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Where ignorance is no bliss

I’m not quite sure why he should choose the week when the North Koreans stuck two fingers up against the rest of the world (one finger for an underground nuclear test, the second finger for firing more missiles). But PAD leader Phipob Thongchai has decided to borrow part of the policy of the new green PAD party from Pyongyang, of all places.

Phipob says he wants to adopt the idea that every citizen has a plot of land to make a living from.

This seems to ignore the problem that the Thais who already have their own plots are called farmers and by and large are not exactly the richest people around, but there is an even more puzzling problem. Agricultural land in North Korea has been collectivized for the past half century. Which hasn’t enabled North Korean farmers to make much of a living either.

Atiya Achakulwisut, Editorial Pages Editor of the Bangkok Post, also seems to have been afflicted by a startling disconnect with reality this past week. She claims that the foreign media have displayed a ‘deafening silence’ over the prosecution by the Burmese military government of Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to act as her own jailer.

Now Khun Atiya seems to be motivated more by her inability to accept foreign press commentary critical of Thailand that she feels is misplaced. But even the most superficial scan of the international media shows that there has been no silence, deafening or otherwise.

Back in April, Pravit Rojanaphruk was sent by The Nation to an ISOC gathering of newshounds to tell them how nice and cuddly ISOC really was and persuade them to give them a better press. At the time, ISOC was in bad odour over the Rohingya affair.

One female ISOC officer said that their working assumption was that “they [the Rohingya] are terrorists, if not [people] who will exploit Thailand.” And how does she come to such a threatening conclusion? “We must remember that we have the richest natural resources in the world and that foreign states do not want us to develop.”

Now we may be dispirited, if not surprised, that members of the security forces would believe such paranoid fairy tales (unless ISOC have some secret oil wells and stuff that they’ve told nobody about). You would expect ISOC to attract a fair sprinkling of delusional nationalists.

What is perhaps more disturbing is that the assembled hacks were apparently writing all this down and giving ISOC tips on how to counter the reports in the foreign media that documented ill-treatment of the Rohingya.

Ill-treatment that PM Abhisit first said he would have investigated (by the same organization accused of the abuses). The Prime Minister then declared that the foreign media had been asked to supply evidence and they hadn’t. So there was no evidence. So there were no abuses.

Until he unadvisedly repeated this claim in an interview with the South China Morning Post, who had been among the busiest in collecting evidence of these abuses. He was promptly and politely told that the SCMP had given copies of all its evidence to the Thai consulate in Hong Kong (and a second set of data was immediately handed over directly, bypassing the consular black hole for unwanted evidence).

Bureaucratic glitches can of course happen anywhere and though the government now has the data, the inquiry has already been closed, so what a pity.

But hang on, if an idle web-surfer like me could come across the evidence and identify the sources, how come the highly resourced minions in the Prime Minister’s Office could not do the same? Instead of making broad appeals for anyone to hand in their film clips and interview tapes for the Foreign Ministry to promptly lose, why weren’t they knocking on the door of the SCMP and all the other media that carried the story?

I don’t expect that Abhisit himself would have the time to do much surfing, but his blanket denials that any evidence existed could only be sustained by the presumption of an international conspiracy to fabricate evidence against Thailand. This is not a million miles from the attitude of the ignoramuses in ISOC.

Examples of appalling and seemingly wanton ignorance of things foreign by people with the intelligence and wherewithal to know better are two a penny in Thailand.

Sondhi Limthongkul’s proposed response to the Phrea Vihar disputes included cancelling all flights from Bangkok to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. According to Sondhi, whose day job is the media, these constitute 70% of the traffic. The true figure is 25%.

Army chief Gen Anupong Paojinda says that after the ASEAN debacle in Pattaya, foreign delegations may want to bring their own armed security, which Gen Anupong sees as an insult to Thailand because ‘no other country would agree to such a measure’. Ha! Yassir Arafat even wore his pistol at the rostrum of the UN.

Farang readers of the Bangkok Post and The Nation are often misled into thinking that the Thai papers carry equally impressive wodges of foreign news. Not so. Monolingual Thais’ understanding of other places is a heady brew fuelled by nationalistic school textbooks, foreign films and TV programmes, and skimpy press coverage, much of which is the reporting of trivia with no analysis.

This ignorance is not going to be dispelled by complete whoppers told to them by their leaders and supposed intellectual superiors.
 

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).

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