It’s my great pleasure to announce that the book “Thailand Unhinged” — a draft of which had been posted here in early January — was released today by Equinox Publishing (click here for the press release). It comes with a new subtitle: “Unraveling the Myth of a Thai-Style Democracy.” The blurb on the back reads as follows:

Thailand Unhinged offers a trenchant analysis of Thai politics and society over the tumultuous years that followed the ouster of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thailand’s ongoing political crisis is explained through the prism of the country’s painful post-absolutist history — a history marred by the systematic sabotage of any meaningful democratic development, the routine hijacking of democratic institutions, and the continued suffocation of the Thai people’s democratic aspirations orchestrated by an unelected ruling class in an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to its power. The book includes scathing critiques of both Thaksin’s administration as well as the military-backed government that came to power in late 2008, following the week-long siege of the country’s busiest airports staged by the “yellow shirts” of the People’s Alliance for Democracy. The essays are written in a provocative, confrontational style — making Thailand Unhinged a decidedly unconventional mix of academic scholarship, literary journalism, and radical pamphleteering.

The book will be available at online retailers, among them of course Amazon.com (click here for the book’s Amazon page), as well as select bookstores in Southeast Asia. While Equinox will pitch it to bookstores in Thailand, it remains to be seen whether it will be distributed there (or, if so, for how long). Though I did make a serious attempt to steer clear of violating Thailand’s thought crime legislation, that’s not the only reason why bookstores might elect not to carry it.

For those who read a previous draft and liked it, and those who downloaded the draft but didn’t go through it yet, there are at least three reasons why it makes sense to buy this book. First, the printed version comes in a beautiful package. The cover, in particular, is alone worth the price of the entire book. Thanks to the generosity of Chatchai Puipia — easily one of the most talented artists of his generation — I am proud to feature the stunning (and delightfully haunting) painting “Siamese Smile” on the cover. Second, a lot of painstaking work has gone into improving the book since the previous draft was taken down from this site. For this, I am grateful to my colleague D., who agreed to spend hours with me going through the manuscript, virtually word-for-word, in an attempt to make the prose as elegant as possible — the occasional profanity notwithstanding. Third, I would love it for my publisher — who took a chance on this book after many others shirked or sneered — to reap some kind of reward from the book’s publication.

Because the book has no section dedicated to “acknowledgments,” I want to take the opportunity now to publicly thank some people without whom the book might never have seen the light of day (or wouldn’t have turned out quite as well). Aside from the aforementioned, I want to thank my good friend C., who has spent months promoting this work. Given that there was certainly nothing in it for him, I have often been touched by the relentlessness with which he helped get this out. In addition, I want to thank BangkokPundit, the guys at New Mandala, and Freedom Against Censorship Thailand for calling attention to the book; an especially big thanks goes to BangkokDan at absolutelyBangkok.com for his generous review. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor B.J. Terwiel, who agreed to my request to print a comment of his on the back cover.

I should add that the experience of writing this book was personally enriching beyond anything I had ever written before. Perhaps the best thing to happen in the past year was the opportunity to make the acquaintance of people who at different times happened to stumble on this site — academics, writers, artists, journalists, and regular readers. While a few have since become good friends, I am frequently moved by the words of encouragement and support I receive from people I barely know and, most often, have never met. Regardless of how well or how poorly this book does commercially, on a personal level it has already been a smashing success. So thank you — to all of you who took the time to read my work and contribute your opinions.

Though the timing of the book’s release is entirely fortuitous, I don’t think I could have chosen a more opportune time had I been given the chance. Many thanks to Mark Hanusz at Equinox for the amazing opportunity to publish this book, precisely at the kind of critical juncture that renders it most timely.

UPDATE x2 (Feb 1) : The book should come out this week. Will post an announcement with more details when it is formally released.

UPDATE x1: It looks like I have found a publisher for the book, so I need to take down the pdf version. Details are forthcoming.

Here’s the book manuscript “Thailand Unhinged” (in .pdf format) I have been working on for a while. The book focuses mostly on the time period comprised between the 2006 coup and the 2009 Songkhran rebellion. Perhaps in part because it’s a bit of a weird mix between academic work, literary journalism, and radical pamphleteering, so far it has been rather challenging to place it with a publisher. In any case, at this point it’s probably close enough to the final version that I feel comfortable putting it out there.

The recent wave of demonstrations had started as a stunning success for the red shirts. The series of coordinated actions that led to the spectacular debacle in Pattaya revealed an unexpected measure of discipline and organizational prowess for a movement often thought of as rudderless and unruly. Important goals were achieved. The country’s piteous Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was humiliated and exposed as the puppet that he is — at once so powerless as to fail to afford his illustrious guests the security civilized countries routinely guarantee them and so cowardly as to rely on a private armed militia, the blue shirts, to ambush protesters he could not get the army or the police to keep out of the area.

When the military did step in, following Sunday’s emergency decree, even the incipient crackdown appeared to bolster the red shirts. The reaction of the authorities, in particular, clearly evidenced the “double standard” their leaders had lamented all along. Reactionaries can shoot their opponents, run police officers over with their trucks, riot in front of Parliament, trash Government House, and occupy the airports for a week with the impunity characteristically accorded in Thailand to the champions of the establishment. But if you are against the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, and the generals who have run the country for the last 75 years, shattering the glass doors of a five-star hotel  is all it takes to be branded an “enemy of the state.”

The luck of the red shirts turned in a mere matter of hours. By Monday afternoon, the movement’s once-buoyant leadership had effectively lost control of the situation. Supporters scattered all over Bangkok resorted to desperate measures to halt the army’s methodical advance through the capital. The height of irresponsibility was reached as red shirts commandeered LPG tankers and drove them into highly populated areas such as the Din Daeng triangle and Soi Rangnam, as if to threaten the annihilation of entire neighborhoods should the army dare to move in. To protect themselves, at least some of the red shirts had proven willing to endanger the lives of regular people — those whose interests and aspirations they ostensibly advance, those whose support is indispensable to the success of their movement. In the process, the red shirts squandered any good will the local population might have harbored towards them — reducing, for the time being, the prospects of a popular uprising to mere fancy.

