Your article is very timely. I have developed an interdisciplinary research team preparing now a proposal on Eugenics and Intellectual Disability in Japan and Thailand involving PhD and post – doc students from Mahidol U. (disabilities studies) and Shumei University (Eugenics historians). Would love to be in touch with you over this.
Sure literacy rates are not everything….ever person interested in knowledge/s (plural rather than singular) should know this. However, I am really not quite sure the Vietnamese education system is a great deal better although perhaps Vietnamese students are more diligent, are seemingly more thirsty for knowledge and are “bored” with the Marxism-Leninism (some university students even pay lecturers to skip such classes that take up to 40% of their study program). But Vietnam has a very different history and culture to Thailand and the only reverential figure who has to be respected is Ho Chi Minh (or Bac Ho). However, you can be critical of Bac Ho as indeed some people are but it is not against the law in Vietnam to criticize him. In making that point I think in terms of civil society Thailand is considerably freer than Vietnam. I know quite a lot about Vietnam because I have been working there since the mid-1980s. As for Malaysia I am not too sure so will not offer. The point of comparison with those countries is that literacy rates are low although improving but less quickly for females than males. And just to repeat: I am not an apologist for regimes of any complexion.
I think the writer is confusing what Indonesian values are and what feminism is. Basic Indonesian values include: no intercourse before marriage, uphold a marriage (no extra marital affairs, never even entertain such notion), and LGBT are bad for you. Looking at it from this perspective, obviously feminism in Indonesia doesn’t adhere to the idea of “my body, my rules” other nation feminist adhere to. But that doesn’t made them any less feminist, they just follow different values.
Sure, a great idea until patron starts to get greedy, and the client begins to assume a status and wield power presumably with the protection of the patron. ‘Tea money’ or the ‘brown envelope’ then becomes standard practice, and the contents of the brown envelopes, or the value of the ‘gifts’ are expected to rise, and almost become an auction. This is the typical ‘mafia’ model, and is unfortunately extensively applied in many countries, particularly in Asia. The billionaire families club in Thailand is a good example of the patronage system, which extends into the legal system where police are paid off to turn a blind eye to the crimes of members of these families, and their wealth increases at the expense of the peasant classes. Sorry, corruption is corruption wherever and however it is called, and the so-called patron-client model is just another name for this culturally embedded practice.
Obviously it could, but it is an exception, and not a rule. As the word itself suggest: patronage implied a take and give relationship between patron and client. How many patron would be willingly sacrifice their asset to advance society? Less than 1% I think.
It is much more profitable for the patron to use their asset to elect puppet leader and use that puppet to increase their asset and wealth.
It only became incendiary after certain parties make it so. Even the people who were present didn’t get offended. Do you think they are all too stupid to get offended if Ahok had said anything that was genuinely offensive?
It’s only after certain people officially throw in their hats into the ring for the Jakarta governorship that the whole thing become controversial.
If it was not this blasphemy thing they would have invented another equally ridiculous issue to attack Ahok with.
They tried with Sumber Waras. It failed.
They tried with reclamation project. It was kind of working, but then that Sanusi guy stupidly got caught red handed receiving bribes from the developer of the same project, while publicly being opposed to it.
They tried with the evictions. It’s somewhat more successful, but they also realize that Ahok is popular with the majority of Jakartans because he reduces the floodings exactly through clearing out the slums and restoring the rivers.
So they had to resort to this blasphemy thing. They know it’s easy to get a lot of people in Indonesia riled up using fear, prejudice, and victimhood. They were right.
What’s hardly surprising is that it’s quite easy to manipulate (or mobilize, if you will) people through fear, prejudice, and victimhood.
If the Drumpf could do it with Americans then it’s not surprising that FPI leader Rizieq, with support from Jokowi’s opponents, could also do it in Indonesia.
Holding a demonstration peacefully is not some super achievement. It’s merely the right thing to do.
Should people be praised for not mowing down pedestrians when they drive to work in the morning?
There really is something to this correlation between ophthalmology and politics. Add to the list the example of Dr. Salvador Nava Martínez, running as an independent candidate against the socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party at a time when Mexico was a de facto one-party state, he was arrested and subjected to torture by the Mexican military after he led a protest against electoral fraud. It took Dr. Martínez 15 years before he returned to Mexican politics under the banner of the socially conservative National Action Party. After again losing an election due to blatant voter fraud, he led a mass of supporters on a 265 mile march, by foot, to Mexico City in protest to the corruption of the IRP. At this time he was 77 years old. He would die of complications from gallbladder cancer a year later.
