Chinese language Translation of Bangkok Post article "Real Democratic Voices Need to be Heard"

 Many thanks to Mr Ng for translating this Bangkok Post article which first appeared 14th of May.


泰国需要听到真正的民主声音

不出所料，反政府运动背后的知识份子，人民民主改革委员会宣布，尼瓦探隆不能成

为看守首相，而只能是副首相代理看守首相一职。这个有争议性的论点意思是要表

明存在一个政治真空，允许建立一个过度时期的政府，也就是所谓的人民议会。这

很可能是反达信阵营又一次唱女皇合唱团的歌词：〝嘿，我也会抓到你。又一个被干

掉。〞

泰国宪法法庭撒除英叻首相职位，被政府的支持者视为是一个阴谋。其实不然。她明

知或罔顾调走国家安全理事会的首长，让政府能够将时任的警察总长调任这个职位，

然后允许达信的前任小舅子担任这个空置的国家警察总长的职位。星期二国家反贪污

委员会就失败的稻米津贴计划而对英叻的失职的弹劾也不能说是一个阴谋，因为关於

这个计划早已有很多警告的迹象。彈劾可能被证明是错误的，但它不是一个阴谋。

在这些判决上没有阴谋；它们完全遵循2007年宪法，目的在於牽制达信集团。它也是

因应后2006年复兴的军人官僚机构与混合自由保守民主党的政治阶级之间的结盟以反

对达信而建立的。它并没有成功。在2007年宪法下，达信支持的政党赢了两次大选

〔2007年及2011年〕，然后在2014年2月又被宪法法庭宣判大选无效。这个判决是有道

理的，因为这次的选举受到人民民主改革委员会的破坏与阻挠。

这其中没有阴谋，因为国家的独立机构，包括宪法法庭和选举局及其他，完全根据

2007年宪法计划而运作。这包括加强独立机构与参议院在司法与官僚制度上的运作，

并安排反达信力量的人士在这些机构里。希望这些手段能够控制那些倾向达信的政治

阶级及其选举的基层。没必要给予没有阴谋这个词一个真正的含意，因为这些机构都

是照章行事的。

这并不是说这些判决一定是合法的。2007年宪法赢得的准合法性，是在军人政府有限

制的条件之下举行的全民公投中以勉强的多数票通过的。它真正产生的原因是基於

2006年的非法政变：一个刑事法上被禁止的行为，但这个行为却被军人政府利用临时

宪法，以由来已久的姿态概括承受了。基於他们这种动辄对政变的依靠，法律话语的

规则在泰国，被反政府的精英当作反看守政府的一个主要的动力，这是有一点虚伪的

味道。

它也是一种绝望的氛围。在1990年代时期，当一个自由保守的集团组成与制定了

1997年宪法，民主党与公民社团大体上都没尽力去赢得新政治秩序与规范之下的国家

治理权，这些新政治秩序与规范原本将可保护他们，以对抗2000年代前半期达信的威

权选举体制。达信以政党的机器和有效的政策与行动，以及一些金钱上的滑润剂，赢

得了选举。但由於走专制捷径与那些反对他的人的操纵，他现在在很多人的眼里，如

果不是一个民主人物，至少是一个选举达人。

有人希望通过适当的基层工作，达信可能从流亡返国。因此，当英叻政府在去年年底

尝试宪法改革之际，非常刻意地在改革的更高目标上，配搭了一个大赦，让达信可以

返国。这带出了捣蛋的精灵 - 让她在位前两年政治上的相安无事分崩离析。

民主党前任秘书长素贴，与其他高调的民主党人士，辞去党要职位，走上街头斗争，

接着在去年十二月，民主党的议员集体退出国会。木已成舟。泰国最老的政党，在

某个时候，有着反独裁的光荣历史，鼓吹民主自由的形式，现在却一变而成为街头

斗爭的形象，剥夺了国家政治妥协的机会，因为它选择不当一个强大的反对党。因此

2007年这个透明的政治改革计划〔不是一个阴谋〕还在持续中。

如果没有阴谋，那么在执行各各法庭的案件以及它们达致的判决，肯定会有〝双重标

准〞。但对於这些〝双重标准〞的控诉，横跨政治分歧的两个阵营之间，因为它们都

有这种倾向，这由它们各自控制的机构采取的手段可见一斑。

双重标准无论谁执政都在玩。这反映出一个明显的棘手问题的两个层面：第一个，在

想要政权的敌对双方的精英之间；第二个，在他们吸引广大群众所奉行的政治愿景之

上。这个棘手问题，本身已是一件坏事，却因环绕在王室继承问题上的担忧而更纠结

不清。

这个周末，双方的大批人马将走上街头。人民民主改革委员会寻求政府官员的倒戈，

并成立一个过度时期的政府。他们占领电视台就是要向群众广播他们的这个意图。反

独裁民主联盟将推动七月的大选，与继续留任看守政府。

前者完全没有希望，后者可能有一些希望。

反独裁民主联盟会说宪法法庭本身是不合宪法的。他们辩说它的功能没有组织法。

2007年宪法必须在一年之内颁布一个组织法。没有组织法的存在，宪法法庭的合法性

是基於2006政变而制定的一个临时条款上。反独裁民主联盟的一个问题是，宪法法庭

的判決是最后的判决，不得上诉。因此，它现在只好走上街头保卫政府。

自从2006年政变，泰国就缺乏一个可行的政治解决办法，双方都在爭取对自己有利

的，因此暴力与仇恨加剧。内战之说以往常被当作无稽之谈，现在却是大有可能。双

方的武装冲突迫在眉头，很可能孤注一掷，邀来军队的干预。

但是，双方的建议并没有针对冲突的棘手性质。选举的权力现在看来，似乎只会导致

灾难。选举并不是解决双方对权力基本矛盾的一个办法。为泰党的看守政府寻求另一

次的民主委任权是没有意义的。真的，在泰国，每赢得一次选举，就好像经济学上说

的〝报酬递减〞。

较好的意见是开始一个全民政治改革的程序。但这只能基於尊重现行看守政府在几次

的选举中赢得的历史性民主意愿。无视这点也将导致灾难。改革的程序不能夺去大多

数人的意愿。但这也不是照比例原则的。

泰国需要的是以非政党、民主的决心，组成一个真正的制定或修改宪法的国民代表大

会。这就必须摈弃人民民主改革委员会中的极端份子，和死抓政权不放的旧体制力

量，以便让路给制定1997年宪法所包涵的意愿。但支持达信的阵营也必须作出一个真

正的选择 - 通过一个拥抱民主改革的步骤，厘清它真正的利害关系，并承诺遵守大家

必须服从的新的政治模式与问责制。它不能一方面把自己打扮成民主的力量，而另一

方面又不承认军人政变前达信政权往独裁漂移的现象。

原文刊载於14.05.2014的《曼谷邮报》

作者：麦可康纳斯〔Michael Connors〕任教於诺丁汉大学马来西亚学府，著有《泰国

的民主与国家认同》〔Democracy and National Identity in Thailand〕。

译者：苏杭

For a new constitutional law


