I would have benefitted from greater elucidation of Jim Taylor’s use of D&G but not because I question what it is he is asserting, “micro Fascism” and Macro Fascism are well established realities in Thailand (think Axis WW2, Phibul Songkhram and Sarit Thannarat, Thanom, The Scouts movement (Catherine Bowie) and every military coup since 1930s). What I’m left wondering is what does Deleuze add to the analysis?
By this I mean from Phibul’s programmes of nation building where people were fined, beaten and jailed for not wearing hats and adopting other hybrid cultural forms, themselves confections of American middle-class mores, through the anti-communist totalitarian mobilisation of the “Village Tiger Cub scout” movement; to the unrelenting cultural chauvinism of the Thai state against the Malay speaking population of the southern provinces etc, when hasn’t Thailand been a Fascist state with incumbent micro and macro fascisms that one would expect to inhere to a fascist state?
For a parallel to people being bashed for not respecting the monarchy “appropriately”, take a look at the record album cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia” that depicts a Thai beating the corpse of a student protester with a chair who has been hung in the Tamarind trees of Sanam Luang in the wake of the 1976 ROYAL BACKED military crackdown on the students.
These protesters were alleged to be both communist and to have also defamed the crown prince by urinating on an effigy of him inside the campus of Thammasart university. There are other such images of general population beating and defiling corpses of these students who were all believed to have Committed lese majeste.
What is interesting in the current context is many of the students from this period and some years later constitute a vanguard of intellectuals who see the Thai King’s support of the crackdown against them, as a betrayal of the people and country of Thailand, and we read and hear nothing of these people in the musings here in blogs or other media in the wake of the King’s passing, my guess is they aren’t wearing black but nor are they likely being bashed.
Also, I think it would be more anthropological to look at the who of who are the people being bashed (as evidence of micro fascisms) and by whom are they being bashed. The reason being not everyone failing to wear black is being bashed nor is every “disrespectful” comment online being hunted down. Just like with anything there are cultural scripts being acted out here and for anthropologists this is usually the most important kind of data.
D&G might be titillating for anyone interested in post-structuralism but has anyone actually tested their insights and theories cross culturally yet? If considered from the very basic tenet of anthropology that all experience is culturally mediated, does the quite obviously European notion of “desire” deployed by Deleuze, translate commensurately to non-European contexts? And do it’s implications similarly apply? My anthropological intuition is saying, unlikely.
The day after Christmas and you’re still at it? Most normal people take breaks from politics during the holidays. It’s a time for inner reflection and a chance to get away from contentious bickering for a short time. You should go listen to Burl Ives sing Holly Jolly Christmas and be happy!
Again, I truly feel sorry for you.
More than 20 Nobel peace prize winners have criticised their fellow laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, for failing to protect Rohingyas in Myanmar’s strife-torn Rakhine state.
Before the year is over I suggest we do a ranking of the Asean nations, from worst (a Police State) to …. good. Here is my ranking:
10. The Worst – the Police State of Asean is: LAOS
9. The Philippines – next worst for President Duterte’s extra-judicial rampage, 6000 deaths so far and still counting.
8. Cambodia – PM Hun Sen three decades of corruption
7. Myanmar – Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority goes on.
6. Malaysia – PM Najib of 1MDB scandal and strangulation of Malaysia’s Democracy
5. Brunei – the Sultan of Brunei and his brother’s excesses
4. Thailand – The undemocratic junta of General Prayuth rules
3. Vietnam – it is a communist country isn’t it not?
2. Indonesia
1. Singapore
[…] legendario: Es poco lo que sabemos en cuanto a su biografía y cómo era (como saber que fue un calvete como cualquier bhikkhu o bhikkhuni) de este personaje de carne y hueso. Sin embargo, lo que más […]
Jatuphat detention violates due process, says lawyer
Thu, 29/12/2016
The lawyer of the first lèse majesté suspect under the King Rama X has challenged a court’s decision to grant custody permission for his client, saying the hearing was done behind the suspect.