Despite never having been elected to office, his protest movement was a first step towards the end of the political monopoly of the IRP’s corrupt rule.
Maybe not as grim as portrayed, true, but grim nonetheless. The article should be more nuanced, agreed, but it was short and tired to get the message across. Are you seriously saying that the Thai education system should not be streets ahead in literacy rates of Lao PDR or Cambodia or in countries such as Bangladesh, India or Pakistan? Why compare Thailand to Laos? Finally, literacy rates are not everything. The style of teaching and content should be streets ahead, say of Laos and Cambodia, I am not sure it is. Why not compare to Vietnam? Malaysia?
1. The first thing you should do “Michael Wilson”, is admit who you are and who you are not. You are not a liberal Canadian, that’s for sure. So who are you and why are you so much – and exclusively – interested in Indonesian affairs if you are not an Indonesian or living in Indonesia?
2. There are many young Indonesian feminists influenced by Western feminism. Either because they educated themselves by reading books, reading on the internet, or in study-groups etc, after having made their experiences in a very male-dominated culture. The majority of Indonesian feminists are not “Islamic feminists” and even many of the minority who are, are at least as inspired by Western feminists as they are by the Koran.
3. If there has been cultural imperialism in Indonesia in the last decades it was not Western but Salafist and Wahhabist cultural imperialism, financially supported, mainly, by Saudi Arabia. This foreign, alien influence has already changed Indonesia in the last twenty, thirty years beyond recognition. It Is now threatening to turn Indonesia into a new Pakistan – as, among others, the general secretary of (Muslim mass organization) NU has warned.
Only a fool or an ideologue would call this a “democratic” development. And no matter how big the amount of your logorrhea you are both.
The writer is very polite in saying “Muslim consummers do not trust international firms without halal Certs”
I would say, jakim is shoving the need for Halal certs down the Malaysian Muslims throats. The average Muslim in Malaysia does not give two hoods about the cert as long as they know that no pork is served.
The Talibanism of Malaysia is being perpetrated by jakim and the Staes religious bodies. It starts with gunning down Muslims who dare to eat in places without “Halal certs” if they are owned by Non-Muslims. If they are Muslim own, then no issues. These establishments of course includes bars and Bistros owned by Muslims – Yes, many big name Bistro Bars are owned by Muslims in Malaysia…
To my way of thinking, Marc, what “nobody here” is interested in is the growing conflict between liberalism and democracy that is very much behind the rise of various populisms that threaten to destroy both of them, pretty much everywhere on the planet.
I, on the other hand, am.
You, like so many unreflective cultural imperialists, automatically conflate “democracy” with “liberalism” and want to pretend that if a society such as the Indonesian does not manifest liberal values when they act to create a government in a manner of their choosing, then they are not “being democratic”.
You, as is the white man’s way, would only call their system democratic if it reflected what apparently you think are “your” values, although I suspect that what we are dealing with here is something imposed through “brainwashing” rather than a personal value system. Values, in my reading, do not reside in a jerking knee.
I’m also interested in how this website reflects the unchanging pattern of white folks hoisting the white man’s burden like a flag and continually lecturing their little brown brothers on how it is they should be conducting their politics.
In some cases, as in the non-stop defense of Thai “democracy” that involves absolving an elected PM of human rights abuses because he was elected and therefore the UN was not his father, the NM rabble opposes liberal values to electoral democracy and democracy is held to be the superior value. So “death squads good, juntas bad” is the chant at the Hate Week forum that this website hosts.
In the case of a Muslim majority society manifesting values that were operative in western liberal societies a mere 5 decades ago, of course the opposite is true. If the values of a given electorate do not reflect one of the more fashionable liberal values du jour, then liberalism trumps democracy.
As to whether or not I am a radical or a liberal, I can only say that when the kneejerk liberal position in North America was that homosexuality was a mental disorder, I opposed that fascistic position. And when AIDs was giving the reluctantly converted “liberals” second thoughts about their support for “gay liberation”, I shaved my head and moved my earring into the “gay ear” in an act of symbolic solidarity. Good friends of mine were activists prominent in the protests against the bathhouse raids and as things started going our way I even converted to opera.
And as someone schooled in a more radical version of feminism than has been on display in the “liberal” media of late, I find it hilarious that a man is making pronouncements on what is surprising or unusual in the discourse of Indonesian women and what constitutes a “feminist” position and what does not. To simply gloss over the very real conflicts taking place between white liberal feminists and the Muslim women they tend to talk down to in an article that apparently wants to look at aspects of women’s rights and women’s roles in a Muslim society is astounding really.