As they increasingly lost control of their own supporters, the red shirts quickly succumbed to the mediatic onslaught that accompanied the regime’s crackdown. Given the military’s shameful history of repression and mass murder, it is hard to think anyone would believe a word that comes out of a Thai general’s mouth. But the government successfully disseminated its self-serving narrative nonetheless, portraying its actions as deliberate, orderly, and restrained in the face of an unwieldy terrorist mob. The servile local media eagerly obliged; the facile foreign press swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Of course, the official version of the events was the usual pack of lies and half-truths. Photographs and video already contradict the preposterous notion that soldiers merely fired warning shots in the air, or that the weapons seen firing directly into the crowds had only been loaded with blank rounds. In the next days and weeks, we will find out just how many red shirts those blank rounds injured or killed.

By Monday afternoon, nonetheless, the red shirts had lost much of their support, their message, and their claim to “democratic” legitimacy. Their numbers vastly diminished, their resources depleted, their credibility in tatters, it would have been suicidal to lead the remaining protesters at Government House into a showdown with the army. Under the circumstances, to beat an orderly retreat was not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Thanks to its guns, its money, and whatever remains of its traditional stranglehold on the media, the old order lives on. The military and bureaucratic elites are still in charge. But, as wiser and more illustrious colleagues have noted (see here and here), it increasingly looks as if God is dead in Thailand (in the Nietzschean sense of that expression). And so those who yearn for real democratic change — those whose ideals transcend the restoration of Thaksin to an office he occupied legitimately and abused shamefully — should take heart in the recognition that the events of the last few months may have already undone decades of establishment propaganda. Old taboos are being shattered. Old myths are being destroyed. And, at long last, the iniquity of old untouchables is now being increasingly exposed to well-deserved public disgust.

The garbage removal process has only just begun.

Whatever the outcome of this fight will be — the ultimate outcome is not in doubt, but it could go either way in the short run — framing the debate in these terms is counterproductive for everyone, on both sides of this fight, who loves the country, its people, and its institutions. Advocates of democracy are much too quick to defer to the brown-nosed apologists of the current regime on the true content of Thai culture. And the defenders of Thailand’s cultural heritage — those for whom cultural discourse is more than just a rhetorical strategy to legitimize an elite’s privileged access to political power — often betray a rather cartoonish view of both the “culture” they seek to defend as well as the alien cultures whose encroachments they so stalwartly oppose. 

The key misunderstanding that plagues well-intentioned people on both sides of this pointless debate is that no “culture” is really specific enough to mandate a single regime type, a single form of government, or a single configuration of institutions. This, incidentally, is true of “Thai culture” as much as it is true of the miscellany of cultures crassly lumped together under the all-encompassing “Western” label. And, in the specific case, it is a gross oversimplification — in plain language, a lie — to say that restrictions on anyone’s ability to discuss basic political issues are any more ideally suited to Thailand’s cultural values than they would be to those of any country in the West.

Lest we forget, most places in Western Europe were ruled by more or less absolute monarchs for much longer than Thailand has been — not to mention much longer than they themselves have been “democratic.” Democratization not only constitutes a very recent development in countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. As recently as four or five decades ago, it was rather common to suspect that democracy was destined to fail in countries distinguished by the “parochial” and “subject” political cultures prevalent in southern Europe. Participatory, pluralist institutions, it was thought, are unlikely to work properly in contexts where citizens are generally passive, uninvolved, and deferential to elites. Interestingly, these are more or less the same arguments made about Thailand’s supposed incompatibility with “Western” democracy.

Lest we forget, moreover, it’s in the country with arguably the proudest republican tradition in Europe — France — that the model of royal absolutism originates. Indeed, it is from French-style absolutism that King Chulalongkorn the Great borrowed heavily in his attempt to build the kind of modern state that Thailand still lacked as of the mid-nineteenth century. Is “republicanism” any more compatible with French culture than “royalism?” To be sure, few people would have argued as much in 1788. Yet, that’s exactly what France got in 1792. The fact is that “French culture” prescribes neither. French culture has given rise to, and has in turn been re-shaped by, both royalist and republican ideas.

Just as there is nothing especially “democratic” about Western culture, it could be argued that Thai culture is not quite as unfriendly to so-called “Western” democracy as it is often made out to be. In fact, there are at least three inconvenient facts that undermine the argument that the lèse majesté legislation is merely the legal expression of foundational, long-held values more integral to Thai culture than is the unfettered expression of political ideas.

First, it’s not really true that Thai culture is historically any more “undemocratic” than most “Western” cultures. It could be argued, as famous social critic Sulak Sivaraksa did twenty years ago, that Thai society came to embody the ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” five hundred years before the French ever came up with that slogan. Way back in the thirteenth century, the people who lived in the kingdom of Sukhothai experienced levels of equality and freedom vastly superior to those most Europeans enjoyed at the time [UPDATE: Exactly how "free" they were is in dispute; see the exchanges in the comments below]. Consider this passage from the venerable Ramkhamhaeng inscription (dated 1292 CE). At a time when most Westerners lived as serfs — essentially the property of feudal overlords — King Ramkhamhaeng had these words inscribed on his throne:

In the time of King Ramkhamhaeng this land of Sukhothai is thriving. There is fish in the water and rice in the fields. The lord of this realm does not levy toll on his subjects for traveling the roads; they lead their cattle to trade or ride their horses to sell; whoever wants to trade in elephants, does so; whoever wants to trade in horses, does so; whoever wants to trade in silver or gold, does so. [...] When commoners or men of rank differ and disagree, [the King] examines the case to get at the truth and settles it justly for them. He does not connive with thieves or favor concealers [of stolen goods]. When he sees someone’s rice he does not covet it; when he sees someone’s wealth he does not get angry. [...] When he captures enemy warriors, he does not kill them or beat them. He has hung a bell in the opening of the gate over there: if any commoner in the land has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart, and which he wants to make known to his ruler and lord, it is easy: he goes and strikes the bell which the King has hung there; King Ramkhamhaeng, the ruler of the kingdom, hears the call; he goes and questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly for him. So the people of this muang of Sukhothai praise him. [Translation in David K. Wyatt, Studies in Thai History, p. 54-55.]