On 28 December 2016, Athiphong Phuphiw, the lawyer of Jatuphat Boonpattaraksa, has submit a petition the Khon Kaen Provincial Court. The petition demands revocation to custody permission of Jatuphat, which the court granted two days earlier. The petition stated that the court granted the permission without asking the suspect’s opinion.
RANGOON — As a Malaysian organization pledges to send a “food flotilla” to Burma’s conflict-ridden Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, President’s Office spokesperson U ZawHtay told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that such a gesture could be met with a warning or with violence.
Last time I checked, Chris, Thailand was a country in SE Asia, not a Facebook page… but we all have to deal with reality in whatever way suits I suppose.
Yes, Michael, there are indeed many poor people among the Thai working class. Very perceptive of you. What little hope there remains for the future among those folks resides not with the parasitic military/ammart ruling class but with those brave people that stand in opposition to the parasites.
Michael Wilson –
if you are SO sure of Thailand’s stability, how come some dissident firing fire-crackers at a government building, has just set off SUCH panic ? Everyone knows this is a ticking bomb ?
You severely underestimate the importance of demographics when talking about the “Chinese” issues. All the country you list down while they do have quite a number of Chinese citizens in them, they are only a small minority in a largely homogenous majority population country. Not so in Malaysia where the Malays only make about 51% of the population while the Chinese make about 22-25% of the population.
Malaysia majority race is not really big compared to Vietnam or Thailand and that is why it was important to include Sabah and Sarawak during the formation of Malaysia because with the inclusion of Singapore, the natives would be the minority. And this would then feed into the low self esteem issue that Malay have.
Of course, religion also comes to play regarding the difficulties of assimilation in Malaysia.
Who’s Asia’s No. 2 Police State After North Korea, And It’s Not China?
“. . . try being a Laotian citizen with gripes about how things are run. Authorities in this country with a population of 7 million make some of Asia’s most chilling grabs of dissenters. Laos is better known for “disappearances” compared to putting people on trial after detention periods as practiced in communist China and Vietnam. And you never know when you might say something that disappears you, a deterrent to speaking out. . .”
The Malays were Muslims longer than 200 years ago. You’ve been harping the assimilation between Chinese and Malays (the Nyonyas) while failing to realize that the initial Chinese migration to the straits was relatively few in numbers, 400 – 600 years ago mind you. Making it advantageous and easier for them to assimilate into the broader Malay culture especially since Islam was just taking root among the Malays.
The current Chinese and Indians population in Malaysia mainly stems from the migration in the 19th century onward. Their number was also far bigger than the initial Peranakan and in the 1430’s, the Chinese population were roughly the same as the Malays in Malaya. Why should they then “assimilate” when in some areas, they are the majority. https://faculty.washington.edu/charles/new%20PUBS/A26.pdf
I imagine that you are talking about the village loan scheme, the 30-baht medical program and the debt-relief for farmers that TRT initiated when it first came to power and conflating these well-known “pro-poor policies” with the notion of “pro-working class governments”.
But when you use the phrase “working-class” to mean nothing more than “poor” you are engaging in the kind of vagueness that Orwell identifies as an aspect of debased political language and that I consider to be essential to the kind of “dumbing down” of political discourse that characterizes most of what gets posted on this site.
The PPP phase of Thaksinite “rule” was headed by Samak, a royalist who not only was actively involved in the October 6 massacre but as PM went on television and denied that it had actually happened. In that sense, I suppose he and Thaksin shared a propensity for massive state violence, so it may not have been pure cynicism that led Thaksin to appoint him as nominee PM.
It goes without saying that the PPP administration was so tangled in up in existential protest against its very existence that it engaged in nothing that could be called “pro working-class”, “pro-poor” or indeed “pro-” anything at all but hanging onto power.
By the time Yingluck’s PT government got into power the advertising program that was the TRT “pro-poor policies” was whittled down to such things as the free tablet for every child “education policy” and the rice subsidy program, an unsustainable one-time payout to rice farmers.
The 300 baht per day minimum wage policy, arguably the only purely “pro working-class” policy ever promoted by a Thaksinite administration, was in itself little more than yet another populist program with short-term effects, including cheers from workers, but no long-term “pro working-class” supplements like improvements to the disgraceful Thai public education system or even just fully-funded skills upgrading programs etc.
