that my letter is in English.

I am working on getting the Thai version of my letter done. It is absolutely true, and highly regrettable, that I am incapable of doing it myself. My spoken Thai is quite adequate, but I never went to a Thai school and I write Thai very, very slowly. The best I can do is get someone else to translate it and then go through it to try to ensure that the real content is still there. I'm sorry about this, but I'm trying to get it done as soon as I can.

An Open Letter to the Red Shirts

2010-05-21T16:49:00.000+07:00

I am writing you this letter because in the past six weeks I have often been angry. I've often been disappointed, disillusioned, and frustrated. But there was only one moment in this entire agonizing sequence that moved me to tears. That was when your leader, Veera Musikaphong, surrendered to the authorities, and spoke of his dreams, his disappointments, and his enduring hopes.

As the smoke dies down, you are going to be told that you were lied to, duped, tricked, bought and betrayed; that you were tools of evil men who did not truly care about your fate; that you are terrorists, arsonists, destroyers of our culture, king-haters. It will be said that you destroyed the country's international image and obstructed its economic recovery. Worst of all, you will be told that you are all ignorant people who have misused your political voices because you didn't understand democracy.

I am afraid that in many cases, the people who say these things will be telling the truth. The instant rebirth that you wanted for our country has turned out to be more of a false dawn. Many crimes have been committed and both sides have hidden important facts from each other.

Even though these things are in many cases true, I want you to know that they have not invalidated other truths: the truths that you carried in your hearts when you set out to air your grievances in a peaceful demonstration.

The doors that should have opened for you years ago, when this country became a democracy, have opened too slowly. The education that you need to become equal participants in society has been withheld too long. The voice that you have always had has been discovered too late, and because it was so long pent up, it is been expressed destructively. And the worst destruction was not that of a few shopping malls and banks; it was the destruction you wreaked upon yourselves.

But I want you to know that when it comes to the liberation of the human spirit, history is on your side. The road towards a more perfect democracy may be difficult, but it is unstoppable. You did not lose this war. But I hope you will have learned from it. The question is not whether the war will be won, but how it will be won: through mayhem and bloodshed, or through slow, painful discussion and compromise — through evolution — the civilized way.

It may be hard for you to believe this, but many people who have been painted as your enemies share your most cherished dreams. For example, I sincerely believe that the prime minister, K. Abhisit, comes philosophically closer to those dreams than a number of your leaders. If he did not — if his mindset had been that of some of the military dictators Thailand has had in the past — the carnage of the last few days would have been unconscionable.

I also believe that many of your leaders, like K. Veera, share the hopes and dreams of those not affiliated with your movement, because they are, by and large, the hopes and dreams of all Thai people: to live in peace, not to spend your life in a mindless struggle to survive, to have the same chance as anyone else at realizing your aspirations and becoming fulfilled human beings.

It may be too soon to hope for this, because the mutual anger and distrust are still too great. If K Veera is found guilty of any crimes, justice will have to be served, just as much as if K Suthep were found to have abused his authority. But it would be a beautiful thing to see idealists like K. Veera playing a role in an Abhisit government. Such a compromise occurred in Italy decades ago, and it saved their country from a potentially disastrous internecine struggle.

You have changed Thailand for ever by discovering, and showing your fellow citizens, that you have the right to think, and to speak, and to act. I urge you to go further. Keep thinking. But think for yourselves. Don't think what you're told to think. Speak what you think, not what you are told to speak. And act with your minds as well as your hearts, and in the interests of all, even those whom you disagree with.

Not many people in Bangkok would feel grateful to you at this moment. But I do want to thank you. What you did was really important, though perhaps not for the reasons you think. And I want to explain why.

When you build a road, you will sometimes come to a mountain. To get to the other side, you may have to go around it. You may have to dig a tunnel. Or you have to blow up the mountain.

Thailand has come to that mountain. But for at least two decades, no one has been willing to go around, dig a tunnel, or blow up the mountain. Yet everyone knows we must get through. The mountain is in the way. Some past governments have stolen your money to build golden hot-air balloons so that a few individuals could get across, not caring if the rest were stranded. Others have talked and talked and talked, but the mountain is still there. Of course you are impatient.

You didn't blow down the mountain, but the tragic events that have unfolded have convinced everyone that it is time to move on. Your people — and the soldiers, too — did not suffer and die in vain. Though we seem to be in darkness and chaos, a fuller democracy is closer today than it has been at any time during the Thaksin administration and all its successors. There will come a time when people will realize that you opened their eyes, that you all contributed to this major turning point in Thailand's history. In time, the rest of the nation will understand it, and come to acknowledge it, and even embrace it. For in embracing those we thought our enemies, we really embrace ourselves.

Purakhanda's Video

2010-05-21T14:10:00.000+07:00

I would like to share Purakhanda's video with my readers because I think it illustrates some points made previously rather well. If you don't speak Thai, watch it both with and without the subtitles. You will see how easy it may have been to confuse anarchic rhetoric with pro-democracy oratory.

A few small clarifications

2010-05-19T14:04:00.033+07:00

I'm putting these here rather than answering the comments in the comment section because they might easily get lost.

Thank you for the overwhelming response. Much of it may have been preaching to the choir, but I hope to have made at least a few people get a more realistic picture of all that is going on. Even in the negative comments, there were many valid points and if I were writing a book about all this, I would also have given them an airing.

There are a couple of things though that might have come from my own haste to get words into the ether that perhaps I should clarify.

