Panic, censorship and the Democrat Party

W e have already posted several times on the continuing and seemingly heightened political struggle as disgruntled royalists seek to undermine the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra. Part of the increase in political tension revolves around issues such as constitutional reform and amnesty. The most recent panic for royalists was Yingluck’s speech in Mongolia airing several truths about the anti-democrats who oppose her. That panic attack saw some nasty and deeply sexist remarks and crazy incantations of treason. At the same time, PPT indicated its position on the defamation regime.

So we are dismayed to read at the Bangkok Post that Information and Communication Technology Minister Anudith Nakornthap has said that he will seek “to silence websites that allow criticism of the prime minister.” This is dumb politics and a stupid over-reaction that allows the yellow-hued lot to prance about talking about “democracy” and “freedom of expression.” Of course, these elitists have no ground to stand on these issues but the minister has allowed them to make these claims.

That the Democrat Party has jumped on Anudith’s silly statement with glee is to be expected. However,  it is more than a little nauseating to listen to its leader Abhisit Vejjajiva claim that Anudith’s statement is a “violation of democratic principles…”. That it might be, but for Abhisit to lecture anyone on democracy is an affront.

Neither the Democrat Party nor Abhisit know anything at all about democracy and their track record is of undemocratic action.

When Democrat Party deputy spokeswoman Mallika Boonmeetrakul lectures that the “minister had no power to close websites, which could be shut down only by a court order…”, this is a practices that her party repeatedly flouted when in government.

When she says that “Users of social media, along with the press, have the right to freedom of expression and to comment on and criticise public figures, including the prime minister,” Mallika ignores the Abhisit regime’s massive censorship of all opposition media.

The Abhisit regime was undemocratic at birth and its time in government was the most repressive for three decades.

Anudith needs to be criticized, but not by a Democrat Party that is disingenuous and pathetic.

Updated: More nonsensical censorship

The Bangkok Post: notes yet another apparently stupid decision to censor the arts. The censors at the dopey Ministry of Culture, run by a conservative relative of a murderer who had been on the run for years, decided that the Thai public could not hear a documentary declared “misleading” and that might “disrupt public order.

Of course, this official view is one fertilized by truckloads of horse manure. The Thai public is far more mature and discerning than any of the patrician and intellectually limited censors.

The film, Fah Tam Pan Din Soong, or Boundary,

includes YouTube footage of Thai soldiers in action during a border skirmish in 2011, a survey of damage from Cambodian shellings, and a long monologue from a Cambodian soldier who criticises Thailand.

Goodness, criticism! Can’t have that!

The director says he made the film “because I wanted to look at issues confronting our society, from the red-shirt and yellow-shirt problems to the Preah Vihear issue…”.

Goodness, issues! Can’t have that!

Censorship is a slippery slope that serves none other than those with power.

Update: It  is now reported that the ban has been lifted. According to Nontawat Numbenchapol, the “Film and Video Board, attached to the Office of Cultural Promotion, contacted the filmmaker of Boundary on Thursday to apologize for the ‘technical mistake’ regarding the ban order on Tuesday, April 23. The filmmaker was informed that the ban order was the decision of a sub-committee that in fact has no authority to issue such verdict.”

The main committee has decided to let the film pass.

Still, the censors asked that two seconds of “ambience sound in an early scene” be removed together with a reference to the king.

Only those over 18 years will be able to see the film.

Light in the dark?

There has been considerable social media argument that the recent PBS discussion of the monarchy and lese majeste shows that great progress is being made. The point is generally that this show could never have been made and shown “before.”

There’s certainly something in this. Since the royalist military intervention in 1957, the monarchy has been a no-go area, except in the period around 1973-76, but even then the more critical discussion was largely underground. For example, the monarchy’s role in inciting massacre in 1976 saw considerable underground criticism but this was soon extinguished.

Following that event, the palace handlers decided that the way to “revive” the monarchy was to create a cult of personality focused on the king himself, effectively linking monarchy to an individual. Yes, he’d been promoted previously, but post-1976, the promotion reached remarkable levels that made rational and critical discussion of the monarchy impossible.

It is in this context that Voranai Vanijaka at the Bangkok Post reflects the social media discussion of the light in the dark. His view is unequivocal:

Thailand has made positive progress concerning freedom of speech and the lese majeste law, and that should be recognised.

