Understanding Lese Majeste - intent and crime

Understanding Lese Majeste in Thailand - intent and crime

One of the most outstanding features of the masterful  Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason and Lèse-majesté (London: Routledge, 2011) by David Streckfuss is its unprecedented attempt to lay bare the logic of thinking by those who protect Thainess through the monarchy (or the monarchy through Thainess). Streckfuss's  idea of a "defamation regime" is not a casual shot at coining a nice easy term, but is a systematic  rendering, informed by deep theory, of the logic of the Thai state.

I had the pleasure of interviewing David Steckfuss about his book and the edited transcript was published in Critical Asian Studies in 2011. As we ponder why people like  labour and red-shirt activist Somyot Prueksakasemsuk  and others are locked behind bars for what amount to thought and speaking crimes, the temptation is to blame the sheer callousness of the authorities.  That doesn't add up. As commentator after commentator notes, the thoughtless and ruthless application of the lese-majeste law  and the inhumane sentencing that occurs  might sensibly be thought to diminish the position of the monarchy in Thailand - any cost/benefit analysis would suggest as much.

Something else is going on so that the lese majeste  machine sentences and imprisons at will.  And it has come  recently in Somyot's case to  more explicitly expand its rationale for imprisonment  to the supposed  "intention" of the accused.  Sentencing  doesn't go through a cost/benefit committee charged with protecting the image and reputation of the monarchy.   There are other reasons behind what is happening other  than sheer instrumental repression. Truth and Trial in Thailand is a conceptually rich that book gives us deep insights  into this ghostly machine. Critical Asian Studies has made the full transcript and accompanying book review available here .  

At a minimum government agencies such as Thailand's   Office of the Attorney General, government and opposition spoke-persons  and public intellectuals ought express a preference for bail,  lighter sentencing and stricter thresholds for prosecution. The idea that  the issue is too sensitive to address openly  is a convenient infantilization of Thailand's public sphere and a misguided attempt to reconcile with something that isn't tangible.

30th Anniversary of the Franklin River Blockade

30th Anniversary of the Franklin River Blockade

30 years ago this month the Franklin River Blockade changed the face of environmental politics. Several thousand people converged in Southwest Tasmania to protest the construction of a hydropower dam in a world heritage indigenous and forest area.

I spent the summer of 1982-1983 involved in the protests. It's over thirty years ago now, but the buzz of the time still resonates. I was privileged to also be present at a small party that walked into the forest and stood round a tree and issued a declaration on the area's status. We arrived late in Strahan at night, stayed at an old local building (very secretly)  and left for a boat ride some time later.  How I got there is lost in memory, but I recall a fellow called Peter Wolf (?) who worked for Greenpeace inviting me to get involved. All because one day I walked into the Wilderness bookshop.....I then attended a planning workshop some way out of Launceston for several days on a rural property, and my involvement grew from that.

This is a brief account of my experience at the Franklin River Blockade It's short on history and context and really is just one person's memories. A wonderful website someone recently suggested to me  on the Blockade is here.

A God-King for Our Times or a Fetish Commodified?

The Journal of Contemporary Asia has made my extended discussion of the edited collection (Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager  eds) Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand (NIAS PRESS)  freely available

Below is an excerpt that discusses the valuable contributions made by Jackson and Sarun to understanding the Thai monarchy

A God-King for Our Times or a Fetish Commodified?


The opening chapter of the book is Peter Jackson's important critique of the “virtual divinity” of the monarchy. The chapter fans out to question the predominantly Buddhist image of Thailand, following Pattana Kitiarsa's (2005) revisionist argument that understanding Thailand's religious culture requires seeing it as fundamentally hybrid and fluid, free of state control. It is this latter condition that provides some understanding to the re-deification of the monarchy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jackson argues that we can understand the near god-king status of Bhumibol only as a product of several related processes, including the “spectralisation” of the world in the neo-liberal era. Contrary to Weber's secularisation thesis, modernity has delivered a vibrant mysticism in the form of capitalist prosperity cults that aim to solicit the aid of the spirit world in aggrandising wealth. Spectralisation partly connotes that such spirits and ghosts come to have a real existence, they inhabit people's calculations, they are worshipped, solicited and they become manifest in symbols or are embodied in otherwise real people; time is no longer linear but people experience a world awash with ghosts of the past. The king who embodies the historical syncretism of Thai cultural practices would seem to be a spectral figure, and monarchy haunts the Thai imagination as an idea that transcends time. This cultural non-ideological texture of Thai mentalities recurs in forms that defy linear progression, the bricolage of traditions surrounding the monarchy being symptomatic. In that sense, monarchical politics are not always instrumental or consciously activated; they draw on a deep reservoir of Thai cultural being, if we take culture to mean a mélange of life practices subject to the tensions of power and freedom.