The Ramkhamhaeng inscription contrasts sharply with contemporary accounts of life in medieval Europe as well as with the model of political and social organization that became dominant in Siam with the rise of Ayutthaya. It describes a strikingly egalitarian society where the king’s subjects were remarkably equal under the law and free to pursue economic activities of their own choosing. It describes a society ruled by an accessible king, one who is confident enough in his own position to routinely lower himself to the level of his subjects to adjudicate their disputes. The king is accorded praise and respect not simply qua inherently superior being, but because of what he does for his people. Historian David K. Wyatt suggests that King Ramkhamhaeng self-consciously defined the administration of the Tai kingdom of Sukhothai in contrast to the more hierarchical, more unequal, more obsessively ritualistic Khmer kingdoms ruled by self-styled “gods.” With the rise of Ayutthaya, however, it was the very Khmer practices Ramkhamhaeng looked upon as bastardizations of Tai culture —slavery, Brahmanism, sakdina, and devaraja rule — that ultimately won out. Incidentally, that’s in part the reason why fanatical nationalists in Thailand are obsessed with Khmer ruins like Phra Viharn (and even Angkor). After all, it is only by claiming ownership of Khmer traditions that they can avoid acknowledging the fact that some of the key organizing principles of modern Thai society are no less foreign than the Western “impositions” they so valiantly resist. 

The second inconvenient truth is that no such thing as Thailand existed (whether as a political entity or even merely as an idea) as of two centuries ago. Not only is present-day Thailand essentially a negative construct — it includes contiguous territories in mainland Southeast Asia left over from French and British colonization. The rulers in Ayutthaya and then Bangkok never really controlled much beyond the Chaophraya basin and the country’s eastern seaboard prior to the nineteenth century. When they did come to control what is now Thailand’s north, south and vast sections of the outer northeast, it was not by plebiscite or popular insurrection that these territories gave their allegiance to the King of Siam. It was rather by conquest and skillful political maneuvering. Parts of northern Thailand, for instance, were essentially brought under Siamese control in exchange for bailing the Lanna rulers out of the debts they had incurred with European trading companies. As such, how much sense does it really make to speak of a single Thai culture? How can whatever Thai national identity the people of Udon Thani, Chiang Mai, and Nakhorn Si Thammarat share be understood without reference to the homogeneity enforced by the authorities in Bangkok through sustained propaganda and a good deal of violence — not to mention the most careless disregard for traditional local customs? And how really “natural,” “sacred,” or otherwise worthy of insulation from domestic debate (not to mention “foreign” ideas) should we presume that single, national identity to be?

Third, it has escaped many on both sides of this debate that lèse majesté legislation as it is currently interpreted and enforced is not something that has existed in Thailand from time immemorial. In fact, at least with respect to the monarchy, the Thai press was immeasurably more free a century ago than it is today. For much of their rule, King Vajiravudh (Rama VI) and King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) — whose job description, it should be noted, was “absolute” (not “constitutional”) monarch — were subjected to vicious criticism and sometimes pointed derision by the local press. And though repression was intermittently applied, the Thai journalists of the time could afford to be much more than the neutered bunch of sycophants they have now become. By contemporary standards — in an obscurantist time when restrained, somewhat apologetic articles in the Economist pass for mortal affronts — the cartoons and editorials routinely printed in the pages of early twentieth century Thai newspapers are genuinely shocking. Scott Barmé’s book Man, Woman, Bangkok provides an especially compelling illustration.

Once again, these considerations point to the conclusion that there is nothing especially “Thai” about lèse majesté. The legislation itself has little to do with Thai culture. In fact, Thai society had shown itself mature enough to tolerate, for decades prior to the more recent restrictions, open discussion of the monarchy. Lèse majesté is rather but a quintessentially modern instrument of repression that leaders like Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat instituted to stifle political debate about the very content of Thai cultural values and identity. It exists not to defend Thai culture, but to enforce the vulgar, comic-book version of Thainess the military and bureaucratic elites have produced and propagated to advance no cause greater than their own aggrandizement. In this sense, those in Thailand and abroad who defend lèse majesté legislation on cultural grounds would do well to read some Thai history before they accuse foreign observers of ignorance and Thai dissidents of apostasy.

Also lost in this idiotic juxtaposition of “Thai culture” and “Western democracy” is that, far from being incompatible, cultures (Thai or otherwise) need dissidents to survive. The practices, traditions, values, beliefs, and institutions typically associated with culture can only hope to endure through the kind of constant renewal which requires of a society the courage to come to terms with its history and the willingness to engage in discussions however unpleasant or divisive. John Stuart Mill famously argued that it is in the interest of any society (or culture) to protect the expression of ideas that a majority of the population might find revolting: 

“If the opinion [of the minority] is right, they [the majority] are deprived of the opportunity to exchange error for truth; if [the opinion of the minority is] wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit — the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (Mill, On Liberty).

As Mill’s reasoning suggests, it’s only under the most stultifying of censorship regimes that slobbering retards like Thanong Khantong are paid to write opinion columns in major national publications.