So for me, Hendri’s article brings up questions: one regarding the “mansplanaton” of what is or is not a feminist position and another about how a supporter of liberal human rights, which last time I checked involved not only sexual/gender-orientation provisions but guarantees of political freedoms as well, can so blithely deny an electorate the right to have its values reflected in its legal system.
Refusing to consider the very real dichotomies and self-contradictions that are separating the democratic horse from the the liberal carriage and tending toward the creation of loveless populist marriages of convenience between the masses and their would-be masters is not how we do things on the liberal/radical side of the fence. Sticking your head in the sand or in another convenient hole is really not our way.
Hazara are Turkic Shi’a of whom there are few in Indonesia or Malaysia. Far more in Turkey, Germany, Australia, US, etc. They are discriminated against in Afghanistan despite having many talents in the arts, sports and politics. They are noticeable due to a “Kazakh” like appearance resulting from common Turkic origins with Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Uyghurs. A gentle people far removed from Afghani Islamic extremism. However, they are the poorest of the main Afghan ethnic groups and being Shi’a does not help them gain acceptance-even Shi’a Iran will not accept them.
Fantastic comment. Well observed and wonderfully articulated. it’s not exactly pertinent (to Isan) but, on my last visit back to the UK I came across this excellent article in the New Left Review (yes, of all places) – my mother has a subscription: https://newleftreview.org/II/97/benedict-anderson-riddles-of-yellow-and-red
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Nationalism and genetics: Thai obsession with race
Dear Olivier,
Your article is very timely. I have developed an interdisciplinary research team preparing now a proposal on Eugenics and Intellectual Disability in Japan and Thailand involving PhD and post – doc students from Mahidol U. (disabilities studies) and Shumei University (Eugenics historians). Would love to be in touch with you over this.
Race to the bottom
Buddhism is not Islam. Religious police is Oxymoron in Buddha teaching.
Sharia is indeed a race to the bottom for ALL none believers.
Old men and the abuse of Thai youth
Sure literacy rates are not everything….ever person interested in knowledge/s (plural rather than singular) should know this. However, I am really not quite sure the Vietnamese education system is a great deal better although perhaps Vietnamese students are more diligent, are seemingly more thirsty for knowledge and are “bored” with the Marxism-Leninism (some university students even pay lecturers to skip such classes that take up to 40% of their study program). But Vietnam has a very different history and culture to Thailand and the only reverential figure who has to be respected is Ho Chi Minh (or Bac Ho). However, you can be critical of Bac Ho as indeed some people are but it is not against the law in Vietnam to criticize him. In making that point I think in terms of civil society Thailand is considerably freer than Vietnam. I know quite a lot about Vietnam because I have been working there since the mid-1980s. As for Malaysia I am not too sure so will not offer. The point of comparison with those countries is that literacy rates are low although improving but less quickly for females than males. And just to repeat: I am not an apologist for regimes of any complexion.
Indonesia and ‘transparent sex’
I think the writer is confusing what Indonesian values are and what feminism is. Basic Indonesian values include: no intercourse before marriage, uphold a marriage (no extra marital affairs, never even entertain such notion), and LGBT are bad for you. Looking at it from this perspective, obviously feminism in Indonesia doesn’t adhere to the idea of “my body, my rules” other nation feminist adhere to. But that doesn’t made them any less feminist, they just follow different values.
Two sides of the same coin
Sure, a great idea until patron starts to get greedy, and the client begins to assume a status and wield power presumably with the protection of the patron. ‘Tea money’ or the ‘brown envelope’ then becomes standard practice, and the contents of the brown envelopes, or the value of the ‘gifts’ are expected to rise, and almost become an auction. This is the typical ‘mafia’ model, and is unfortunately extensively applied in many countries, particularly in Asia. The billionaire families club in Thailand is a good example of the patronage system, which extends into the legal system where police are paid off to turn a blind eye to the crimes of members of these families, and their wealth increases at the expense of the peasant classes. Sorry, corruption is corruption wherever and however it is called, and the so-called patron-client model is just another name for this culturally embedded practice.
Two sides of the same coin
Obviously it could, but it is an exception, and not a rule. As the word itself suggest: patronage implied a take and give relationship between patron and client. How many patron would be willingly sacrifice their asset to advance society? Less than 1% I think.