Many people are furious because they think I said "there is no gap between rich and poor" or words to that effect. My assumption was that people had been following this blog, but obviously there are many new readers. I discussed this issue a few weeks ago. I said "unbreachable gap" because my point is that such an "unbreachable" gap always existed in the past and that in the past twenty years this gap has become "breachable." In the tiny period that I lived in Thailand as a child (early 60s) (for about 5 years between the ages of about 7-12) the class structure was in full swing. The elite were the elite. The peasants were the peasants. The gap was unbreachable 40-45 years ago, when I was little.

Now if you grow up believing fervently that the gap is unbreachable, you don't try to breach it. But now there is a growing middle class and indeed the old elite is getting pushed into the background. It because it is clearly seen that the gap CAN be breached that the poor have finally been able to see that they can have a real voice. In that this has happened, I am entirely pro-red, as can be seen if you scroll back far enough in this blog to read my criticism of the yellow shirts' condescension.

I've also been attacked a lot for bringing up the racism issue. It is, of course, offensive. And should be. It is nevertheless a real issue. I know because I, who left Thailand at the age of six months, never entered the Thai educational system, only learned the language at the age of 8 and only started studying the culture in the 1970s, have had a hard time dealing with this racism myself. I still cannot entirely dislodge my ingrained feeling in the innate superiority of the culture I was brought up in — Western culture. I have often been as guilty of this cultural chauvinism as any of my attackers. I don't think we should rid ourselves of it ... it is part of who we are. I think we should face it and understand it.

As for those who lecture me about the finer points of the American system: I would remind them that they probably didn't have to take a test to become an American citizen: I did.

I'll gladly confess that it is an overstatement for me to have said the soldiers haven't killed ANYONE at all except in self defense, but that doesn't really undermine my basic premise. All the accusations of massacring women and children have been in the "When did you stop beating your wife?" vein. The soldiers have clearly been given instructions to shoot real bullets only in self-defense and they are clearly attempting to do so.

If this were NOT the case, Rajprasong would look like the Amritsar Massacre. (Remember that? It was when the British army fired on peaceful, unarmed protesters and killed women and children.) Amritsar is what they were hoping for. ... that would be a case for a U.N. tribunal. This is not it.

Don't Blame Dan Rivers

2010-05-18T15:41:00.006+07:00

I have been composing a long, day by day account of the "troubles" of the last three days, which I have not yet posted. The reason is that I've been getting a lot of mail asking me to explain "the truth" to people overseas. A lot of people here are astonished and appalled at the level of irresponsibility and inaccuracy shown by such major news sources as CNN, and are imputing the most astonishing motives to this, such as suggesting that they're in the pay of Thaksin and so on.

I don't think this is really what is going on. Rather, I think that there are two basic problems: preconception and language.

CNN first became a force to be reckoned with during the "People Power" movement in the Philippines. The kind of coverage we had for this was amazing. There was a camera in every camp, and we could follow this exciting revolution every step of the way. We knew exactly who to root for: the oppressed masses led by the widow of the iconic Aquino, and we knew that whenever President Marcos appeared he was Darth Vader, the symbol of an evil empire. The arc of the story was simple and inexorable. A whole new way of looking at the news was born, with all the excitement of a TV miniseries and, prophetically, a reality show as well.

Of course, many of the little details of the story were conveniently glossed over. Reality was not — never is — so black and white. But there are three important things about this story: first, in its essentials, there was a lot of truth. And all the protagonists spoke English.

The Philippines, as Filipinos never tire of telling me, is the third most populous English speaking country in the world. We will leave the definition of "English-speaking" to another blog, but it's very important that the various sides in this conflict were able to articulate their viewpoints in a language which CNN well understood.

The third important thing about the story is that it fulfilled a vision of history that is an inseparable part of the inheritance of western culture, that is so ingrained in western thinking that it is virtually impossible for an educated member of western society to divorce himself from it.

It is a vision of history as a series of liberations. From Harmodius and Aristogeiton throwing off the tyrant's yoke to the removal of the Tarquins and the establishment of the Roman Republic to the failed rebellion of Spartacus, from Magna Carta to the Bastille to the American Civil War to the Russian Revolution, there is this Platonic Model against which these big historical movements are always compared. There is a bad guy — often a dictator — who can be demonized. There is a struggling proletariat. The end comes with "liberty and justice for all". This is Star Wars. The dark times. The Empire.

The "People Power" coverage was riveting, compelling, and contained all the emotional components of this mythical story arc. Finding another such story, therefore, is a kind of Holy Grail for the international media. When a story comes that appears to contain some of the elements, and it's too much hard work to verify those elements or get all the background detail, you go with the Great Archetype of Western Civilization.

Now, let us consider the redshirt conflict.

Let's not consider what has actually been happening in Thailand, but how it looks to someone whose worldview has been coloured with this particular view of history.

Let's consider the fact that there is pretty much nothing being explained in English, and that there are perhaps a dozen foreigners who really understand Thai thoroughly. I don't mean Thai for shopping, bargirls, casual conversation and the like. Thai is a highly ambiguous language and is particularly well suited for seeming to say opposite things simultaneously. To get what is really being said takes total immersion.

When you watch a red shirt rally, notice how many English signs and placards there are, and note that they they are designed to show that these are events conforming to the archetype. The placards say "Democracy", "No Violence," "Stop killing innocent women and children" and so on. Speakers are passionately orating, crowds are moved. But there are no subtitles. What does it look like?

The answer is obvious. It looks like oppressed masses demanding freedom from an evil dictator.