PS: My apologies to regular readers for the long hiatus, but my day job hasn’t allowed me to spend much time on this blog of late.

A ragtag army of hustlers and beggars is out in full force. The middle-aged females sprawled out on the wet pavement pull at every pant leg within their limited reach, imploring passers-by to look at the filthy, emaciated small children sleeping in their arms. Men with mutilated limbs shove their stumps into startled white faces for maximum theatrical effect. A blind, deranged man in tattered clothes wanders through the crowd, holding a cup half-filled with coins that jangle loudly as he violently bumps shoulders with pedestrians briskly walking past him. Touts selling Viagra, teddy bears, and cheap knock-offs of brand name wrist watches and sunglasses hassle every foreigner they come across, often placing the items in their prospective customer’s hands as if to make the ill-advised purchase a fait accompli. Fat American women have their pictures taken while riding a small elephant. Midgets in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms greet visitors making their way in. And a six-foot tall ladyboy poses before cell-phone cameras with a Middle-Eastern tourist shrouded in a black burqa. On the other side of the street, a crippled and scarred stray dog looks on, as if unsure of his next move, perplexed by the feeding frenzy unfolding before his every eyes. Rummaging through garbage is a tough business in this part of town. 

“Haah-rrooow, weeeear-come, where you go sexy man?” The endlessly repeated mantra echoes all around, mixing in a thunderous cacophony with the undistinguished thumping sounds of techno, disco, and hip-hop, the languid falsetto flamed out by a local pop-singer, and the dire opening notes of Gimme Shelter blasted from the crackling loudspeakers of the Morning and Night Bar. 

They are everywhere. Free-lancers stand shoulder-to-shoulder on sidewalks and alleyways. Others prepare for another long night of somewhat less than backbreaking work. They pack what little seating is available by the foodstalls and clutter the brightly lit convenience stores in a last-minute search for chewing gums, cigarettes, condoms, vaginal lubricant, lottery tickets, and travel-sized toiletries — the requisite tools of the trade. Others still lovingly pay homage to the Buddha, genuflecting with evident devotion before a shrine questionably adorned with garlands, plastic action heros, butter cookies, and freshly opened bottles of grape-flavored Fanta surrounded by swarms of flies. It is only upon completing the elaborate preparatory ritual that they finally report for duty, making their way into the go-go bars or joining their colleagues atop worn-out stools lining the wooden barroom verandas. 

Nana Entertainment Plaza — the word “entertainment” serves as a euphemism for ejaculation in much of the country — is a disheveled three-story bazaar of cascading go-go bars, glaring red neons, and mildewy guestrooms rented out by the romp. Acts of unspeakable depravity are committed or tentatively agreed upon here. Men have seeped through the bowels of every respectable first world society, dripping all the way down here to feast on a veritable largesse of oriental game. Bronze-skinned, post-pubescent metrosexuals join limp septuagenarians carrying lifetime supplies of indispensable hard-on pills. Veteran sex fiends wear as decorations from previous, valiant campaigns t-shirts acquired in places as far flung as Cambodia, the Philippines, Brazil, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. Most, however, populate the thick sludge of balding middle-aged men, tourist and expatriate alike, flaunting their trademark deformity — guts swollen from a lifetime of the old lady’s home-cooking and an eternity spent lounging in the slothful comfort of a livingroom couch. 

Much like their patrons, the working girls come in all shapes and sizes. Most have the brown or burnt orange complexion of the Lao and Khmer people of Isan, the vast wasteland of depressed northeastern provinces surviving on meager rice crops, occasional handouts distributed by local officeholders, and a steady flow of remittences drenched in the bodily fluids of all manners of Western creeps. They are not all young, nor are they all pretty. Nor, for that matter, are they all women. With a few, blinding exceptions easily explained by the bulge in the man’s back pocket, the girls are rather well-matched with their employers du jour. Those whose looks afford them the luxury pride themselves in picking their dates carefully and discerningly, with a keen focus on physical appearance, dress, charm, and any information about net worth they might glean from a man’s consumption, mannerism, and eagerness to part company with money for no reason whatsoever.

The pocket-sized Lonely Planet guidebook that accompanies scores of tourists on their first, wide-eyed trip down here proclaims, with unmistakeable condescension and tone-deaf self-flattery, that “Beautiful [Thai] women will throw themselves at you, all for a modest sum (money or status).” Of course, that women would throw themselves at men for money or status fails to distinguish Thailand from any country on this earth. The operative word here is “modest” — what counts as money and status here buys you a stack of foodstamps and a welfare check back home. But for many Westerners, Bangkok’s legendary magnetism does not lie in its heavily discounted market rates. It’s rather that the services rendered in this town involve a measure of passion and lust that prostitutes elsewhere typically don’t offer.

For the local bargirl, after all, a long term relationship with a farang is prospectively the most secure of early retirement funds. Most are painfully aware that the clock is ticking inexorably against their capacity to earn incomes equivalent to those paid to mid-level corporate management in Thailand’s private sector — and several times the salary of most government workers. To make matters worse, their lifestyle mercilessly accelerates the aging process, making them look thoroughly washed up by age thirty. And when the music stops, in a few short years, a life less glamorous still awaits those left without a foreign husband. Not many among them particularly look forward to working the night shift in a factory, giving $5 handjobs in a seedy massage parlor, or sweating it out in the rice paddies upcountry. 

So rather than engage  in a single-night shakedown of the worthless pigs, the girls often take a more calculating, long-term approach to dealing with Westerners. They might not have the faintest scintilla of an idea of what they are getting into — most foreigners here posing a varying measure of danger to themselves and others — but many salivate at the chance of taking the devil they don’t know. Indeed, the instant cuddling may be somewhat unauthentic, the words they speak suspiciously sappy, and the loud orgasms just a wee bit contrived, but the attempt to get them to care is sincere enough. Call it “the fierce urgency of now.” And that makes for a damn good time, I guess, should you happen to be so fortunate as to be singled out as a potential one-way ticket out of the cesspool or, at the very minimum, a temporary shelter from its sickening stench.