The piece below argues for the continuing mandate of the Pheu Thai care-taker government and for a constituent assembly to be formed that democratically establishes new political rules of the game. The 2007 constitution was a coup-born document and its problems and biases are emerging in ways that make any election under its terms problematic. Some have interpreted this as support for PDRC - not sure if they read the article. It seems when you criticize both sides - you are either red or yellow depending on the accuser.

_________________________________________________________________________

Real Democratic Voices Need to be Heard

Michael Connors (Bangkok Post 12 May)

Another one bites the dust, so the great Queen song goes. With Yingluck Shinawatra’s dismissal from the care-taker prime ministership on Wednesday by the Constitutional Court, Thailand has witnessed three pro-Thaksin prime ministers dust-bitten in six years, courtesy of judicial interventions. The very moment she was dismissed her party, Pheu Thai, quickly promoted to the care-taker prime-ministership Niwatthamrong Bunsongphaisan -  a close associate of Thaksin Shinawatra -  almost as if to line him up for the firing squad.

On cue, intellectuals behind the anti-government movement, the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), announced that Niwatthamrong could not be care-taker prime-minister but only a deputy prime minister acting as a care-taker prime minister. This tendentious argument was meant to demonstrate that a political vacuum existed  allowing for  the creation of an interim  government and a so-called People’s Council. May well the anti-Thaksin camp be singing Queen’s chorus line, “Hey I’m gonna get you too, Another one bites the dust”.

The dismissal of Yingluck by the Constitutional Court is part of a conspiracy according to pro- government supporters. It is not.  She knowingly transferred the head of the National Security Council, enabling her government to then transfer the sitting national police chief into the post, which then allowed Thaksin’s former brother-in-law to occupy the vacant post of national police chief. Nor is it right to call a conspiracy the indictment of Yingluck on Thursday by the National Anti-Corruption Commission for negligence in regard to the failed rice subsidy scheme, about which warning signs were plenty. The indictment might prove to be wrong, but it is not a conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy in these judgments; they are faithful to the 2007 constitution that aimed  to keep at bay the Shinawatra clan. It also buttressed a reactive alliance between the post-2006 revived military-bureaucratic establishment and the political class around the hybrid liberal-conservative Democrat Party against Thaksin. It didn’t work. Under the 2007 constitution pro-Thaksin parties won two elections (2007, 2011) only to be robbed of the 2014 February election by the Constitutional Court nullifying the election. That ruling made sense in the face of the PDRC’s vandalizing blockades of the ballot.