At the time,

When magazine editor Somyot Prueksakasemsuk received an 11-year sentence for crimes related to lese majeste in January, much was made of the case.

From supporters of the law, there were cheers and applause. From opponents, there was an outcry and condemnation.

As PPT noted back then, the outcry is the positive, with Voranai citing the Chula-Thammasat football match and the social media campaigns associated with “Free Somyot” campaigns. He asks: “Would the students have dared to do this 10 years ago, five years ago, or even two?” He also points to the media:

Today, commentaries on lese majeste are routine whenever the issue comes up. Writers are ever more critical of the controversial law and its usage….

That’s true. But the fact remains that Somyos and several others (the actual number remains unknown) remain locked up.

Censorship remains. Voranai notes this:

The present situation regarding freedom of speech in Thailand is still far from ideal, but things are changing, and that is something we should recognise. In this recognition we can then nurture and foster an environment that is more conducive to freedom of speech.

On the Thai PBS talk show, he says:

Put it into perspective: The station had the courage to do such a show, and it was aired without some invisible hand first smiting it.

The show wasn’t yanked while on the air because somebody made a phone call to somebody. The station too defied threats and aired the last episode of the series.

Finally, Thai PBS formed a legal team to deal with any lawsuits or criminal charges they might face.

This does constitute “a concerted effort to stand for freedom of speech.” For Voranai, that the ultra-royalists, including Army boss General Prayuth Chan-ocha, could only bleat but “could not stop the airing of the entire five-part series.”

That’s true, too. But the saga is not over, and we need to see what the legal fallout is. The threats, the law and the state’s power remain in play in ways meant to repress.

Voranai himself shows how narrow the shaft of light really is:

Times are changing because people are pushing the envelope. In this, the media should take the lead. Not because we don’t respect the monarchy _ we do _ and not because we are not loyal to the monarchy _ we are.

That he feels the need to declare loyalty and monarchism in order to defend free speech demonstrates how the monarchy and lese majeste continue to limit free speech. That he chooses to speak for all is arrogant and mistaken elitism.

Voronai’s resort to the king’s 2005 speech is so boringly bland that we won’t comment much on it. After all, if the king didn’t want all these cases, he could make a simple and clear statement rather than a convoluted ramble that was really a criticism of elected politicians. He doesn’t, so all the references to 2005 is nothing but royalist propaganda. We think the palace loves this law.

We agree that:

Thailand is changing. Freedom of speech today is still a far cry from what it should be, but compared to 10, five or two years ago, there has been a lot of progress.

At the same time, just saying so neglects the important question of how Thailand became a censorship regime, how self-censorship became required of every Thai and how a cult of personality was created and enforced.

Voranai’s answer for this is deeply conservative, even Lee Kuan Yew-esque:

Thailand and the culture of the East in general will never be like Western democracies, not in the foreseeable future. We have different cultural DNA, our social values are different, our national psyches are an ocean apart.

His “Asian values” and “Confucianist” claims were ideological nonsense when it was made by LKY in the 1980s as a way to justify patriarchal authoritarianism, is now just dated nonsense:

Where freedom of speech in the West means institutions like royal families and religion are tabloid fodder and material for comedy skits, in Thailand and the East we still afford them a strong measure of respect and decency.

Such culturalist “explanation” is an excuse for repression.

Progress? Light? Well, yes, some, but Voranai can only conceive of this in narrow culturalist terms that is another excuse for elites to repress.

We think Voranai and the media will only be truly free when they can treat republicanism as part of a rational debate. Thailand will be free when the lese majeste law is gone. Until the lese majeste prisoners are  released,  everyone remains in chains.

Thai Journalists’ Association’s double standards

We trust readers recall that a weeks or so ago the Thai Journalists’ Association was bleating about freedom of expression. It was chastising the Army for its intimidation of journalists at ASTV/Manager, which is one of the TJA’s favored outlets. We suggested then that the bleating was justified.

But when it comes to lese majeste and freedom of expression, the TJA has less backbone than a jellyfish. Look at its comment on lese majeste from president Chavarong Limpattamapanee:

The TJA executive meets on lese majeste

… the court’s ruling in Somyos’s case should not be linked with the issue of freedom of expression.