The anthropologist Eric Cohen has it about right when he notes that there is “often no crisp separation in Thai society between emotional and mercenary sexual relationships.” If anything, it’s possibly even more complicated than that. If, specifically, it is the girls themselves who push individual relationships held together by regular side payments to quickly develop some emotional content — animated bouts of jealousy, prophanity-laced tirades, crying fits, and sometimes physical abuse after just a handful of encounters are far from uncommon — at the same time the girls go to some lengths to compartmentalize the demands of their careers from other aspects of their lives. And while they are quite aware of the stigma with which their profession brands them, they eagerly dispute any characterization of them as loose or promiscuous.

Quite aside from what the girls actively do, more or less consciously, it is the stories they tell that are frequently poignant enough to drive a dagger into the soft spots of even the most jaded, cynical, or sociopathic among us. A common thread runs through just about all such dismal narratives. In the background is a large and/or broken family where parents are always poor, sometimes abusive, and occasionally in the throws of an addiction to alcohol, gambling, or methamphetamine. As soon as she is old enough to make it on her own, if still much too early to do anything useful with her life, the girl drops out of school and moves to the big city.

The poor bitch, no education, marketable skills, or social graces to boot, comes to Bangkok to face quite the conundrum. One option is to work 12 hours a day in a convenience store, scrub the latrines at a hotel or a private home, or serve tables at a restaurant. That only gets her about 6,000 Baht (less than $200) per month. And after paying rent for a 150-square-foot shared hole-in-the-wall, not much is left for herself or her family. The other option is to sleep until mid-afternoon, lounge around for a while, take a leisurely promenade shopping for faux name brand clothes and accessories, and finally make it to the bar at the late hour of her choice. At work, she has a drink or two, suits up in boots and bikini, takes 20-minute turns “dancing” — more like wobbling listlessly around the pole with a conviction and energy evocative of Shakira on Xanax — and finds some foreigner to screw at the fixed rates that exist for short-time and long-time romps. Between the regular salary the bar corresponds, the commissions on “barfines” and “lady drinks,” and a hundred percent of the fees paid by the customer directly to the girl, a fraction of the effort (not to mention the humiliation) generates an income at least five times as large as that guaranteed by SevenEleven. If the girl is pretty, charming, and has a strong enough stomach to fuck multiple strangers a day, her monthly income may exceed 2,000 American dollars — more than a good chunk of her own customers make.  More empowering still, the status of a young girl otherwise as authoritative as the water buffalo parked underneath the stilted family home in the provinces soars as she becomes the family’s chief breadwinner. 

Beyond this skeletal plot, variations on both theme and cast of characters are legion. Many of the girls have one or more children living with their grandparents in Isan. Their eyes well up when they are pushed to admit that the kids no longer recognize their mothers — much less pay attention to anything they have to say — when they go back for a rare visit once or twice a year. Mom or dad might have initiated the girl to the time-honored trade by selling her virginity to an acquaintance of their choice. Ever present is also a younger sibling whose studies are being subsidized by the big sister turning tricks in the big town. But it’s the dangerous Thai ex-boyfriend who’s invariably the most interesting character. He might enter the storyline as a thug, a drug dealer, or a deadbeat dad. Or he might simply be the girl’s first love, the man who broke her heart when he walked out with someone else, got thrown in jail, or better yet perished in a barroom brawl, a drug overdose, or an all-out shootout with police. One girl I met had the bullet wounds  to corroborate the harrowing story. Entry and exit. 

To be sure, the debauchery on permanent display at Nana Plaza is somewhat extreme, even by Thai standards,  but similar scenes can be witnessed all over town. So for anyone who has ever spent any time in Bangkok, to read the ongoing debates on morality and sex in the editorial pages of Thai newspapers is essentially to venture into a parallel universe — a petty bourgeois black hole whose existence is quite distinct from the everyday reality of Bangkok’s busy streets. Even as the country was being transformed by its rulers into a degenerate open-air bordello — a veritable beggars’ banquet — the Thai press has spent much of the past century nostalgically lamenting the decline of Thai culture reflected in the much too revealing outfits now worn by city girls, the much too suggestive dances they can be observed performing in local discos, and the much too evident loss of propriety exhibited by teenagers who openly date their classmates in the absence of a formally proffered, carefully pondered, and solemnly approved marriage proposal. In those pages, one can find stern condemnations of “Coyote dancing” performed by bartenders in nightclubs as a practice that threatens to irreparably corrupt the city’s youth. Or one can find discussions raging on about the merits of the government-imposed ban on pornographic websites. All websites found to include obscene content, in fact, are blocked by the ever-blundering Ministry of Information and Communication Technology — a fancy name for “Ministry of Propaganda” whose most insidious, Goebbelsian aspirations are undermined by the comical incompetence exhibited by just about every government agency in Thailand. Laughably swept under the rug is the strident dissonance between the government’s ongoing moral crusade and the fact that even the most depraved acts featured on the world wide web are offered by scores of local women, at every hour of the day and night, to anyone in Bangkok with the means to afford an internet connection.

The government’s hypocrisy on matters of sex and prostitution has risen to new, dizzying heights in the past few weeks. Upon learning that cash-strapped, if notoriously consumption-crazed college students in Bangkok have increasingly taken to advertising sexual services on social networking sites, the government feigned alarm, indignation, and grave concern for the threats posed by the practice to the morality of the city’s youth and the integrity of the country’s social fabric. As if to highlight the severity of this gathering danger to Thai society, it was the puppet Prime Minister himself who took the time to personally reassure the country’s bourgeoisie that the government would swiftly intervene — cracking down through the usual admixture of underhanded censorship and wasteful re-education campaigns aimed at teaching students the “right values.” It’s anyone’s guess, really, where teenagers in Bangkok would have learned the “wrong” values. Most probably, it was the growing exposure to Western culture and media that tragically led them astray.