Don't blame Dan Rivers, et al, who are only doing what they are paid to do: find the compelling story within the mass of incomprehensible data, match that story to what the audience already knows and believes, and make sure the advertising money keeps flowing in.

A vigorous counter-propaganda campaign in clear and simple English words of one syllable has always been lacking and is the reason the government is losing the PR war while actually following the most logical steps toward a real and lasting resolution.

If the foreign press were in fact able to speak Thai well enough to follow all the reportage here coming from all sides, they would also be including some of the following information in their reports. I want to insist yet again that I am not siding with anyone. The following is just information that people really need before they write their news reports.

-- Thaksin was democratically elected, but became increasingly undemocratic, and the country gradually devolved from a nation where oligarchs skimmed off the top to a kleptocracy of one. During his watch, thousands of people were summarily executed in the South of Thailand and in a bizarre "war on drugs" in which body count was considered a marker of success.

-- the coup that ousted Thaksin was of course completely illegal, but none of the people who carried it out are in the present government.

-- the yellow shirts' greatest error in moulding its international image was to elevate Thaksin's corruption as its major bone of contention. Thai governments have always been corrupt. The extent of corruption and the fact that much of it went into only one pocket was shocking to Thais, but the west views all "second-rate countries" as being corrupt. Had they used the human rights violations and muzzling of the press as their key talking points, the "heroic revolution" archetype would have been moulded with opposite protagonists, and CNN and BBC would be telling an opposite story today.

-- the constitution which was approved by a referendum after the coup and which brought back democracy was flawed, but it provided more checks and balances, and made election fraud a truly accountable offense for the first time.

-- the parliamentary process by which the Democrat coalition came to power was the same process by which the Lib Dems and Tories have attained power in Britain. The parliament that voted in this government consists entirely of democratically elected members.

-- no one ever disputed the red shirts' right to peaceful assembly, and the government went out of its way to accede to their demands.

-- this country already has democracy. Not a perfect one, but the idea of "demanding democracry" is sheer fantasy

-- the yellow shirts did not succeed in getting any of their demands from the government. The last two governments changed because key figures were shown to have committed election fraud. They simply did not take their own constitution seriously enough to follow it.

-- the red TV station has a perfect right to exist, but if foreign journalists actually understood Thai, they would realize that much of its content went far beyond any constitutionally acceptable limits of "protected speech" in a western democracy. Every civilized society limits speech when it actually harms others, whether by inciting hate or by slander. The government may have been wrong to brusquely pull the plug, but was certainly right to cry foul. It should have sought an injunction first. Example: Arisman threatened to destroy mosques, government buildings, and "all institutions you hold sacred" ... a clip widely seen on youtube, without subtitles. Without subtitles, it looks like "liberty, equality, fraternity".

-- the army hasn't been shooting women and children ... or indeed anyone at all, except in self-defense. Otherwise this would all be over, wouldn't it? It's simple for a big army to mow down 5,000 defenseless people.

-- since the government called the red shirts' bluff and allowed the deputy P.M. to report to the authorities to hear their accusations, the red leaders have been making ever-more fanciful demands. The idea of UN intervention is patently absurd. When Thaksin killed all those Muslims and alleged drug lords, human rights groups asked the UN to intervene. When the army took over the entire country, some asked the UN to intervene. The UN doesn't intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign countries except when requested to by the country itself or when the government has completely broken down.

-- Thailand hasn't had an unbreachable gulf between rich and poor for at least 20 years. These conflicts are about the rise of the middle class, not the war between the aristocrats and the proletariat.

-- Abhisit, with his thoroughly western and somewhat liberal background, shares the values of the west and is in fact more likely to bring about the social revolution needed by Thailand's agrarian poor than any previous leader. He is, in fact, pretty red, while Thaksin, in his autocratic style of leadership, is in a way pretty yellow. Simplistic portrayals do not help anyone to understand anything.

-- the only people who do not seem to care about the reds' actual grievances are their own leaders, who are basically making everyone risk their lives to see if they can get bail.

-- the King has said all that he is constitutionally able to say when he spoke to the supreme court justices and urged them to do their duty. The western press never seem to realize that the Thai monarchy is constitutionally on the European model ... not, say, the Saudi model. The king REIGNS ... he doesn't "rule". This is a democracy. The king is supposed to symbolize all the people, not a special interest group.

The above are just a few of the elements that needed to be sorted through in order to provide a balanced view of what is happening in this country.

There is one final element that must be mentioned. Most are not even aware of it. But there is, in the western mindset, a deeply ingrained sense of the moral superiority of western culture which carries with it the idea that a third world country must by its very nature be ruled by despots, oppress peasants, and kill and torture people. Most westerners become very insulted when this is pointed out to them because our deepest prejudices are always those of which we are least aware. I believe that there is a streak of this crypto-racism in some of the reportage we are seeing in the west. It is because of this that Baghdad, Yangon, and Bangkok are being treated as the same thing. We all look alike.

Yes, this opinion is always greeted with outrage. I do my best to face my own preconceptions and don't succeed that often, but I acknowledge they exist nonetheless.

Some of the foreign press are painting the endgame as the Alamo, but it is not. It is a lot closer to Jonestown or Waco.