It is much more profitable for the patron to use their asset to elect puppet leader and use that puppet to increase their asset and wealth.
Has Jokowi handed a strategic victory to radicals?
Also, less than 2% of the population self declared as Chinese Indonesians in the last population census in 2010.
How many out of this 2% “…have denied people opportunity and equity.”? And how did they do this?
Has Jokowi handed a strategic victory to radicals?
It only became incendiary after certain parties make it so. Even the people who were present didn’t get offended. Do you think they are all too stupid to get offended if Ahok had said anything that was genuinely offensive?
It’s only after certain people officially throw in their hats into the ring for the Jakarta governorship that the whole thing become controversial.
If it was not this blasphemy thing they would have invented another equally ridiculous issue to attack Ahok with.
They tried with Sumber Waras. It failed.
They tried with reclamation project. It was kind of working, but then that Sanusi guy stupidly got caught red handed receiving bribes from the developer of the same project, while publicly being opposed to it.
They tried with the evictions. It’s somewhat more successful, but they also realize that Ahok is popular with the majority of Jakartans because he reduces the floodings exactly through clearing out the slums and restoring the rivers.
So they had to resort to this blasphemy thing. They know it’s easy to get a lot of people in Indonesia riled up using fear, prejudice, and victimhood. They were right.
Has Jokowi handed a strategic victory to radicals?
What’s hardly surprising is that it’s quite easy to manipulate (or mobilize, if you will) people through fear, prejudice, and victimhood.
If the Drumpf could do it with Americans then it’s not surprising that FPI leader Rizieq, with support from Jokowi’s opponents, could also do it in Indonesia.
Holding a demonstration peacefully is not some super achievement. It’s merely the right thing to do.
Should people be praised for not mowing down pedestrians when they drive to work in the morning?
Has Jokowi handed a strategic victory to radicals?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for that mass organization law to be ratified by the parliament.
Doctor, my eyes
There is no correlation between ophthalmology and politics, except those like Dr Bashar al-Assad, can’t see when they are butchering their people.
Doctor, my eyes
There really is something to this correlation between ophthalmology and politics. Add to the list the example of Dr. Salvador Nava Martínez, running as an independent candidate against the socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party at a time when Mexico was a de facto one-party state, he was arrested and subjected to torture by the Mexican military after he led a protest against electoral fraud. It took Dr. Martínez 15 years before he returned to Mexican politics under the banner of the socially conservative National Action Party. After again losing an election due to blatant voter fraud, he led a mass of supporters on a 265 mile march, by foot, to Mexico City in protest to the corruption of the IRP. At this time he was 77 years old. He would die of complications from gallbladder cancer a year later.
Despite never having been elected to office, his protest movement was a first step towards the end of the political monopoly of the IRP’s corrupt rule.
Old men and the abuse of Thai youth
Maybe not as grim as portrayed, true, but grim nonetheless. The article should be more nuanced, agreed, but it was short and tired to get the message across. Are you seriously saying that the Thai education system should not be streets ahead in literacy rates of Lao PDR or Cambodia or in countries such as Bangladesh, India or Pakistan? Why compare Thailand to Laos? Finally, literacy rates are not everything. The style of teaching and content should be streets ahead, say of Laos and Cambodia, I am not sure it is. Why not compare to Vietnam? Malaysia?
Indonesia and ‘transparent sex’
1. The first thing you should do “Michael Wilson”, is admit who you are and who you are not. You are not a liberal Canadian, that’s for sure. So who are you and why are you so much – and exclusively – interested in Indonesian affairs if you are not an Indonesian or living in Indonesia?
2. There are many young Indonesian feminists influenced by Western feminism. Either because they educated themselves by reading books, reading on the internet, or in study-groups etc, after having made their experiences in a very male-dominated culture. The majority of Indonesian feminists are not “Islamic feminists” and even many of the minority who are, are at least as inspired by Western feminists as they are by the Koran.
3. If there has been cultural imperialism in Indonesia in the last decades it was not Western but Salafist and Wahhabist cultural imperialism, financially supported, mainly, by Saudi Arabia. This foreign, alien influence has already changed Indonesia in the last twenty, thirty years beyond recognition. It Is now threatening to turn Indonesia into a new Pakistan – as, among others, the general secretary of (Muslim mass organization) NU has warned.
Only a fool or an ideologue would call this a “democratic” development. And no matter how big the amount of your logorrhea you are both.
Old men and the abuse of Thai youth
This is one of the most utterly vile things I have heard of in a long while.