For Jackson the king has become spectralised as a divine figure. How this has come about is the subject matter of his chapter. As such, he furthers our understanding of the wide-eyed awe that some Thais have for the king. He shows how Buddhist discourses of dhammaraja that envisaged virtuous rule of the Buddhist monarch have gradually been supplanted, or perhaps cross-fertilised, with Brahmanic discourses of god-kings, with the latter becoming increasingly prevalent. The surprising element to Jackson's claim is how capitalist social forces – the money-seeking middle classes of shop owners and small workshop owners and, in part, the middle layers of the professional classes – have paved the way to this divination by imagining King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1905) as an ancestor spirit with special powers. The Chulalongkorn cult has been articulated to Bhumibol in some popular religious paraphernalia, and this emerging conflation of kings, a work still in hydra-headed progress, puts Bhumibol in a reflected aura. Not that he needs to bask in the glory of others, for the elements of god-king status have long been in place. Many Thais already assume the king to be a sammuttithep, which Jackson describes as a “virtual deity,” a god by convention, rather than an actual god. Sammutthithep, he explains, “is a key concept in Thailand's hybrid Buddhist-Brahmanic discourse in which royal power is legitimated by the king's ritual performance of godlikeness rather than from an ascription of literal divinity” (p. 38). For Jackson, the dual images of kingship are not simply parallel processes, for they bear some intimate relationship. He notes that in the Hindu pantheon of Gods, Buddha Gotama is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu. So rather than seeing contradictory processes of traditions of kingship that defy orderly progression, Jackson advances an understanding of differential permutations of religious lineages, adding up to a present in which the past is always there. The question now is whether the king has moved from this virtual realm of divinity to the real in popular belief? Indeed, it is not clear if this distinction has had much purchase even among some royal admirers (p. 39).

One way of testing this blurring of distinction is to ask what attributes of power attach to the monarchy. Jackson suggests that there are three notions of power operative in Thailand: amnaat (raw power to act on things); barami (charismatic power of the virtuous); and saksit, described by Jackson as the “magico-divine power possessed by holy objects” (p. 33). Bhumibol is conventionally held to have an enormous store of barami, in keeping with conceptions of Buddhist kingship, but in recent years saksit has also attached to his person, giving him an aura of divinity. It is this development, Jackson (p. 34) contends, that enables Bhumibol to simultaneously aggrandise more raw power, against, we might add, a fourth notion of “procedural democratic power” that has emerged in struggles for democratic constitutionalism.

This god-making process is partly driven from below. Jackson tells the fascinating story of King Mongkut's conjuring of the protective deity Phra Siam Thewathirat to watch over the new capital in the nineteenth century (pp. 29-42), while noting that god-making around Bhumibol is no longer the preserve of the court. It has become demotic, for much of the holy view of the current king has been manufactured not in the workhouses of state identity agencies, but from the waves of mania and insecurity among social classes negotiating a pluralised spirit world and a life of commerce to create “occult economies.” If an early corporate aristocracy was suckled by the monarchy from the 1960s in highly specialised relationships (Gray, 1986 8),  in a more developed form of capitalism it is fitting that a more numerous middle class seek favours by offering worship, whatever their chosen god.

For Jackson, what is most significant is that the state agencies have not resisted this process. Instead they have inserted the monarchy into the process by using “technologies of enchantment.” On this, contributor Martin Platt (p. 101) recounts seeing a video, set to modern folk music, on the Skytrain in Bangkok: “An elderly woman is showing reverential respects (or wai-ing) in front of a picture of the King. When her granddaughter asks who it is in the picture, the grandmother replies, “thewada thi mi lom hai jai” (a living, breathing angel). Visitors to Thailand are now greeted with a video presentation while waiting in line at the passport desk, telling them that the king “sees possibilities that no one else sees.” Such depictions depart from the more prominent rational discourses surrounding Buddhist kingship popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when both military dictatorships and elected governments sought to end people's reliance on superstition and the spirit world. Of the political impact of the new divinity surrounding the monarchy, Jackson notes that those who have promoted rational images of kingship and constitutionalism – advocates of “royal liberalism” – have done very little to protest these developments, viewing as they do the monarch's apparent anti-materialism as a support against the corrupt money politics that troubles them (p. 51). In as much as the monarchy is now a cult, the cult is about a spirit/ghost-in-the-world which is beyond control. In all, Jackson's piece helps greatly in imagining a social and anthropological place of the monarchy beyond the instrumentalism that some commentators have sometimes largely attributed to it.