One thing that is notably missing from any Thaksinite administration and that would be definite evidence of a “pro working-class” slant is a new Labor Relations Act. The restrictive “anti working-class” nature of that Act is well known to pro working-class people.
The increase in minimum wage was a welcome development and long-overdue but top-down “paternalism” is no substitute for removing the legal chains that bind Thai workers and keep them from being able to organize effectively and thus gain some degree of agency of their own.
For many reasons, including Thaksin’s firing of a whole raft of recently unionized employees at ITV when he bought it to bolster his control over media during the first TRT administration, organized labor was prominent in PAD and in the more recent Suthep mob calling for a coup to replace the “pro working-class” Thaksinite governments of the day. And this is not simply a case of people protesting against their own interests, although there is an element of that.
Let’s just say that I agree with Kevin Hewison when he said:
“The populism of these policies should not conceal the fact that the TRT
government was one by and for the rich, and the government immediately set about helping domestic business, including those associated with its leaders and supporters.”
So, Jim, what I “know” and what you “know” are apparently very different things. I wonder which of us is indulging in an “Orwellian” destruction of an understanding of history?
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Second acts for Thaksin and Trump?
The arrogance of this article is astounding. How did the “educated” become so incapable of relating to the world? What are they studying?
MAGA
A response to the Thai government
I would have benefitted from greater elucidation of Jim Taylor’s use of D&G but not because I question what it is he is asserting, “micro Fascism” and Macro Fascism are well established realities in Thailand (think Axis WW2, Phibul Songkhram and Sarit Thannarat, Thanom, The Scouts movement (Catherine Bowie) and every military coup since 1930s). What I’m left wondering is what does Deleuze add to the analysis?
By this I mean from Phibul’s programmes of nation building where people were fined, beaten and jailed for not wearing hats and adopting other hybrid cultural forms, themselves confections of American middle-class mores, through the anti-communist totalitarian mobilisation of the “Village Tiger Cub scout” movement; to the unrelenting cultural chauvinism of the Thai state against the Malay speaking population of the southern provinces etc, when hasn’t Thailand been a Fascist state with incumbent micro and macro fascisms that one would expect to inhere to a fascist state?
For a parallel to people being bashed for not respecting the monarchy “appropriately”, take a look at the record album cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia” that depicts a Thai beating the corpse of a student protester with a chair who has been hung in the Tamarind trees of Sanam Luang in the wake of the 1976 ROYAL BACKED military crackdown on the students.
These protesters were alleged to be both communist and to have also defamed the crown prince by urinating on an effigy of him inside the campus of Thammasart university. There are other such images of general population beating and defiling corpses of these students who were all believed to have Committed lese majeste.
What is interesting in the current context is many of the students from this period and some years later constitute a vanguard of intellectuals who see the Thai King’s support of the crackdown against them, as a betrayal of the people and country of Thailand, and we read and hear nothing of these people in the musings here in blogs or other media in the wake of the King’s passing, my guess is they aren’t wearing black but nor are they likely being bashed.
Also, I think it would be more anthropological to look at the who of who are the people being bashed (as evidence of micro fascisms) and by whom are they being bashed. The reason being not everyone failing to wear black is being bashed nor is every “disrespectful” comment online being hunted down. Just like with anything there are cultural scripts being acted out here and for anthropologists this is usually the most important kind of data.
D&G might be titillating for anyone interested in post-structuralism but has anyone actually tested their insights and theories cross culturally yet? If considered from the very basic tenet of anthropology that all experience is culturally mediated, does the quite obviously European notion of “desire” deployed by Deleuze, translate commensurately to non-European contexts? And do it’s implications similarly apply? My anthropological intuition is saying, unlikely.
Inching toward Orwell
What? The newly-installed King gets aced out by an ignorant corrupt General?
Inching toward Orwell
The day after Christmas and you’re still at it? Most normal people take breaks from politics during the holidays. It’s a time for inner reflection and a chance to get away from contentious bickering for a short time. You should go listen to Burl Ives sing Holly Jolly Christmas and be happy!