In a country where tens of thousands of young women — possibly as many as several hundreds of thousands —  suck, fuck, and swallow for a living, one might ask what the hell is the point of imposing a ban of internet pornography, of lamenting the dangers of pre-marital sex, or of expressing alarm over a handful of students who screw their classmates to finance their weekend shopping. And if modesty, chastity, and innocence are so important to the idea of Thainess, it may baffle some that purists and cultural warriors would spend so much time fending off comparatively small threats to that ideal. What many foreigners do not understand, however, is that the filthy whores who have spent decades fueling the nation’s growth, keeping entire villages afloat, and filling to the brim the coffers of the state don’t count. Nor do the large numbers of provincial women in Bangkok  — whatever their day job happens to be — who are well known to be available for liaisons involving some (if perhaps less direct) form of cash payment. 

For the smug petty bourgeois, whose broken English is just good enough to read brain-dead editorials in the Bangkok Post or The Nation, provincial girls who live in Bangkok are not really citizens of Thailand. Or, at least, they are not citizens in the same way they are. These women, after all, belong to a social class whose sole prerogative is to grovel, in the heinous cosmology of the poo yai. It’s not merely to be poor — if not so poor as to inconvenience the highest authorities of the state into making token gestures of support — but rather to be content with the prospect of always being poor.

As such, debates in the Thai media focus almost exclusively on the sexual mores of middle/upper class city girls — and, occasionally, the peasant women who are still expected to serve as a symbol of cultural purity for the comfort of the Bangkok elites. The ubiquitousness of the sex industry in Bangkok is not inconsistent with the elites’ image of Thailand as a sexually demure, conservative country. Nor, for that matter, does it undermine their self-appointed role as the upholders of that myth. The army of streetwalkers, go-go dancers, and tentacled masseuses working in Bangkok, then, are not commonly regarded as the long forlorn daughters whom the double-breasted, uniformed, and garishly bejeweled fathers of the nation have sold into prostitution. Far from being gratefully acknowledged for the heroic contribution they have made to the country’s prosperity, they are rather more conveniently ignored — at least when they are not being patronized or scapegoated as the loafing, conniving reprobates single-handedly responsible for giving the country a bad name.

On the other side, in red, stand the poo yai of a different kind — provincial gangsters, corrupt upcountry politicians, and (former) Bangkok-based businessmen who have fallen from the grace of the military and bureaucratic elites. They too want the whole pie for themselves. They too have used public office to line their pockets, reward their cronies, and silence their critics. They too have have labeled their opponents foreign agents and threats to society. They too have ruled with the crassest disregard for human rights and democratic freedoms. They too have exploited the people’s fear of “the other” — supposed deviants, presumed insurgents, and purported foreign invaders — to bolster their credentials as the strenuous defenders of Thailand’s social cohesion, independence, and tradition. They too have raped, tortured, and killed. The difference? Instead of viewing them as a threat, those in the red shirts see the people as an opportunity. Instead of telling them, to their face, that they have no right to a government that works for them, they seek to ride the people’s long-frustrated aspirations all the way back into executive office. What they offer in return is a chewed-up, leftover bone — mere scraps of the spoils of power they once again seek to hoard for themselves and their henchmen.

It is often the case that of the deepest, darkest crises are borne the most spectacular of possibilities. Thailand is in a rut, but its current predicament is no different. It is at this painful juncture, after the tragic setbacks that followed the triumph of the 1997 People’s Constitution, that the Thai people have an unprecedented opportunity to take charge of their own destiny, to reach for what they have long been denied. As Thaksin’s influence continues to wane, those committed to real social and political change have the opportunity to channel the unity of purpose that the provincial masses achieved — for the first time in their history — under the leadership of Thai Rak Thai into a genuinely democratic movement. One that seeks the people’s empowerment but rejects the corruption, the cronyism, the violence, and the contempt for the rule of law of the old TRT regime.

At the same time, the corruption scandals that have hit Abhisit’s government, the atrocities it has desperately sought to cover up, and the wave of paranoid repression it has unleashed have exposed the yellow shirts for all their hypocrisy. It is now painfully obvious that the military-backed elites who have paralyzed the country and pissed all over Thailand’s international image have gone to such extremes only just so they could substitute the will of the people for their own, superior wisdom. Only just so they could replace corrupt politicians inimical to their agenda for equally crooked but more malleable ones. Only just so they could establish their own dictatorship masqueraded in the most meaningless trappings of democracy. Should Bangkok’s students, professionals, and middle-income, white-collar workers rise up — just as they did when they caught on to a similar fraud in 1992 — they would not only deprive the new regime of a constituency whose tacit support it needs to survive, much like Suchinda’s regime did 17 years ago. This time, urban middle-income voters have a chance to parlay a potentially invincible alliance with the once-dormant rural populace into sweeping, long-awaited social change.

What will it take to marry the aspirations of the provincial masses with those of the urban middle classes? It will take meeting half way, to join hands in a movement that is neither red nor yellow, but rather embodies the noblest sentiments of each. It will take for the provincial masses to recognize that the gangsters they have often called their representatives are as much an obstacle to their empowerment as the poo yai in Bangkok. It will take for them to throw Thaksin under the bus, embracing the urban electorate’s desire for a cleaner, more transparent, more honest, more responsive government. It will take for the urban middle classes to acknowledge that the Bangkok-based poo yai are as much an impediment to the country’s progress as the provincial politicians they viscerally despise. And it will take for those among them who share with the PAD rank-and-file a sincere reverence for Thailand’s most sacred institutions to openly reject their PAD’s elitism, its contempt for democracy, and its fascist fantasies. 