He said the Constitution ensures Thai people’s freedom of expression, but not without limit or exception.

“Freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to accuse or criticise anybody. And according to Thai law, the monarchy is an institution above politics. Whether the … penalties are too harsh or whether the legal processes are suitable is another issue,” he said.

Of course, these reactionary comments are in line with the usual position taken on censorship by this royalist enclave. For example, when there was discussion of censoring Twitter, mainly to screen out thousands of anti-monarchy tweets, the TJA was cheering loudest. Earlier, during the dark days of the censorial and royalist Abhisit Vejjajiva regime, the TJA promoted ideas about politicized censorship.

As PPT said some time ago, that any journalists’ association should support censorship is jaw dropping. That it is predictable that the royalist TJA should support censorship is reflective of the failure of the TJA over several years. The TJA is a disgrace.

Military censors

Others have commented on this story, yet it still seems worth a note at PPT. The Bangkok Post report that the Ministry of Defense, as the Army, is displaying a penchant for the extending political control to social media, which has been reasonably unfettered in Thailand.

By “reasonably unfettered” we mean that there have been some lese majeste and similar cases arising from Facebook, but that the huge volume of posting, including political posting, has largely been left untouched. As the report notes, “Thailand 14th in the world for number of Facebook users. There are now more than 17.6 million Facebook users in the country, according to the company, a rise of more than 3.3 million in the last six months.”

Major General Bunjerd Tientongdee, a deputy director of the Department of Defence Information and Space Technology, is quoted as saying that “the increasing number of social media users was causing concern among cyber security experts.” Given that a vast amount of the stuff posted at Facebook is vacuous sludge, why should the military be concerned? Apparently, the more or less democratic uprisings associated with the “Arab Spring uprisings last year” which saw the widespread use of social media by opponents of incumbent regimes have scared the brass in green and probably many of the old elite troglodytes as well. Banjurd worries that “Thailand would follow a similar course if social media were used for political purposes.”

He expressed the brass’s concern “that the widespread use of social media could lead to public misinformation.” Of course, everyone knows that the military are opaque and masters of the production of misinformation. What the brass want is to maintain control of the “misinformation.”

Everyone should worry when this unprofessional and corrupt bunch of arms salesmen begin to talk about increased control and censorship, for they are a dangerous lot best suited to the suppression of opposition.

Google and Thailand

We reported earlier on Google’s Transparency report to the end of 2011. The company has now released its report for the first half of 2012.

For Thailand it states: “We received two requests from the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology in Thailand to remove 14 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy in violation of Thailand’s lèse-majesté law. We restricted three of these videos from view in Thailand out of respect for local law.”

As the graph shows, there has been a precipitous decline since the Democrat Party government lost power in the an election in July 2011.

Banned books week

Banned Books Week is an event that PPT mentions each year.

Observed this year from 30 September to 6 October, the week is about preserving intellectual freedom. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries in the United States. It is now observed around the world in various ways. Banned Books Week stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.”

This year, PPT urges readers to seek out banned books and read them. We suggest beginning with a bit of Paul Handley’s The King Never Smiles or the คำนำจาก นายสิน แซ่จิ้ว for กษัตริย์ไม่เคยยิ้ม.

In English, readers can explore banned books at Google. And download banned books through links at this site.

Updated: Publications of interest I

A reader has reminded us of the site http://www.boell-southeastasia.org, which has some useful content on Thailand that might be of interest to other readers.

Under publications – http://www.boell-southeastasia.org/web/123.html – are sections “Media for Democracy in Thailand” and “Gender Democracy in Thailand” and “Energy and Climate Change in Thailand”. Some of the content is only in Thai.

Publications that might be of interest are for instance:

- รายงานประจำปีของเครือข่ายพลเมืองเน็ตในปี 2554, Thai Netizen Network Annual Report 2554 (Thai only, 176 pages)

- Situational Report on Control and Censorship of Online Media, through the Use of Laws and the Imposition of Thai State Policies. By the Research Team on “The Effect of the Computer Crime Act (2007)… English, 28 pages.As this is a Foundation in memory of German writer Heinrich Böll, these links are unlikely to be removed, even if there would be a request to do so from Thai authorities.

