HIV/AIDS organizations around the world have reacted with predictable outrage and incredulity at the Pope’s latest comments on the use of condoms as a way of preventing HIV infections. 

Drawing on his deep experience of the issue, the Pope Benedict XVI said that the spread of HIV/AIDS could not be resolved with the distribution of condoms.  “On the contrary, it increases the problem,” said His Holiness.

His comments took on added significance because this was part of an interview on board the plane taking the Pope on his first visit to Africa, the continent suffering the highest rates of HIV infection in the world.

It seems to be a perversion of logic to claim that a condom, normally seen as a physical barrier to the transmission of disease, could in some way be responsible for spreading the virus.  Based on earlier explanations by the Vatican, the argument seems to be this:

People are perfectly happy in obeying the Church’s instructions to abstain from any sexual activity that risks HIV infection, until they are tempted into sexual misbehaviour by the mere availability of condoms, which, possibly due to the resulting unbridled frenzy, they will fail to use.  So the availability of condoms creates a risk of HIV infection.

A similar form of logic is quite often used in Thailand, and shows how often a reliance on mere logic will lead one astray.

A simple-minded syllogism, for example, might mislead you into thinking that when a child compulsorily enters a primary school classroom for the first time, she is more likely to benefit from the instruction offered if it is given in a language she understands. 

Educators, international agencies such as UNESCO, and the government’s own National Reconciliation Commission for the south have all stumbled into the same silly error.

Hats off to the President of the Privy Council and National Statesman Gen Prem Tinsulanonda for pointing out the fallacy here.  For children in Thailand, at least, it is essential that they be confronted with the Thai language as soon as they step through the classroom door.  Otherwise they will learn a painfully wrong lesson about minority rights or respect for cultural identity or some other foreign-inspired mumbo-jumbo and they might not understand that Thai citizenship carries with it the duty of doing things the way the dominant majority does them.

Human rights activists and the victims of gross human rights abuses have followed a similar fallacy in arguing that the culture of impunity currently enjoyed by the security forces will only be ended when the perpetrators of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and torture are brought to justice.

Claims by successive governments that inquiries will be held and prosecutions initiated are ineffective, they say, if the investigations are run by the guilty themselves or if prosecutions are avoided or so badly handled that the accused escape conviction.

This childish logic, which naively believes that people will only stop torturing and killing when they are punished for it, is belied by actual experience.  It forgets that when Gen Panlop Pinmanee was named as a guilty party in the Krue Se Mosque massacre, it wasn’t necessary to bring him to trial.  The mere act of transferring him back to Bangkok caused him such untold mental anguish that his name wasn’t linked to any new atrocity for months afterwards.

The inquiry into the death in custody in Narathiwat last year of Imam Yapa Kaseng did result in an investigation that concluded in an inquest finding that he had been killed while under torture by military personnel.  Surely this admission of official wrong-doing is quite sufficient in preventing any further cases.  What good would be served by bringing persecutions against the soldiers named in the inquest?  Some of them have already been transferred out of the area anyway.

Further examples of faulty logic abound in Thai society.  A few teachers have reached the strange conclusion that an important goal of any education system is for students to be able to think for themselves and some teachers have shamelessly tried to brainwash their students into thinking this way, with predictably chaotic results for other more right-minded teachers, who strive in their classrooms to inculcate the principles of dutiful obedience to the powers that be.

There are those who point to statistics that show the majority of road deaths involve alcohol and motorcyclists not wearing crash helmets and rush to the wrong-headed conclusion that access to alcohol must be restricted and that the traffic police must actually try to enforce the law on wearing helmets.  These woolly minds seem to forget that any half-cut idiot on a motorbike with no helmet who tries bouncing his skull along the tarmac until his brains spill out will already have learned a very important road safety lesson.

Some people even think that columns like this may be able to change people’s minds, whereas the comments below show how ridiculous these aspirations are.