Again, I truly feel sorry for you.
Inching toward Orwell
If you have the time to write something so long-winded and boring on Christmas Eve, I truly feel sorry for you.
Inching toward Orwell
PM Prayut named “Man of the Year 2016”
http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/pm-prayut-named-man-year-2016/
Another year over
push Thailand up above Malaysia
Decades of denial as Rohingya genocide continues
More than 20 Nobel peace prize winners have criticised their fellow laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, for failing to protect Rohingyas in Myanmar’s strife-torn Rakhine state.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/nobel-peace-prize-winners-scold-aung-san-suu-kyi-over-crimes-against-rohingyas-20161230-gtjzco.html
Another year over
Before the year is over I suggest we do a ranking of the Asean nations, from worst (a Police State) to …. good. Here is my ranking:
10. The Worst – the Police State of Asean is: LAOS
9. The Philippines – next worst for President Duterte’s extra-judicial rampage, 6000 deaths so far and still counting.
8. Cambodia – PM Hun Sen three decades of corruption
7. Myanmar – Ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority goes on.
6. Malaysia – PM Najib of 1MDB scandal and strangulation of Malaysia’s Democracy
5. Brunei – the Sultan of Brunei and his brother’s excesses
4. Thailand – The undemocratic junta of General Prayuth rules
3. Vietnam – it is a communist country isn’t it not?
2. Indonesia
1. Singapore
Happy New Year to all.
4.
6.
The Buddha was bald
[…] legendario: Es poco lo que sabemos en cuanto a su biografía y cómo era (como saber que fue un calvete como cualquier bhikkhu o bhikkhuni) de este personaje de carne y hueso. Sin embargo, lo que más […]
Henry VIII of Thailand
Jatuphat detention violates due process, says lawyer
Thu, 29/12/2016
The lawyer of the first lèse majesté suspect under the King Rama X has challenged a court’s decision to grant custody permission for his client, saying the hearing was done behind the suspect.
On 28 December 2016, Athiphong Phuphiw, the lawyer of Jatuphat Boonpattaraksa, has submit a petition the Khon Kaen Provincial Court. The petition demands revocation to custody permission of Jatuphat, which the court granted two days earlier. The petition stated that the court granted the permission without asking the suspect’s opinion.
http://prachatai.org/english/node/6814
Decades of denial as Rohingya genocide continues
28 December 2016
RANGOON — As a Malaysian organization pledges to send a “food flotilla” to Burma’s conflict-ridden Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, President’s Office spokesperson U ZawHtay told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that such a gesture could be met with a warning or with violence.
http://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/could-the-burmese-navy-attack-malaysias-food-flotilla.html
Inching toward Orwell
Michael Wilson – would you accept that ” populist” is a better description of the Thaksin governments, than “pro-working class” ?
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Last time I checked, Chris, Thailand was a country in SE Asia, not a Facebook page… but we all have to deal with reality in whatever way suits I suppose.
Inching toward Orwell
Yes, Michael, there are indeed many poor people among the Thai working class. Very perceptive of you. What little hope there remains for the future among those folks resides not with the parasitic military/ammart ruling class but with those brave people that stand in opposition to the parasites.
What next for the theatrics of Thailand?
Michael Wilson –
if you are SO sure of Thailand’s stability, how come some dissident firing fire-crackers at a government building, has just set off SUCH panic ? Everyone knows this is a ticking bomb ?
A rise in anti-Chinese rhetoric
You severely underestimate the importance of demographics when talking about the “Chinese” issues. All the country you list down while they do have quite a number of Chinese citizens in them, they are only a small minority in a largely homogenous majority population country. Not so in Malaysia where the Malays only make about 51% of the population while the Chinese make about 22-25% of the population.
Malaysia majority race is not really big compared to Vietnam or Thailand and that is why it was important to include Sabah and Sarawak during the formation of Malaysia because with the inclusion of Singapore, the natives would be the minority. And this would then feed into the low self esteem issue that Malay have.