The pseudonymous Sarun Krittikarn (Chapter 3) offers a counter-point to spectralisation by suggesting an inter-subjective reading of the monarchy that strips away the aura produced by the divination processes explored by Jackson. For Sarun, the king has become part of what he calls “entertainment nationalism.” This is defined as “a kind of nationalism channelled through the fleeting and volatile desires and emotions of sensation gathering and pleasure seekers” (p. 63). Sarun explores how the inter-subjective gaze between king/royals and subjects instantiates an identity in subjects that is dependent and childlike. In effect, the claim is that observance of royal performance can lead to the internalisation of the propagated discourse of family-like relations between the parental royal family and the childish subject. Just as the process implores the royal family to continually perform itself in royal guise, so the king has become a logo “easily turned into a fetishized commodity” (p. 77). For some, the king's gaze is “warm, protective, forgiving, full of self-sacrificing love and care” (p. 69). Still, for others, the gaze can involve “total subjugation to superior power” (p. 69). Sarun is at her/his interpretative best describing the celebrations of the King's sixty-year reign in June 2006:

At that moment [when a photo was taken by a member of the royal family during the 2006 celebrations] the abstract sadomasochist relationship was materialised into a tangible object of the photograph, the individuality of the people in the Royal Plaza was temporarily dissolved into a mass uniform larger Self the self of being Thai, under the protective royal patronage (p. 70).

Here, as Sarun notes, the gazer is the king looking out at the masses. He is the subject who provides the foundation of the collective subject of the nation. It/they in turn look back, getting a shot of nationalism refracted through the monarch. They see themselves. This electrifying essay carries with it the burden of all cultural critiques influenced by the aesthetics of the Frankfurt School on modern mass culture – its assumption of a mass psychology and a thinly disguised distaste of mass processes. So the conclusions should be read as critique, not empirical reality.

Sarun's essay touches on themes explored at a 2008 photographic exhibition entitled Waiting for the King, by Manit Sriwanichpoom, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia. Taken while a massive crowd waited for Bhumibol to appear during the 2006 June celebrations, the pictures are long, thin and grey. They show a tired heat-stricken people, some brushed by a slight wind. Rusty street barriers exclude the people from the path of the imminent royal procession. Despite the presumably joyous occasion, worrisome and furtive looks make up the bulk of dispositions. Is this a corralled people waiting for a glimpse of divinity or a people waiting for their own brand of entertaining nationalism? The gaze then might be in the eye of the beholder. Manit set the exhibition on opposing walls so that when viewers walked through the space it was as if they themselves were in the procession, perhaps becoming Sarun's looked-at-king who is fashioned by a disturbing assembly of people and consumers. Coming to the end of these images, viewers gazed upon enlarged photographs of children tied and bound in Thai flags. Further still, viewers confronted a picture of a slit-throated chicken hanging above the flag and dripping blood. And finally viewers were confronted by the jarring image of a pig's heart so red it could still be pumping, sitting nonchalantly on the flag. The image symbolises, perhaps, the entirety of the processes that have led to an exclusionary and corrupt politics of all nationalisms, not just the Thai brand (Manit, 2008 20)
The tensions between the varied reading of the monarchy by Jackson and Sarun are evident. How can we align the occult magico-power of the divine kingship as spirit in the world with the mundane gaze of gossip and celebrity implied by entertainment nationalism so stridently described by Sarun? That both authors seem to be saying contradictory things and yet are able to offer convincing accounts reflects the monarchy's multiple registers and interactions with different, and frequently even opposed, audiences.