There is no conspiracy because the independent agencies of state, including the Constitutional Court, the Election Commission and others function according to the 2007 constitution project. This included strengthening the hand of the judiciary and bureaucracy in the functioning of the independent agencies and the Senate, and peopling them with anti-Thaksin forces. With such instrumentalities the hope was that the demands of the Thaksin-aligned political class and its electoral base could be controlled . That being so, no conspiracy in the real meaning of the word is required, because these agencies  are functioning to script.

This is not to say that the judgments are necessarily legitimate. The 2007 Constitution won quasi-legitimacy by a bare majority in a national referendum under the restrictive conditions of a military junta. Its real birth lay in the illegal seizure of power in the 2006 coup: An act forbidden in the criminal code and an act which was absolved, in time-honored fashion, by the military junta in its interim constitution following the coup. Given their coup-dependency, the rule of law discourse in Thailand claimed by the anti-government elites as a primary motivator against the care-taker government has a whiff of hypocrisy.

It also has an air of desperation. During the 1990s when a liberal conservative pact was formed and found expression in the  1997 constitution,  the Democrat Party and civil society broadly did little to win the nation to new norms of political order that would have protected them against Thaksin’s electoral authoritarianism during the first half of the 2000s. Thaksin won the electoral argument by action and effective policy and party machine, and some monetary lubrication.  But as a result of dictatorial shortcuts and manipulations by those who oppose him he has now emerged in many people’s eyes as at least an electocrat, if not a democrat.  

There was hope that with appropriate groundwork Thaksin could return from exile. And so very deliberately, when the Yingluck government attempted constitutional reform late last year, it twinned-in-time that higher purpose of reform with a general amnesty that would have enabled a Thaksin return. And this brought out the gremlins – the political peace of her first two years of office fell apart. Former Secretary General of the Democrat Party, Suthep Thaugsuban and other high profile  Democrats quit as party notables to take the fight to the streets and were then followed  by Democrat Party MPs resigning en-masse from parliament in December last year.  The die was cast. Thailand’s oldest party with a sometimes honorable history of fighting dictatorship and promoting liberal forms of democracy, transformed  itself into a street fighting outfit robbing the country of a chance of political compromise  because it chose not to be a strong parliamentary opposition.  And so the 2007 transparent political project, not a conspiracy, continues.

If there is no conspiracy there are certainly “double standards” in the various court cases pursued, and in the outcomes achieved. However, the charge of double-standards stands across the political divide because this is a tendency in both camps, evidenced by the way the instrumentalities under their respective control function. 

The double standards – in play no matter who is in office - reflect an apparent intractability at two levels: first, between the rival elites who want to hold power, and the secondly the  political visions they espouse, and upon which they have attracted a mass base. The intractability, bad as it is, is also entangled in anxieties surrounding the issue of royal succession.  

This weekend significant numbers of protestors from both sides are on the streets. The PDRC is seeking defection by state officials to its side and an interim government. Its occupation of television stations seeks to broadcast this intent.  The United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) will be pushing for a July election and for the care-taker government to remain in office.

There is no chance of the former, some for the latter.

The UDD will say that the Constitutional Court is itself unconstitutional – arguing that it functions without any Organic Law. The 2007 Constitution required that an Organic Law be promulgated within a year  of its promulgation. No Organic Law exists and the Court has been functioning under transitory provisions that reference its legitimacy to the coup constitution of 2006. One problem the UDD faces: there is no appeal against a Constitutional Court decision. So, it now takes to the streets to defend the government.  

Since the 2006 coup Thailand has lacked a workable political settlement and as each side has maneuvered for advantage, violence and hate have intensified. Talk of civil war used to be rhetoric, it is now a possibility. The strategic arms in both sides’ armory is narrowing – and it may come down to going for broke, inviting military intervention.

However, the proposals from both sides do not address the intractable nature of the conflict. An election right now seems like an invitation to hell. An election is not a forum to decide fundamental antagonisms on the nature of power.  There is no point in the Pheu Thai caretaker administration seeking another democratic mandate.  Indeed, winning elections in Thailand appears to be a case of diminishing returns.

The better option is to begin a national political reform process. But this can only begin on the basis of respecting the electoral will of the current care-taker government’s constituency, across several elections. To ignore this is also an invitation to hell. Reform processes cannot disenfranchise a majority or eradication of a political force.  But this is not about proportionality.

A genuine constituent assembly, for that is what is needed, should form a democratic will, not a partisan one.  This would require that extremist elements of the PDRC be abandoned, and the clinging to power of the old establishment should give way to the aspirations that were embedded in the 1997 constitution.  But it also requires of the pro-Thaksin camp a real choice – to embrace democratic reform through a process that it has genuine stakes in and to commit to new modes of politics and accountability that all must be subject to. It cannot seek to present itself as a democratic force and fail to  acknowledge the authoritarian drift of the pre-coup Thaksin administrations.  

___________________________________________________________________

Michael Connors teaches at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia campus. He is the author of Democracy and National Identity in Thailand (NIAS Press, 2007).

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.