Like those latter two cases, a highly charismatic leader figure (in our case operating from a distance, shopping in Paris while his minions sweat in the 94°weather) has taken an inspirational idea: in one case Christianity, in the other democracy, and reinvented it so that mainstream Christians, or real democrats, can no longer recognize it. The followers are trapped. There is a siege mentality and information coming from outside is screened so that those trapped believe they will be killed if they try to leave. Women and children are being told that they are in danger if they fall into the hands of the government, and to distrust the medics and NGOs waiting to help them. There are outraged pronouncements that they're not in fact using the children as human shields, but that the parents brought them willingly to "entertain and thrill" them. There is mounting paranoia coupled with delusions of grandeur, so that the little red kingdom feels it has the right to summon the United Nations, just like any other sovereign state. The reporters in Rajprasong who are attached to the red community are as susceptible to this variant of the Stockholm syndrome as anyone else.

The international press must separate out the very real problems that the rural areas of Thailand face, which will take decades to fix, from the fact that a mob is rampaging through Bangkok, burning, looting, and firing grenades, threatening in the name of democracy to destroy what democracy yet remains in this country.

But this bad reporting is not their fault. It is our fault for not providing the facts in bite-sized pieces, in the right language, at the right time.

Waiting for the Barbarians ... to Leave?

2010-05-12T12:08:00.000+07:00

Cavafy's poem is particularly significant today, especially the last lines....

kai tora ti tha genoume khoris barbarous?

oi anthropoi autoi isan mia kapoia lysis.

-- and now, what is to become of us without barbarians? These people were a kind of solution --

Today, the prime minister has set a deadline. The red shirts demanded that Suthep turn himself in; he did so, and they demanded that he turn himself into someone else. Elsewhere I've said that this is essentially saying that he shouldn't have gone to the principal's office but to the janitor's closet. It is a meaningless condition.

Although I suspect that most red shirt leaders are as tired of all this as everyone else, and would welcome an end, it is clear that their puppetmaster(s) have another agenda.

The deadline is in EIGHT MINUTES. Is this exciting or what?

Unfortunately, the question of whether the protesters will leave, be forced out, or be horribly slaughtered is no longer that significant.

The real issue is whether the underlying problems will be solved.

The educational abyss is the first one. It is because of this abyss that we see a similar power change in the UK, with a less-than-majority party forming a coaltion to put an Old Etonian in No. 10 in a period where parliamentary corruption has been front page news for ages, without angry peasants seizing Picadilly Circus or taking over Harrods.

The educational gap leads to the ignorance gap, the brainwashability gap, the employablity gap, the wealth gap and, ultimately, the class gap.

Well, if certain people have their way I'll probably be first in line for the gulag, so I await this countdown....

Whose Bluff am I calling?

2010-05-10T23:32:00.000+07:00

This is a very interesting endgame. On the one hand, the redshirts are cornered, essentially killed with kindness. Their only hope of a decisive victory is to have someone use violence against them.

So, today, they announce that they'll accept the deal and immediately disband on condition that Mr Suthep gives himself up to face the charges of ordering the April 10th crackdown. They must have thought that he would never do so, because that seems to be the way they themselves act, by demanding the impossible and then acting like the injured party when they receive "almost" the impossible in return.

These guys must never have had the Brer Rabbit stories told to them as children, because the briar patch beckons. Suthep can easily turn himself in. Getting convicted would be exceptionally unlikely. Why should he care?

So, it must have been a shock when Mr Suthep immediately announced that he would turn himself in the next day, meaning that they would have to disband tomorrow.

Now, at about 7 pm, comes the news that a new condition is in place. It is unacceptable for Mr Suthep to turn himself into the Special Investigations office. He must turn himself in to the police. Or else the reds won't leave. So ... the fate of millions hangs on which office this guy will show up at tomorrow?

Does this mean that someone, somewhere, isn't getting what they want? And could "what they want" be something as simple as 46 billion baht and a get-out-of-jail-free card?

The renegade general Seh Daeng, considered by many to be the most radical red shirt, suspected by some of being behind the grenades and the "men in black" ... has announced that Thaksin has given orders by phone that the red shirt leaders are all to be replaced by ones who will carry on fighting and that the others are to be relieved of their command. The "Three Stooges", however, deny all this. It is conceivable that both versions are true.

Tomorrow, it may all be a dream....

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

2010-05-10T14:14:00.000+07:00

Well, after a lovey-dovey sort of Wednesday where everyone saw the Prime Minister's roadmap towards a new Thailand as a wonderful way out for all those who have waited and waited and waited ....

Now a lot of spoilsports are showing up. Despite the red shirts ostensibly accepting the compromise, more grenades went off, killing a couple of cops. More red shirts are coming in from out of town. Oddly enough, the red shirt leaders deny responsibility for anything bad. The multicolored are pissed that the government has caved in to the demands of what they see as rebels. The yellows are demanding Abhisit's resignation over his being so nice. The red shirts are saying Abhisit is only pretending to be nice.

I haven't posted much recently because to be honest, people in Bangkok have more or less adjusted to the fact that a number of Starbucks, five-star hotels, nice movie theatres and a great English language bookstore have become inaccessible and that a square kilometer or so of this huge city has become its own country with its own government and army. The atmosphere has started to become one of "mai pen rai" ... which is certainly scary when you think about it. . The Emporium is getting rich off Siam Paragon's woes, but don't they have the same owner? A huge fire sale at Emporim Stadium of things that couldn't be sold in Siam Paragon over the weekend attracted huge bargain-hunting crowds. Up to 80% off high society items meant the real thing was almost as cheap as a fake. What is the world coming to?

Since nobody believes anyone, many people are just ignoring things or getting on with their lives

Which could be very frightening. Before the bloodbath of October 14, 1973, which ushered in the brief shining moment of "real" democracy in Thailand, there was also a feeling that it was all going to be negotiated away.