Comments from 2008/9: blogatry

Blogatry:

As the reality of the one-sided willed pact with royalists in Thailand (Pheu  Thai showing its loyalty) becomes undeniable, I thought it was time that Sovereign Myth acted like a blog and self-referenced itself in the manner of "as I said in XXX, as I noted  XXX, when I predicted that  XXXX". I've not done this before, so please indulge. The emerging commentary (Ji Ungphakorn, Political Prisoners in Thailand)  on disappointment with the Yingluck/Thaksin government and its refusal to help political prisoners is a healthy sign, and it's interesting that government apologists have started to look like yellow shirt apologists.....Regardless of all these moral gymnastics....yes to freedom for Somyot and all other politcal prisoners.

As I wrote in


"He wants to make History"  (Bangkok Post, 2008)

"The question to ask is why does a self-declared democratic movement fall back on someone like Thaksin, a gifted but impulsive political operator so frightfully contradictory that any popular movement that returns him to power would need to watch its back?

 The answer to that question, and to progressive acquiesce to rival elite camps more broadly, lies in organisation and politics.As long argued by Ji Giles Ungpakorn, there is a lack of independent pro-democratic and left-wing forces of sufficient size and clarity to intervene in struggles in such a way as to advance a progressive agenda. In such organisational absence, individual leftists and progressives have joined both the yellow and red camps, seeking a free ride through history for their more radical politics.

 In doing so, they have momentarily ironed out contradictions, refused to reveal their politics, and failed to come to terms with the limits of their influence. This strategy of simplification reveals itself as a politics of alliance, silence and accusation; alliance with the “lesser evil”; silence on the former and on their own politics; accusations directed at the “greater evil.”

 They have surrendered in part the responsibility to offer criticism publicly (necessarily circumspect) of things they criticise privately. Both red and yellow movements are partly led by phrase-coiners and image-makers who deliberately, on message, manage and distort, seeking to win support by insincere argument and selective truth.

This raises the question of the place of honesty and openness in social change. And it raises the issue of political adventurism, for a failure to fully appreciate the social forces at play in street politics is prone to dangerous consequences.

___________________________________________________________
As I wrote in "Coup by Stealth or something else"
Asia Sentinel 2009

Democracy?

Although the struggle between strategically relevant opposing forces in Thailand is presented through the idiom of democracy, the opposing forces who stand by the coupsters are actually an inter-sectoral mix of business, bureaucracy, police, military and royalists who care little for genuine democracy. As these inter-sectoral forces fight for state control they do so in a partial “state of exception” whereby, for the most part, force determines outcomes rather than law, persuasion or a democratic mandate. This is actually the same situation that held in the later Thaksin years, although the balance of forces has reversed.

The acute state of Thai politics at this present time has little to do with democracy. An elite struggle that goes back at least a decade is manifest: a new brand of capitalism that seeks to break from the quasi-feudalistic hold of monarchy is in motion, but it is a force that dares not declare its name. Enlightened Thaksin forces want a bourgeois revolution against the current way the monarchy and networks surrounding it work, but they dare not declare their mission. These forces – a mix of the old left, old right, capitalists and technocrats - mobilise forces under a banner of right wing populism, including Buddhist chauvinism, but they have yet to elaborate any genuinely ideological position to challenge the force that thwarts their emergence. They are also hostile to liberal forms of democracy.

So where is the ‘left’ in all of this? Some serve the stealth bourgeois revolution of the pro-Thaksin forces. They are beholden to a version of objective history that pits “progressive capitalism” against quasi-feudalistic monarchy and aristocracy. They have been unrelenting in their claim of Thaksin’s democratic mandate, willing to ignore that democracy means so much more than a mark on a ballot paper. Such belief in the march of objective history has led to many historical calamities and it is not hard to see Thaksin as one of them. The killings of Tak Bai and the War on Drugs surely count as modern equivalents of the descent into governmental barbarism.

Others on the left and a range of political liberals have sought to use the monarchy as a buffer against the political authoritarianism represented by Thaksin. In doing so, they have found comfort in myths about the monarchy, tradition and elite democratization. They have supported the use of extra-constitutional power to overthrow the Thaksin regime. Beholden to a subjectivist view of history (good versus evil), such forces are willing to turn a blind eye to the palace’s history, and its privileged economic position. They seek the return of ‘royal liberalism’, in which the monarchy stands as the supreme ombudsman, supporting the emergence of constitutional rule.