Of course, religion also comes to play regarding the difficulties of assimilation in Malaysia.
What happened to Sombath Somphone?
Who’s Asia’s No. 2 Police State After North Korea, And It’s Not China?
“. . . try being a Laotian citizen with gripes about how things are run. Authorities in this country with a population of 7 million make some of Asia’s most chilling grabs of dissenters. Laos is better known for “disappearances” compared to putting people on trial after detention periods as practiced in communist China and Vietnam. And you never know when you might say something that disappears you, a deterrent to speaking out. . .”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphjennings/2016/12/27/behind-the-smiles-laos-is-known-as-asias-no-2-police-state/#12cb90111ff5
A rise in anti-Chinese rhetoric
Cohen,
The Malays were Muslims longer than 200 years ago. You’ve been harping the assimilation between Chinese and Malays (the Nyonyas) while failing to realize that the initial Chinese migration to the straits was relatively few in numbers, 400 – 600 years ago mind you. Making it advantageous and easier for them to assimilate into the broader Malay culture especially since Islam was just taking root among the Malays.
The current Chinese and Indians population in Malaysia mainly stems from the migration in the 19th century onward. Their number was also far bigger than the initial Peranakan and in the 1430’s, the Chinese population were roughly the same as the Malays in Malaya. Why should they then “assimilate” when in some areas, they are the majority. https://faculty.washington.edu/charles/new%20PUBS/A26.pdf
Inching toward Orwell
I imagine that you are talking about the village loan scheme, the 30-baht medical program and the debt-relief for farmers that TRT initiated when it first came to power and conflating these well-known “pro-poor policies” with the notion of “pro-working class governments”.
But when you use the phrase “working-class” to mean nothing more than “poor” you are engaging in the kind of vagueness that Orwell identifies as an aspect of debased political language and that I consider to be essential to the kind of “dumbing down” of political discourse that characterizes most of what gets posted on this site.
The PPP phase of Thaksinite “rule” was headed by Samak, a royalist who not only was actively involved in the October 6 massacre but as PM went on television and denied that it had actually happened. In that sense, I suppose he and Thaksin shared a propensity for massive state violence, so it may not have been pure cynicism that led Thaksin to appoint him as nominee PM.
It goes without saying that the PPP administration was so tangled in up in existential protest against its very existence that it engaged in nothing that could be called “pro working-class”, “pro-poor” or indeed “pro-” anything at all but hanging onto power.
By the time Yingluck’s PT government got into power the advertising program that was the TRT “pro-poor policies” was whittled down to such things as the free tablet for every child “education policy” and the rice subsidy program, an unsustainable one-time payout to rice farmers.
The 300 baht per day minimum wage policy, arguably the only purely “pro working-class” policy ever promoted by a Thaksinite administration, was in itself little more than yet another populist program with short-term effects, including cheers from workers, but no long-term “pro working-class” supplements like improvements to the disgraceful Thai public education system or even just fully-funded skills upgrading programs etc.
One thing that is notably missing from any Thaksinite administration and that would be definite evidence of a “pro working-class” slant is a new Labor Relations Act. The restrictive “anti working-class” nature of that Act is well known to pro working-class people.
The increase in minimum wage was a welcome development and long-overdue but top-down “paternalism” is no substitute for removing the legal chains that bind Thai workers and keep them from being able to organize effectively and thus gain some degree of agency of their own.
For many reasons, including Thaksin’s firing of a whole raft of recently unionized employees at ITV when he bought it to bolster his control over media during the first TRT administration, organized labor was prominent in PAD and in the more recent Suthep mob calling for a coup to replace the “pro working-class” Thaksinite governments of the day. And this is not simply a case of people protesting against their own interests, although there is an element of that.
Let’s just say that I agree with Kevin Hewison when he said:
“The populism of these policies should not conceal the fact that the TRT
government was one by and for the rich, and the government immediately set about helping domestic business, including those associated with its leaders and supporters.”
So, Jim, what I “know” and what you “know” are apparently very different things. I wonder which of us is indulging in an “Orwellian” destruction of an understanding of history?