This is the people’s chance. A chance to substitute Thai-style dictatorship with a real, Thai-style democracy. A chance to honor king, nation, religion, and each of the distinctive traditions that make Thailand a unique, special place without subjecting dissenting views to censorship, legal harassment, or violence. A chance to reject the simplistic, vulgar reduction of “Thai culture” to the mere requirement that the most desperate must always grovel before the most fortunate. A chance to recognize, as Prince Damrong did, that tolerance, freedom, and non-violence are as much an integral part of Thai culture as sakdina-based social hierarchy. A chance to elevate, as King Mongkut demanded, the pluralistic traditions of Sukhothai on par with the more conservative legacy of Ayutthaya. A chance to restore Buddhism to more than just the legitimation of social inequalities. A chance to bring the military under civilian control. A chance to come clean about recent history. A chance to acknowledge that the story of the last 75 years is not the “development” of democratic institutions, but rather the elites’ increasingly frantic attempt to deny the people real democracy. A chance to pay homage to the sacrifice of those who died for democracy by telling the truth about their executioners. A chance to stop exchanging human rights abusers for statesmen, heros for troublemakers, and novelists for criminals. A chance to put the elites back in their place. A chance to make government work. A chance to empower the people through equitable development, education, rights, and participation. A chance to lead Thailand into the developed world not through the back door of repression and exploitation, but as the nation of laws, freedom, justice, and opportunity it has always aspired to be.

Cheered in Bangkok and unencumbered by any hint of active popular opposition, the generals solicitously apologized for the “inconvenience” caused, promised to return the country to democracy within a year, and for good measure gave everyone a day off. The edicts that suspended the 1997 constitution and banned all political activities were accompanied by the instruction that soldiers keep smiling in public. Three days later, a pro-democracy demonstration was held in the busy shopping complex at Siam Center; banners read “No to Coup and No to Thaksin.” It was attended by an oceanic crowd estimated at 20 to 100 people. On September 30, a lone protester badly injured himself after crashing his taxi into a tank. The reliably servile Bangkok Post — ever the model of “opium pipe” reporting [These appear to be the words of its own founder Alexander MacDonald, cited in Pickerell and Moore (1958, 94)] — snidely reported the incident in its online breaking news section under the headline: “Tank 1, Taxi 0 in Apparent Protest [Link to the story now outdated].” Democracy had died in Thailand. Few, however, seemed to mourn its passing.

It was argued at the time that the army did not kill democracy. Democracy had only been put out of its misery as the generals brought the elected dictatorship of Khun Thaksin to an ignominious close. Thaksin, after all, had already thoroughly dismantled democratic institutions, imposing a measure of repression and social control more reminiscent of an authoritarian regime than a representative government in a free country. In five years at the helm, Thaksin had systematically subjected dissenting voices to police brutality, legal harassment, and a relentless smear campaign that portrayed them as anarchists and enemies of the nation. He had revived repressive legislation granting the police expansive powers to search and interrogate suspects. He had moved to assert editorial control over the television channels owned by the state. He had routinely pressured the print media to give favorable coverage through threats of legal action and the manipulation of the advertising budget of state-owned enterprises. And he had vanquished independent bodies like the Election Commission, the National Counter Corruption Commission, and the National Human Rights Commission through carrots, sticks, and a wave of partisan appointments. 

More shamefully still, in 2003 Thaksin had launched a “war on drugs” that vowed to eradicate drug trafficking within three months. More than 2,500 people — according to Thailand’s own Office of Narcotics Control Board, as many as 1,400 of whom had nothing to do at all with drugs — were killed in a flurry of extra-judicial executions. Whether the government’s campaign made much of a dent in the lucrative narcotics trade is not clear. Drug abuse was reported on the rise in 2005.

If that weren’t enough, throughout his tenure Thaksin also seems to have done his utmost to inflame long-dormant ethnic tensions in Thailand’s southern provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. Insurgent offensives that targeted army bases and government schools in early 2004 were followed by the government’s brutal reprisals. The military and the police were cited in a number of episodes of torture, abductions, and murders of activists and suspected insurgents. Voices of dissent like those of human rights advocate Somchai Neelaphaijit were forever silenced. On April 28, 113 people were killed in incidents such as those that led to the storming of the Kru-Ze mosque in Pattani, where 28 lightly-armed men who had barricated themselves inside were massacred. The following October, the government’s heavy-handedness caused the death by suffocation of 78 among the hundreds of people who had been loaded onto military trucks during a peaceful protest in Tak Bai. By 2006, what was once effectively contained to a low-intensity conflict characterized by sporadic episodes of minor violence had erupted into a full-scale insurgency, the daily attacks on the representatives and the symbols of the state leaving hundreds dead in their wake.

 In light of Thaksin’s sickening record, I would have sympathized with the argument made in support of the 2006 coup — were it not, that is, for three small details that seem to have escaped many of the coup’s supporters in Thailand and abroad. First, we should have all known better than to think there is any such thing as a “democratic coup d’etat.” To be sure, Thailand has never experienced one — pace the long list of generals who have used the expression with much the same results as putting lipstick on a pig. Second, Thailand is a country where human rights violations (whether perpetrated by the army, the police, or paramilitary death squads) have never (ever) been punished, so it was unclear why things would be different this time. Thanom Kittikachorn? He got a swell state funeral. The Red Gaurs and Village Scouts? They were never even prosecuted. Suchinda Kraprayoon? He was granted blanket amnesty while the bodies of those he murdered were still warm. Third, it’s not like those associated with the coup had a much better human rights record than Thaksin. The coup’s mastermind, Gen. Prem Tinsulanonda, rose to prominence in the 1970s by leading a gruesome counterinsurgency campaign against the Communist Party of Thailand in Isan — a campaign defined by the same extensive, systematic recourse to extra-judicial executions. And Surayud Chulanont, the former general chosen as Prime Minister in the wake of the coup, was the same man who led the special forces responsible for well-documented atrocities in May 1992.
 