Reclaiming halal
The writer is very polite in saying “Muslim consummers do not trust international firms without halal Certs”
I would say, jakim is shoving the need for Halal certs down the Malaysian Muslims throats. The average Muslim in Malaysia does not give two hoods about the cert as long as they know that no pork is served.
The Talibanism of Malaysia is being perpetrated by jakim and the Staes religious bodies. It starts with gunning down Muslims who dare to eat in places without “Halal certs” if they are owned by Non-Muslims. If they are Muslim own, then no issues. These establishments of course includes bars and Bistros owned by Muslims – Yes, many big name Bistro Bars are owned by Muslims in Malaysia…
Indonesia and ‘transparent sex’
To my way of thinking, Marc, what “nobody here” is interested in is the growing conflict between liberalism and democracy that is very much behind the rise of various populisms that threaten to destroy both of them, pretty much everywhere on the planet.
I, on the other hand, am.
You, like so many unreflective cultural imperialists, automatically conflate “democracy” with “liberalism” and want to pretend that if a society such as the Indonesian does not manifest liberal values when they act to create a government in a manner of their choosing, then they are not “being democratic”.
You, as is the white man’s way, would only call their system democratic if it reflected what apparently you think are “your” values, although I suspect that what we are dealing with here is something imposed through “brainwashing” rather than a personal value system. Values, in my reading, do not reside in a jerking knee.
I’m also interested in how this website reflects the unchanging pattern of white folks hoisting the white man’s burden like a flag and continually lecturing their little brown brothers on how it is they should be conducting their politics.
In some cases, as in the non-stop defense of Thai “democracy” that involves absolving an elected PM of human rights abuses because he was elected and therefore the UN was not his father, the NM rabble opposes liberal values to electoral democracy and democracy is held to be the superior value. So “death squads good, juntas bad” is the chant at the Hate Week forum that this website hosts.
In the case of a Muslim majority society manifesting values that were operative in western liberal societies a mere 5 decades ago, of course the opposite is true. If the values of a given electorate do not reflect one of the more fashionable liberal values du jour, then liberalism trumps democracy.
As to whether or not I am a radical or a liberal, I can only say that when the kneejerk liberal position in North America was that homosexuality was a mental disorder, I opposed that fascistic position. And when AIDs was giving the reluctantly converted “liberals” second thoughts about their support for “gay liberation”, I shaved my head and moved my earring into the “gay ear” in an act of symbolic solidarity. Good friends of mine were activists prominent in the protests against the bathhouse raids and as things started going our way I even converted to opera.
And as someone schooled in a more radical version of feminism than has been on display in the “liberal” media of late, I find it hilarious that a man is making pronouncements on what is surprising or unusual in the discourse of Indonesian women and what constitutes a “feminist” position and what does not. To simply gloss over the very real conflicts taking place between white liberal feminists and the Muslim women they tend to talk down to in an article that apparently wants to look at aspects of women’s rights and women’s roles in a Muslim society is astounding really.
So for me, Hendri’s article brings up questions: one regarding the “mansplanaton” of what is or is not a feminist position and another about how a supporter of liberal human rights, which last time I checked involved not only sexual/gender-orientation provisions but guarantees of political freedoms as well, can so blithely deny an electorate the right to have its values reflected in its legal system.
Refusing to consider the very real dichotomies and self-contradictions that are separating the democratic horse from the the liberal carriage and tending toward the creation of loveless populist marriages of convenience between the masses and their would-be masters is not how we do things on the liberal/radical side of the fence. Sticking your head in the sand or in another convenient hole is really not our way.
Living in limbo
Hazara are Turkic Shi’a of whom there are few in Indonesia or Malaysia. Far more in Turkey, Germany, Australia, US, etc. They are discriminated against in Afghanistan despite having many talents in the arts, sports and politics. They are noticeable due to a “Kazakh” like appearance resulting from common Turkic origins with Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Uyghurs. A gentle people far removed from Afghani Islamic extremism. However, they are the poorest of the main Afghan ethnic groups and being Shi’a does not help them gain acceptance-even Shi’a Iran will not accept them.
Mourning and the Thai interregnum
The Golden Goose.
“The deep political crisis within the Royal Thai Army officer corps”
Fantastic comment. Well observed and wonderfully articulated. it’s not exactly pertinent (to Isan) but, on my last visit back to the UK I came across this excellent article in the New Left Review (yes, of all places) – my mother has a subscription:
https://newleftreview.org/II/97/benedict-anderson-riddles-of-yellow-and-red