At this moment in time it appears that the contending fractions of the Thai elite are about to enter the final round of a long struggle. It remains to be seen if they will step back from the brink and instead embrace compromise. One thing, however, is certain: as long as contending elites fail to agree to any rules of the game and instead wage open political warfare for complete victory, Thailand’s chance of returning to some form of liberal democracy are slim.

Stirring the dust under the feet

Just before the Thai  July 2011 General election I was asked by Bloomberg: “What are the prospects of a power-sharing arrangement between Thaksin and his opponents?” My response in part was:

“Apart from hardline elements who mistakenly view Thaksin as the nadir of monarchist Thailand, my guess is the economic and political costs of protracted conflict is now weighing heavily on some of the incumbents who still want to steer Thailand to a prosperous and modern future. There must be considerable distress felt in royalist circles at the anti-royalist feeling that is emerging among rank and file redshirts and frankly the only genuine way to stop this growing is by bringing Thaksin back into the fold. Thaksin has time and time again shown his willingness to abide by most public protocols in relation to the monarchy. The inane propaganda efforts of the various security agencies are a lesson in blowback and the stupidity of force feeding people with "correct ideas". The more men in khaki wax lyrical about the royal family the more their standing is diminished. Thaksin has always signalled his willingness to do a deal and moreover is happy to deploy royalist imagery. This is what he offers and no one else can play this card. This will be the basis of any power-sharing arrangement.

In some senses the stark choice facing the rival camps is continued conflict at the cost of mutual destruction and seeing Thailand meltdown, or some step back from this and working out a formula for power sharing or at the very least a situation in which a "loyal opposition" has a credible chance of electoral victory at the following election. And should something be "agreed" this raises another question, how would such a historic anti-climax be received among those mobilised yellow and red -shirted citizens. This takes us to the final of the many unknowns of the post election period: the potential of a rising democratic mass in the face of this intra-elite bargaining and game-playing. Of all the possible game changers, this seems the least unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I'd like to be proven wrong.”

More recently I’ve been asked about the lack of support for amending Article 112 that concerns lese majeste. My response was:

“There is actually broad but muted support among some sections of the elite to amend the law, liberal royalists have come out in favour of amendment and of course red-shirt elements are strongly in support. The proposed amendment in the “people’s bill” are smartly pitched and in a situation where public policy was rationally debated you’d have to say the bill would go some way to answering the needs of both sides of the political divide.

But rational public debate is playing second fiddle to various political imperatives. These include constantly changing attempt to appease hardline royalists and not provoke mobilisation. You can see in the mobilisation against the amnesty bills what is possible. You’d expect greater mobilization to oppose the Campaign 112 Bill, given the monarchy’s place in Thailand’s symbolic politics.

Pheu Thai forces made it very clear in the days after the July 2011 election that the monarchy was their most vulnerable point and they would need to move slowly. They’ve lived up to that expectation, with people still in prison, and Chalerm’s war room to monitor lese majeste. But the plea by government sympathisers to understand Pheu Thai’s constrained political environment can also be self-serving - it creates a space for Thaksin forces to use anti-monarchy sentiment among supporters as their strongest bargaining point with the establishment to try and forge a power-sharing arrangement. “Deal with us, and we can stop this” is the message. This attempt largely defines the last year of political bargaining.

It is evident that while party-connected red shirts and those surrounding Thaksin do not totally control the red-shirt movement, they are in a position to largely shut down anti-monarchy discourse or at least alienate it from the more cautious elements of the movement. This is what they offer at the bargaining table. In some senses, the future of the monarchy depends on what agreements can be made to share power.

A final point to make would be that the reluctance to amend reflects a national condition of impending crisis. There is respect on both sides of politics for the king. This is a cultural condition that does not necessarily reflect agreement on the monarchy or the lese majeste law , but a sentiment that says so late in the reign it would be disrespectful to make these moves. For those who feel the king’s presence as the father and soul of the nation – and these ideas are really felt – amendment that is politically motivated appears as ingratitude. For that reason, amendment will likely quickly follow the passing of King Bhumiphol.

Amendment is only likely to happen in this reign under two conditions. Either a signal comes from the palace, so that the amendment is seen as part of the narrative of a democratic kingship or controversial amendment, even abolition, occurs as part of an increasingly polarised struggle for total power. Amendment based on rational debate is a distant possibility.”