Nonetheless, the junta announced it was determined to right Thaksin’s wrongs. And its beginnings looked promising. Shortly after being appointed Prime Minister, Surayud visited the South and extended unusually heartfelt apologies to family members of the victims at Tak Bai. A few months later, the government launched investigations into the human rights abuses committed in the context of the war on drugs and the southern insurgency. At the same time, the generals impaneled a commission to look into 20 government programs suspected to have been tainted by corruption. The Asset Examination Committee was charged with probing Thaksin’s “unusual wealth” as well as specific episodes of tax evasion, corruption, and abuse of power. And the police was instructed explore the possibility of charging Thaksin with as many as 6 counts of lèse majesté.

Fast forward two and a half years. Thaksin has been subjected to a number of judicial proceedings including the infamous Ratchadaphisek land deal, the Exim Bank case, the two- and three-digit lottery case, the sale of Shin Corp, and the shareholder structure of SC Assets Plc. He was convicted, in absentia, and sentenced to two years in prison for his role in the Ratchadaphisek affair. At the same time, Thaksin’s bank accounts were frozen by the AEC, while 76 billion baht may ultimately be seized by the state at the end of an ongoing civil case. All this, however, barely scratches the surface of the atrocities committed by Thaksin’s homicidal regime. No charges were ever filed for the disappearances, the extra-judicial executions, and the brutal crackdown of demonstrators in the south. At the end of the day, Thaksin never paid for his real crimes. Nor will he ever.

The question is why. Why, specifically, did the generals go after Thaksin for fairly pedestrian episodes of corruption but then completely ignored potential crimes against humanity? The Ratchadaphisek case, for instance, is not that much different from the probe into Surayud’s ownership of land at Khao Yai Thiang. And corruption is well-known to have been rampant during Prem’s own tenure as Prime Minister in the 1980s. So graft could hardly be a plausible justification for Thaksin’s removal from office.

Two reasons are typically adduced for judicial inaction on human rights abuses. Sometimes, it is noted that prosecuting these cases may compromise Thailand’s chances to achieve “national reconciliation” — as if there could be any such thing as national reconciliation without a measure of justice. Besides, the military’s support of the PAD hardly seems to have been in the interest of protecting the country from further unrest. In other instances, we are reminded that prosecutions of human rights cases are complicated and messy. So getting Thaksin for comparatively paltry offenses would be Thailand’s equivalent to nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. But though that may well apply to some of the disappearances, in the absence of physical evidence, the state has built a fairly detailed case-file of the Tak Bai incident, which the judiciary seems determined to do nothing about. Not to mention that the case for which Thaksin was recently convicted was no slam dunk either; the kangaroo court that sentenced him to two years in prison did so on the basis of the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

So why was nothing done to hold Thaksin accountable for human rights abuses? Here’s a thought. Thaksin is ultimately (and quite possibly criminally) responsible for the abuses, but he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger on all manners of drug dealers real and imagined. He did not personally storm the Kru Ze mosque. He did not physically torture Muslim youth, nor did he hide Somchai Neelaphaijit’s body in his basement. And he didn’t stack the demonstrators at Tak Bai into the vans that ultimately turned out to be their mass graves. All of these actions might have happened with Thaksin’s knowledge or even at Thaksin’s behest. But, as the government’s own report points out, most such monstrosities were carried out by the military. So Thaksin could never be prosecuted for commissioning murders without subjecting the actual executioners to similar probes. After all, no civilized country considers “I was just following orders” a valid excuse to rape, torture, or kill. And Thailand’s so called “independent” courts, much less the junta itself, were never going to hold senior military officers accountable for their crimes.

Colonel Manas Kongpan, one of the three officers found by a Pattani Provincial Court to be responsible for the massacre at Kru Ze in November of 2006, is a case in point. Not only was the good colonel never fired, arrested, or tried. He is now the head of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) in Ranong — with license to kill Rohingya refugees, provided that the international community is looking the other way. [Manas' superior at the time, Gen. Panlop Pinmanee --- former death squad commander and known PAD supporter --- was appointed by the junta as ISOC advisor after the 2006 coup.] Of course, none if this matters to the retards charged with waving the pompoms for the coup in Thailand’s sycophantic media. In a recent column, The Nation’s Sopon Ongkara rails against Thaksin’s abysmal human rights record in one paragraph. Then he proceeds to dismiss the abuses committed by the same military commanders on Abhisit’s watch as “a distraction.” A distraction? Or an inconvenient revelation that finally draws attention to the hypocrisy of the new government’s ostensible support for human rights and the rule of law?

All of this points to a fairly obvious conclusion. The human rights rhetoric was highly instrumental to the military’s case to overthrow Thaksin, particularly as the generals sought to explain themselves in terms the international community might have sympathized with. But the substance of what Thaksin had done was not particularly objectionable to them. So it was never about human rights, for which the military-bureaucratic elites who removed Thaksin have shown nothing but contempt over the past eight decades. Nor, I would submit, was it ever about corruption. When it comes to abusing public office or plundering state coffers, in fact, generals, top civil servants, and their supporters in Bangkok’s jet-set have never taken a back seat to anyone. And so, trite and increasingly half-hearted protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this was always about removing the threat that Thaksin posed to their own power. It was always about discrediting Thaksin by labeling him a convicted criminal without seeking any actual justice or redress for his real crimes. And it was always about finding a quasi-legal pretext to seize the assets upon which, undoubtedly, any chance of a comeback now rests. 

All criminals are equal in Thailand. But some criminals are apparently more equal than others.