It's not pride that comes before a fall ... it's complacency.

I woke up this morning and the red shirts have not yet dispersed. Reportedly their leaders met for five hours without coming to a decision. The real issue appears to be whether the leaders will in fact be able to get bailed out for their various criminal misdeeds. They've presented an alternate demand now: they are willing to disband, and give themselves up to due process, on condition that the prime minister also be prosecuted for the same incidents for which they are being prosecuted ... something of a non-starter and clearly just a way of stringing this out.

Little has been heard from Mr. Thaksin except for some (video-less) phone conversations about which there are rumors of fakery. It also seems that a funeral service was held for him at a family mausoleum, though it was supposedly a "fake funeral" to avert negative karma. Yes, we do have such events in Thailand quite often.

Last night Abhisit gave, for the first time, a highly personal TV address that didn't contain too many long Sanskrit words. Putting his position in words of one syllable was a really good idea. A learned vocabulary suggests disengagement. I wonder if he reads reads this blog. He should; I always give good advice .... :)

Indeed, the British election is getting almost as much air time these days in the land of pagodas, politics and prostitutes. It looks like they may have a hung parliament which is of course the usual state of affairs in this multi-party country. This makes Christiane Amanpour's attempts to bully Abhisit in Hard Talk seem pretty lame, when we she was going on and on about how he would defend himself against the accusation of being "unelected" ... In Britain, the Prime Minister is NEVER directly elected at all ... one elects representatives and the parties take turns trying to form a government in order of viability ... well, Thailand happens to have a system basically modeled on that British system. Abhisit's failure, however, was not to say to the woman, "Why are you asking me this? Didn't you learn about the parliamentary system in school?"

Of course this doesn't explain why there aren't hordes of British redshirts throwing shit at Downing Street or bombing the Houses of Parliament.

The reason is very simple. I went to school in Britain. I therefore have learnt how this is supposed to work. So have most people in the UK, so they know that seizing parliament isn't "real democracy."

One of the biggest cries of "foul" we hear here is "The party with the most votes didn't get to form the government ... so it must be illegitimate." We hear this cry because the parliamentary process is being inadequately taught.

This not the American system, where the president's name is on the ballot (though even there, the popular vote doesn't guarantee a win.) However, people are not being educated about the difference. They have not been taught that having the MOST votes is not the same as controlling a MAJORITY of the seats. The two are only the same if you get more than half the votes.

They simply have never been taught this here. And, to quote Oscar Hammerstein II for a moment, "You've got to be carefully taught."

Now, there is plenty of corruption to go around. In Thailand, we are basically at about the beginning of the nineteenth century. The age of Pocket Boroughs and Rotten Boroughs (if you watched Black Adder Part III, or went to school in the UK, you know about these.) Such important figures as William Pitt the Elder got into politics that way, and surely he is no less important a figure than Abhisit. Thailand is a little head in this stage, because representation is more proportional, but still not perfect ... one of the red shirts' legitimate grievances.

If we take Magna Carta as an arbitrary date for a start to democracy in Britain, then from then to the British reform that got rid of pocket boroughs is about six hundred years. Thailand has arrived at this stage in less than a century.

Perhaps the apathy in Bangkok isn't really selfishness or lack of concern for fellow citizens. Perhaps it is simply that the long view has kicked in. If the 180 years of British history from the reform act of 1832 to the Hung Parliament 2010 can be proportionally squeezed, we will have a British system in only thirty years.

So I'm offering a video of Jay's first world premiere in lieu of reconciliation....

Disillusion and Dissolution

2010-05-06T01:59:00.000+07:00

For the last few days I've been in Korat, which is a province some three hours' drive from Bangkok with a population of 2.7 million people. It doesn't seem very far physically; 3 hours' driving in California doesn't always get you very far. But the concert which our newly formed youth orchestra played in the packed auditorium of a local university there was the first time that a symphony orchestra of any kind had played there, the first time that works of Haydn and Mozart were heard live … and they were heard in exactly the way people of the 18th century would have experienced them … as completely new works, as exciting new ways of organizing the universe of sound. It was an incredible audience. Apart from the odd baby, the kept absolutely silent and they hung on every note. Every familiar phrase of this music was a journey of discovery and wonder. The kids, too, played their hearts out. Despite a few technical glitches they dug into the meat of this music and made it their own. It was, in every sense, "the real thing." It is, indeed, the reason I came back to Asia.

And the reason I can't seem to leave and return to a more comfortable, bourgeois existence in a first-world country. There's just too much excitement here. The dawn of political awareness. The government of a European-style liberal trying to navigate through an ocean of age-old conflicts.

It's an established fact that in this country, the past is being continually rewritten, and if you were not there, you are unlikely ever to be told what happened. A prominent member of the Thai aristocracy commented on one of blogs that I hadn't gone far enough back, hadn't revealed the real sources of the various conflicts here. I replied that it would take a book, and she said, "Better write it now, before the old people die off without being interviewed, and the truth is lost forever."

As an experiment, I once asked a dozen Thai high school kids whether Thailand had won the Second World War. The answers ranged from "Of course" to "I think so." The amnesia about Siam's close aliance with the Axis Powers in WWII extends to recent events, as well ... such as the various pratfalls our country has taken on the road to democracy.

