Wikileaks reveals a secretive, authoritarian state

This is not a post about any cable released by Wikileaks. Rather, it is about what the release of Wikileaks cables has revealed about contemporary Thailand. Let’s make sense of this distinction through a story in The Nation by Pravit Rojanaphruk.

Pravit reports that when cables on Thailand first came out, he was talking on the phone with a fellow journalist and discovered that “our mobile phones might be tapped.” PPT reckons that as one of the few critical journalists in the mainstream media, Pravit must be being watched by the authorities, so no surprise. However, it indicates that phone tapping may again be standard practice.

Then Pravit turns to the “the self-censorship of the mainstream Thai media regarding WikiLeaks.” He adds: “This writer will not try to discuss this subject either, because that might lead to this article never seeing the light of the day.” That’s more than self-censorship.

According to Pravit, news about Wikileaks coming via some of the world’s best newspapers, only got out “beyond the realm of the mainstream media, Thai Red News, a red-shirt mobile-phone SMS service” and so on, and there too being careful to avoid the repression of the ever-threatening and draconian lese majeste laws.

He says that when “there were more leaks about the future of a certain institution from the views of two privy councillors and former premier Anand Panyarachun – again, none were reported.” Tech-savvy and politically-wired people in Thailand will get news, but Pravit maintains that it is “

“unclear how effective alternative news networks such as prachatai.com will be in disseminating information to the wider public on the matter.”

He observes:

So here we are, approaching 2011, supposedly in an era of borderless, instantaneous information and yet many Thais still have no clue about news that should be on the front page of every newspaper and every television channel’s breaking news bulletin. It is at moments like this that Thailand reminds me of North Korea – a secretive authoritarian society where censorship is the norm, where people are too afraid to speak publicly about certain issues and where paranoia about the state listening in is widespread.

Pravit knows the NK comparison is over-stretched but adds: “in a way, it is scarier to be living in Thailand, where the society is seemingly free but is not actually free and where censorship and self-censorship operates in a more effective and subtle way than in North Korea. In the end, there is no prison more frightening than one that its occupants are not quite aware of.”

This lament reminds PPT of a regular reader’s comment observing that what has happened in Thailand in recent years “is almost incomprehensible,” going from a country “branded” as “cool, friendly and trendy” to one that is seen internationally as “a country of repression, sniper shots into the heads and chests of unarmed protesters, draconian censorship, … a totally corrupt judiciary, elite billionaires with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, … the hi-so crowd has become obnoxious, right-wing and distasteful … and [when] the foreign media which manages to see through all the bullshit and describe the actual ‘state of present-day Thailand’ [it] is mindlessly attacked…”.

In the end, protecting the royalist state demands all of this.

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