Update: While we are looking at worthy articles and reports on Thailand, a link supplied by a reader prompts PPT to link to a chapter “Citizen King. Embodying Thainess” by Michael Connors, from his book Democracy and National Identity in Thailand. The chapter is made available by NIAS Press, and our link to the PDF is at the Commentary pages.

Google censorship in Thailand

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, later today Google will publish its Global Transparency Report, “a biannual study the search giant started in 2010.” It will say, amongst other things, that:

The company said it received 461 court orders demanding the removal of 6,989 items in the second half. Google consented to 68% of those requests. The company received 546 informal requests, such as phone calls from police officials, requesting the removal of 4,925 items. It complied with 43% of them.

In total, Google received 1,007 requests and complied with roughly 54% of them. The statistics don’t include countries such as China and Iran that block Google content directly without submitting removal requests to the company.

The Guardian states that this represents an alarming rise in censorship by governments.

Dorothy Chou, senior policy analyst at Google, is reported as saying that: “It’s really troubling because there’s a lot of instances of political speech that governments are asking us to remove…”.

In introducing a paragraph on Thailand, it is stated that

… in some places, Google complies with laws that would be unthinkable in the U.S. and other countries with free-speech protections. One example is in Thailand, where Google removes YouTube videos that insult the monarchy, a crime under Thai law. Google in the second half [of the year] restricted or partially restricted all 149 YouTube videos identified by Thai authorities as insulting to the monarchy.

At the Google page on Thailand it is stated:

We received four requests from the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology in Thailand to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy in violation of Thailand’s lèse-majesté law. We restricted 70% of these videos from view in Thailand in accordance with local law.

Chou argues that Google “must comply to continue doing business.” She adds:

We operate locally there…. In most of these cases, we have offices in these countries, we have employees in these countries, so we want to be able to respect local law there. That said, we try to limit the amount of censorship that is happening at all times.”

Thailand continues to expend a huge effort on ensuring that the monarchy is “protected.”

Updated: Yale and censorship

Readers will likely know Michael Montesano as a historian and frequent commentator on Thailand’s politics. PPT’s attention was recently drawn to another debate Montesano is engaged in, related to the establishment of a Yale University campus in partnership with the National University of Singapore.

The debate taking place seems long and convoluted for outsiders, but in making the point that Yale’s management has been compromised and in pointing to censorship and self-censorship on Singapore’s politics and how Yale will slot into that, what caught PPT’s eye was that a part of Montesano’s argument drew attention to the Yale administration’s role in the publication of The King Never Smiles. This is what he says:

… chillingly, in early 2006 Yale’s current president caved in to pressure from the government of Thailand to allow representatives of the Thai monarchy, whose supporters would just months later mount a coup d’état in Bangkok, pre-publication review (just “for accuracy,” but they always say that, don’t they?) of a biography of the Thai king already in the process of publication by Yale University Press… [by Paul Handley]. While the late Yale law professor Alexander Bickel turned over in his grave, publication of the book was thus delayed long enough so that the world’s media had no access to it as they reported on the gala celebrations marking sixty years of the king’s reign in June 2006. This episode leaves little doubt about the impact, on Yale itself, of the current Yale president’s weak commitment to academic freedom where Southeast Asia is concerned. Its implications for Yale scholarship relating to Singapore are clear and ominous. After all, Yale was not even employed by the government of Thailand when the episode occurred.

That this Thai episode elicited so little protest from Yale faculty was hard to understand. Nonetheless, it was in itself a one-time event. Should such episodes, or even the suspicion of them, become routine in matters concerning Singapore, however, the resultant regime of self-censorship in New Haven would surely prove unsustainable. It would poison both the relations of many of Yale’s humanists and social scientists with Yale’s leadership and the intellectual climate at the university. It would thus also undercut the ability of Yale, especially under the leadership of future Yale presidents, to serve as an effective partner of the PAP government and NUS.

For those who have forgotten the details of the pre-publication efforts by the Thaksin Shinawatra government and the palace to stop the book, and the U.S. Ambassador Ralph Boyce’s role, there is a useful summary in the first few pages of this article (a PDF).

Update: A reader tells us that Montesano’s claim that it was “a one-time event” is not accurate. Yale has a longer record of freedom of speech challenges than indicated just by the events over The King Never Smiles. The reader points to cases here, here, here and here.