When Dr. Weng called Abhisit a vicious mass murderer, did he somehow forget that thousands of alleged drug dealers were disposed of without trial during the Thaksin era in order to fulfill a "war on drugs" quota, or that Muslim protesters were routinely shot, tortured, or left to suffocate in airless containers? If so much can be forgotten in only a few years, think of how much has been forgotten since democracy was first proposed for this country, almost eighty years ago.

I want to take a few statements that people, both locally and in the foreign media, have been bandying about, and just say "it ain't necessarily so."

"Thailand has never had a real democracy."

In 1973, as a result of a repressive attack by the military regime on protesting students which left perhaps hundreds dead, the government fell and a full-blown, exuberant democracy was put in place without any intervening stage between it and the previous dictatorship. That democracy lasted only three years, but in those three years people really had freedom of the press, could discuss every taboo subject, and had civilians running everything. It is important to know that Dr. Weng was an active student protester in that period, because his experience of students being shot at by fascists colors his entire worldview, and prevents him from understanding how much our world has changed since then.

It is true that this exciting democracy lasted only for three years. Panicking generals put an end to it. But those who were alive then have never forgotten how it felt.

"We are in a class war because of the unbridgeable chasm between the elite and the proletariat."

This tired page from the Marxist playbook was once true. When I was a child, the gap did indeed seem unbreachable. There was no middle class, and servants still crawled around on the floor. However, to state this as one of the axioms of today's situation is to ignore the fact that in the intervening years a rather powerful middle class has come into being. Except for the reverence and sanctity of the royal institution, the blue-bloods have become pretty irrelevant to the process. The paradigm of the Russian/French revolution is frequently invoked, but it is inaccurate. Serfdom was eliminated a very, very long time ago. If there is any kind of class war going on, it is between the nouveau riche and the slightly-less-nouveau riche. Go back a couple of generations with almost anyone who is anyone in Thailand today — from millionaires to generals — and you will find rural or working class backgrounds. The gap has been bridgeable for some time now. The problem is not that it can't be bridged but that not enough opportunities exist for the bridging to occur.

"It's all an anti-monarchist plot."

This, too, is a tired page from an old playbook. It has been invoked a few times in the past. It has rarely been a credit to its invokers. The 1976 coup used doctored photographs to insinuate that students were attacking the royal family. This is not a good accusation with which to "cry wolf" because it has generally tended to backfire. So, there had better be proof.

***

A few days have passed since I started writing the above and I've returned from Korat and done a second concert in Bangkok with the kids. Which was quite different. For one thing, Pa Daeng, immersed as she is in her dawning political awareness, has been a little more absent minded about her domestic duties and packed the wrong shoes for my concert, as a result of which I had to conduct in my socks. I knew that someone would end up noticing, so I decided to tell the audience that I wanted them to feel more Thai ... that this concert should feel like us having a nice chat in my living room about music ... a living room that just happened to have a symphony orchestra sitting around in it....

Well, the kids again outdid themselves, though the audience had a tough time getting to the hall amid 2-hour traffic jams .... and the stress of waiting to see if the red shirts would accept Abhisit's "Magic Plan."

The plan looked really great yesterday, but today it is already unravelling. Because the Magic Plan gives the red shirts everything they claim to want, but doesn't address some things the leaders actually want: amnesty for the leaders, a dissolution to come quickly enough to ensure they win the election and before the Abhisit government succeeds in fixing the economy or doing anything else that might make it more likely to hold on after an election. It seems that, while stating publicly that they will righteously defend themselves against these charges, they have in fact been secretly attempting to negotiate the charges away ... "terrorism" being, at least in theory, a capital offense here.

I think most people believe that some, even most, are innocent of the more extreme accusations. Still, there wouldn't be this much squirming if there weren't some fear that one or two charges might stick. For instance, the infamously iconoclastic Dr. Porntip, forensics superstar, has announced that the last soldier to die from what conventional wisdom has decided was friendly fire was in fact shot by a sniper from a location which agrees chillingly with footage shot by a foreign reporter, once more opening up the question of that mysterious "Third Party". And we know that Dr. P is notorious for calling them as she sees them, government be damned.... is there a smoking gun somewhere? (And if so, whose smoking gun?)

Once again, the unspoken is at the heart of it all.

Blogging at length

2010-05-01T01:14:00.002+07:00

I was feeling very ill after tonight's rehearsal of the youth orchestra (which went very well) so tonight I will refrain from blogging even though the situation is getting more and more interesting.

Catch you all tomorrow.....

Perhaps, a Deus Ex Machina

2010-04-27T13:00:00.002+07:00

I was taken completely aback when unexpectedly, this evening, His Majesty appeared on television. This is something we haven't seen for a very long time. As I was switching channels, I caught him in the middle of a speech. They were words of great import, spoken slowly and with great deliberation. The King was speaking about big issues: duty, integrity, and honesty. At one point, he said, "There are some people in this country who have forgotten to perform their duty," and he exhorted those he was addressing to set an example and "restore peace to the nation."

Now, as I had missed the beginning, I fully expected that the camera would zoom away to show the leaders of the red shirts and the government prostrating themselves at his feet. Only the camera didn't zoom away and later I figured out through context that the King was addressing a group of judges who had just been appointed and were about to take up their positions.

In the end, I don't think it really matters who was the "official" audience for these words. The message will clearly be seen as a message to the entire nation.

