Bangkok: All coup, no blood

There has been a hiatus in this blog dating back to two events: the overthrow of the elected government of Thailand and the arrival on that day of 24 American college students, also known as my students (naak rian phom). Without drama, I can assure the reader that it is the latter and not the former condition that has caused this hiatus.

The class is a 3½ week, 3 credit global seminar. So it is a pretty intensive undertaking. I’m writing now from the front sear of a van curling through the hills north of Chiang Mai on what promises to be, hands down, the greatest act of faith of the trip; we are going on an overnight in a village sponsored by Wat Sri Soda to see one of their projects in action. We’ll be eating with the villagers and sleeping on the floor of the temple (wat). I have given over the weekend to our hosts and it is off to a promising start – the roads are getting smaller and smaller, windier and twistier. Up in the clouds, Emily says, “It’s like we’re at the end of the Earth.”

Cooing about the Coup. Although teaching this course may be the primary reason for this blog’s hiatus, this post will be primarily about politics.

Some of my notes about martial law and the coup are based on news that arrives with a predictably filtered flavor through the Bangkok Post. The overall arch suggests that at first the coup seemed like a relief to many as a way of coping with a perceived political stalemate.

Uniformed news anchor who would occasionally interrupt
monotony of the National Council for Peace and Order sigils

I doubt there was in fact a political stalemate. Instead there was a popular (and populist) government elected and reaffirmed by election that was contrary to a former political elite and their allies in the army. There was legislation. Given the majority of the popularly elected Pheu Thai government, passing legislation was not a structural problem. There were protests – first from the right against the prime minister’s policies, which had largely burned out; then from the left when the judiciary ruled against the prime minister and her entire cabinet, causing the party to put in place a caretaker government. As an outside observer mindful of the slogans now bandied about by the ruling junta, it seems that some ideal of political harmony was not being upheld, and that frustrated people enough to be supportive – or at least resigned to – an unconstitutional coup.

Thailand, the land of smiles, simply can’t stand overt hardball politics. It wants its hardball politics closeted.

If there was any doubt as to who are not the democrats in Thailand, here is one description of the initial reaction of the Democrat Party's protest movement called the People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC): “PDRC demonstrators greeted the news of the coup with cheers, blowing whistles and waving hand-clappers. Some stood up to wave national flags.”

Since the initial announcement on 20 May of martial law and then on 22 May of the coup, since the initial antipathy toward these developments (see the video blog post Life Under Martial Law), things began to take a more sinister flavor. Arrest warrants, “invitations”, were issued for members of both the left and right parties. Most politicians who responded to these have subsequently been released under various constraints to their speech. Other are still being sought. The National Council for Peace and Order, or NCPO, issues decrees every day that appear more and more dictatorial. One decree suggested the internet needed to be censured. Another decree restricted gatherings to no more than five people and prohibited the “three finger salute,” a wonderful example of life imitating art.

Life Imitating Art. The Hunger Games is a young adult science fiction series in which a detached, indulgent urban elite (read oppressive university professors) lord over genuine, impoverished rural workers. The novels are set in a dystopic, future North America. However some clever leftist wag figured this was a pretty accurate portrayal of Thailand today. So, how do you bring this critique home to roost? You adopt the three-fingered salute of the fictional resistance in Hunger Games. In the second book and movie, protesters who show defiance by raising three fingers are dragged out of the crowd by masked and truncheon-wielding riot police and beaten for their insolence. Following NCPO’s decree against this three-fingered salute (“Even a bystander at a demonstration showing the three-fingered salute will be subject to arrest,” or some such language,) it is hard to imagine such scenes not playing themselves out somewhere around Democracy Monument in Bangkok.

Orwellianity with a Smile. Speaking of the Democracy Monument, the center of the anti-coup demonstrations in the past several weeks, the government had a brilliant idea to thwart the protests: a music concert! So instead of traffic in Bangkok being ground to a halt by political protest at this central hub, traffic was to grind to a halt because of this wonderful recreational opportunity brought to you by your favorite neighborhood Thai Psychological Operation (sic.) branch of the military government. In a wonderful coda to this hearts-and-minds offensive, the Post noted that the concert started 2 hours early because the crowd that had gathered beforehand was so large. I was unable to research the incident further, but it holds a special place in my heart as the only concert in the history of the universe to have started early.

On that first night I was informed about the coup by the hotel clerk when I asked him for a recommendation for a local restaurant that evening at 8:50. He indicated that I could not go out because there was a 9 pm curfew. I had not heard of a curfew and he did not know the word for coup, so it wasn’t until I headed, empty stomached and confused, back to my hotel room that I found on my Facebook feed a description of the day’s events. You can bet that made my evening. When I turned on the television for the latest news coverage, it was all the same channel playing patriotic songs that, from their screechy scratchy quality, must have been dusted off from a previous military take-over.

The beautifully painted murals on the walls of the royal Wat Phra Khaew
remind the observer that politics without gloves is no new thing in Thailand.

At about 11, still not entirely sure I had a class to teach or, if I had one whether they would be allowed to enter Bangkok from the airport, I received a call from a New York Post reporter. This poor reporter was cold calling hotels around Bangkok finagling receptionists to put him through to any Americans they might have staying at the hotel. Our receptionist, no bright bulb, I fear, thought he was part of the University of Minnesota apparatus trying to get ahold of me to answer my existential questions about the class. We spoke for only a few minutes, but it was enough to garner the headline, “Tourists gripe about coup’s inconvenience.” Tourist? Gripe? I felt so minimized. Clearly I have more to learn about public relations.

That night I sent out an inquiry on Facebook asking how best to incorporate these political developments with the themes of the course, Buddhist and addiction. My colleague in the Psychology Department, Rich Lee, bless his heart, did not hold back. He wrote, “Hang in there, Angus! And I hope you are also able to help students appreciate the rich Thai and Buddhist history and genuine life of the Thai people without students accidentially essentializing or completely pathologizing the culture, religion, and people. An interesting perspective is to incorporate the role of American militarism (and its accompanied facilitation of corruption and the drug trade) and American/Western-fueled sex trade of girls and young women as ways in which Whiteness and wealth exploit and corrupt developing countries.”

I think this captures a prominent bias among American academics for the past couple decades (roughly speaking the post-colonial, post-Orientalism, post cold-war era). I worded my response carefully, because I do appreciate Rich diving in with a theoretic position. I responded, “Thanks for your advice, Rich. I actually have a different analysis of the events, such that U.S. foreign and drug indiction policies are really quite peripheral to the current, very Thai, set of issues. In effect, the Thai's are struggling with a fundamental brittleness of democracy wherein a state is cobbled together by regions and classes with distinctly separate interests. In this case, the ruling Pheu Thai party has a sufficiently strong majority that they can, in effect, tyrannize the minority -- although in this case, that tyranny comes in the form of rice subsidies and other unsustainable policies. This has backed the so-called Democrat party into becoming anything but democratic -- they welcomed the coup because it was their only way of getting influence back. All this while parties of all colors repeat their allegiance to the monarch. There is a sex trade here, but to call it Western-fueled is to give the locals and their Asian neighbors short-shrift, while to see it underlying the political instability is a head scratcher.” In short, 65 million Thai's are creative enough to imagine their own political stalemate without the help of anyone else.