Last week, General Chavalit, allegedly closely associated with the red shirts and Thaksin, had publicly pleaded that His Majesty come forward and intervene, but his plea came with a thinly disguised threat: that the violence would become uncontrollable. The King is a constitutional monarch and considered to be above politics, and had he answered the general's request, it would have put him in the untenable position of appearing to take sides in a political dispute. Chavalit's gesture was widely criticized as putting undue pressure on the monarch — not because he petitioned the King — any citizen may do that — but because he made such a huge public display of doing so. meaning that being seen to have petitioned was the point — not the petition itself. In fact, this may well have been a crafty plan to prevent His Majesty from saying anything.

If so, the plan has failed because despite the difficulty of his position, a way has still been found for the King to tell the citizens of Thailand that core values like integrity, justice and truthfulness are the means by which peace can be restored.

"And Jupiter aligns with Mars .... o/'"

2010-04-26T13:41:00.001+07:00

As news came of a bomb going off at the home of coalition party leader Banharn, I settled down to watch a transvestite beauty contest on Thai television. A thousand people in white went to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha to perform a ceremony to increase the karmic bank balance of the country, while in the heart of the red shirt camp, more monks were trotted out to perform a ceremony to increase the influence of the planet Jupiter in order to bring them victory in the coming fray.

There's been an outbreak of H1N1 virus amongst the red community, but Dr. Weng has announced that there is no danger because "it is so hot that you just have to cough, and the virus will die on contact with the heat." All this whilst demanding an "Erection in Thirty Days". I'm not an expert on immunology by I suspect that if there are such viruses knocking around the plaza, they won't be as susceptible to heat stroke as the demonstrators.

It is very interesting to note that in a nationwide poll held by one of the universities, over half the population of Thailand seemed to think that this madness would be "over pretty soon". Either the common man has a better sense of the body politic than the average pundit, or there's a lot of wishful thinking going around.

Meanwhile, Thaksin has surfaced to deny the rumors of his own death. Abhisit did not capitulate to the red shirts' "30-day erection" demand, perhaps because, once the T-word came into use, it also created the new dilemma of whether it is permissible for a legitimate government to negotiate with same. He could not capitulate and they knew that. It would set a precedent whereby any mob could expect any demand from any minority, whose only requirement would be that they break laws and make a lot of noise. Yes, the yellow shirts started this trend by seizing the airport and not getting punished. But the government didn't capitulate to them; the judiciary was what actually gave them what they wanted. This would be a first.

I watched with some consternation the redshirts' clip in which Dr Weng said (I'm condensing this) "The international community is all on our side. Ban Ki-Moon has personally accepted our request for UN Peacekeeping Forces, and the only concern is that he may not be able to arrange them in time." Dr. Weng then proceeded to read the redshirts' letter to the U.N. aloud, in English, as proof of all this. The audience cheered wildly at inappropriate points, reacting only to Dr. Weng's triumphant tone of voice. This is because most people in the audience probably don't speak English, and certainly don't understand diplomatic phraseology. Dr. Weng didn't deign to read Ban Ki-Moon's response, if any. The demand was already proof of its acceptance.

It's a pity that the red rally speeches don't have English subtitles because the international press would surely have a much deeper understanding of what's happening if they did. One notes that the well-placed English-language slogans and placards are all the cues the international press picks up. It has all the subtlety of Woody Allen's "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"

The speech was an ultimate victory of tone over content. This could be said to be the theme of this entire fiasco of a people's revolution. As Humpty Dumpty said, "When I want a word means something different, I always pay it extra." A lesson which Thaksin has surely taken to heart as we begin to reassign definitions to such concepts as "democracy", "majority", and "peace". (Perhaps he should consider also what happened to Humpty Dumpty.)

When someone emerges who truly speaks for the values that the redshirts appear to espouse — a fair shake for the poor, equal opportunity, compassionate governance, and the ability to agree to disagree without resorting to grenade launchers — I will be first in line to join their cause.

For now, though, I would continue to maintain that no one does. In fact the only person who comes even close to wanting to bring about these noble ideals so touted by the red shirts is — ABHISIT!

Stereotypes

2010-04-24T12:12:00.001+07:00

Once in a while, I get a letter or email attacking me for my elitist arrogance. These letters make far-reaching assumptions about who I am, or rather who I ought to be considering my family name and societal status. For instance, here's one that excoriates me for being an upper-class twit:

Somtow, your condescending, self-satisfied bloviations do more to advance the case for toppling the aristocracy than a hundred hours or Ratchaprasong oration. But at least you have a good reason to fear an egalitarian society - without your royal relatives' patronage, your job at the opera would go to someone far more more talented and better liked.

Or else, they don't know anything about my family and therefore accuse me of some kind of pretension, like this one I just got today:

not favor demagoguery in any form but because I personally know people in the upper echelons of both sides
oh fuck off
"because I personally know people in the upper echelons of both sides "
don't be so stupid
typical thai
social climber
hi so
typical fuckin shit thai

Quite poetic, don't you think?

The truth is, I've rarely stated what I ultimately believe in, when it comes to the political situation, because this blog has been about telling my friends what I've seen and heard, the way I see and hear it. And trying to stay logical. The problem is that my personal feelings about this matter are not easily to categorize. But let me try.

In my head, I am for as society that is as egalitarian as it possibly can be, where everyone has the chance to go as far as their talent and ambition can take them. But in my heart, I am a monarchist, because the familial and societal connections are too strong for me to be otherwise, and because I am enamored of the beauty, historicity, and elegance of the traditional paradigm.

In my head, my sympathies tend towards the yellow view of society, not because I believe that the poor are too "dumb" to vote, but because I favor the Jeffersonian view that education must be used to evolve society towards equality for democracy to function fully. But in my heart, I do have a lot of sympathy for the red end of the spectrum. Not with their leaders, whose agenda is probably completely divorced from the reds' hopes and desires, but with the people themselves, because they have legitimate and important grievances which must be addressed properly if we are to be other than a feudal society behind a veneer of futurism.

In my opinion, these paradoxes are the same ones that cause such conflict in the mind of our prime minister. Because, as an European-educated, typical British-style liberal, he could probably do more for what the reds really need than any number of Thaksins. If they really wanted the things they say they want, and if they really understood the way that Abhisit was raised and the values that Europe taught him, the reds should actually make him their prime minister. (Has any previous government in this country voluntarily paid compensation to all the victims of any kind of political violence, including agreeing to pay for the education of all bereaved children all the way through college? Of course not. This is an idea that comes from a western liberal way of thinking and it shows that he has really taken responsibility in the fullest sense of the word — not by some forced abject confession of guilt, but by actually looking after the victims.) Abhisit is far more on the side of the proletariat than Thaksin's government ever was. This is not of course true of those around him, nor does it seems to be true of many of the leaders of this "proletariat movement".

Conversely, the Thaksin government, despite many brilliant solutions to the country's problems, became increasingly dictatorial. They certainly didn't shy away from massacring Muslims, shooting accused (perhaps innocent) drug dealers without a trial to fill a quota (did he compensate their families?), or slapping nuisance lawsuits on members of the press to muzzle them. The PAD made a grave error in making corruption their main bone of contention because there were so many better bones which the foreign press would have happily gnawed at, whereas corruption charges in this land of rampant corruption can always be met with scepticism. Thus in a sense, Thaksin was philosophically pretty yellow, although his yellowness was on the "wrong" side of the PAD's fence.

So this has been a war of labels, not of reality. Words like "democracy" and "terrorism" are bandied about without much regard to their meaning. Slogans have become substitutes for rational thought. In fact, it's more true to say it is a war about "mislabelling".

As can be seen in some of the attack mail I receive, even I, your humble blogmeister, have been labelled with opposing labels, and have had to endure the abuse that was directed at the label, not at myself. You can't wear a swastika and a yellow star at the same time. Rational people wear neither — unless compelled to do so by some evil power — nor do they blindly pin such labels on others.

Today, the red shirts have offered what they say is a "compromise" to the government; they will give them 30 days to dissolve parliament which means that there are really 90 days, since it will take at least two months to have an election.

The red shirt position is in fact becoming increasingly untenable as this continues because its ostensible aims seem to conflict so much with the massing of grenade launchers, the covering of surveillance cameras with garbage bags, the patent lack of enthusiasm in the city for their cause, and the weirdly changing and contradictory demands made each day.

I do not think that any government which came into being by a legitimate parliamentary process should negotiate about anything at all until the atmosphere has become one of civilized, non-threatening discourse. If this compromise is not to be mere posturing, it must begin with the voluntary disbanding of the protests to make way for such discourse.

This is as true now as it was when the PAD seized the airport. The reds must remember that the PAD did not "win" before; the regime was changed by a judicial process, not by a threatening mob. In a very real sense, the yellow shirts have themselves to blame for the current red shirt situation. They created an atmosphere where the red shirts became possible.

There are, in fact, understandable reasons why an election should take place pretty soon, because the parliamentary shufflings under the current imperfect constitution have made a lot of people uncomfortable. But forcing an election sets a very bad precedent.

If the government were in fact to capitulate, there would be, at least temporarily, a relief. Democracy (the real thing, not the label) will, however, be set aside by this, just as surely as it would be if a coup were to take place.

Drama

2010-04-23T02:02:00.000+07:00

As I was leaving a rehearsal of "The Marriage of Figaro" this evening, my driver told me that the radio was reporting bombs going off.

I went to Emporium to buy groceries and on my way out, around 10 pm, the iPhone news apps were starting to chime in.

Fie M-79s went off in Silom. It's a couple of hours later and here's what I can figure out: the first three blasts landed in the same place, basically the roof of the skytrain station. Two more came later; one in the street beneath the skytrain and the other at a major bank. Casualties: 1 dead, 75 wounded, a few foreigners.

Who did it? Police say the trajectories put their origin squarely at a red shirt stage behind the Statue of Rama VI. The red shirts deny all knowledge. Conventional wisdom among average Bangkokians has already prejudged them to be the culprits.

A few hours after the blasts, the Silom crowd are back in front of the Dusit, venting their rage at the red shirts. Bottles and slingshots seem to be the main weapons at this stage. The TV reporters noted, to our dismay, that the police weren't doing that much about it ... they were still reacting to the M-79 blasts.

The red shirts have been celebrating a civil court injunction handed down today that bars the government from using force to disperse their assembly. However, the injunction also contained a proviso that it no longer would apply if the assembly was no longer peaceful. Therefore, as pointed out in the Nation's "breaking news" just now, it no longer applies, and has been withdrawn. If ever they wanted to claim justification for martial law and mopping up, it would seem they have achieved that. However, that might well NOT be what they want to claim....

I imagine that in a few hours the spin doctors will all be ready with their versions of this.

After an hour or so of punditry, Jay and I watched the Takacs Quartet playing Bartok No. 6. It's one of the many DVD's Jay brought back for me from the Burmese border, where dubious DVDs of really great music are available for a dollar each.

We're waiting anxiously for morning. Trisdee will be here, still covered in volcanic ash. I'm still not "scared" yet, but that may change.