A Plagiarist’s Manifesto

Plagiarists of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your alleged originality (and your degree).

Since Socrates, in a Hemlock sip, accepted his punishment for leading astray the frail youth of his times, all that needs to be said has been said. Between truths and untruths there is a gallery of historical figures who have in their way refashioned familiar stories as original. Take any of the great religious figures: the plump laughing Buddha rising to nirvana on account of his balloon belly and the obviously bloated point of the pointlessness of it all ; the Christ of a virgin mother never even having the opportunity to go through the civilising Oedipus complex, the great Prophet of Medina who saw in revamped scripture, old and new, a worthy story for his people; the gods who defy categorisation and who mock the paragraphic order of the west, so truly original that there are multitudinous spirit cults found anywhere in the world where fire, water, earth and air inspire awe and fawning.

Thinking of all of these religious attempts to make sense of our absurd condition we can note that each religion makes of the mystery of life its own puzzle, but few are original in the answers proffered. Religion is plagiarised salvation.

So plagiarists of the world, you have before you a veritable pantheon of would be gods and prophets who have taken from the common stock of knowledge ideas as their own without a quotation mark, let alone a footnote. If gods and prophets plagiarise, why not ordinary mortals? You stand in proud company.

Why then are you marked down and despised? Why are you summoned before austere academic committees that demand explanation of your stolen words?
It is not that you have committed any cardinal sin inherent in the act of plagiarism; it is that you have been discovered. There lies your error, for refashioned thought must always catwalk as this year’s original talk. If summoned, seek forgiveness, look remorseful. And never be caught again. Like a celebrity DJ who makes the original their own you need to jive so that you spin the original as your own.

Student plagiarism, if correctly done, is politely ignored. If they can’t Google the quoted phrase, they won’t find it. There are basically three ways of winning the plagiarism game, each corresponding to a level of aspired level academic achievement. The brilliant plagiarist aspires to a first class mark, the mediocre plagiarist aspires to a second class but can accept lower, the idiotic plagiarist merely aspires to pass, but rarely does.

1. Brilliant Plagiarism

This is the gravest sin, for you have set yourself above your teachers. The brilliant plagiarist is discovered as a consequence of not having convinced the tutor of their right to play at a high intellectual level. When a student writes brilliantly the tutor becomes suspicious. The following question occurs to him or her: Could I, a PhD, have written such a piece as an 18-22 year old?

To avoid being charged with plagiarism because of brilliance (and the resulting envy of the tutor), it is necessary to prepare the tutor to think you are capable of such brilliance. So, how to do this? The answer is to attend a few tutorials, and no more, and look bored, brilliantly bored. Snort with exasperation as other students say the most obvious of things. Purse your lips at the politeness of the tutor who praises as ‘interesting’ the tedious comments of ill-informed students. Make the tutor feel inferior with impossible questions of an epistemological nature. Intimidate. If you succeed in creating an atmosphere of psychological-superiority-complex, when your essay is marked by the said wretched tutor, he or she will masochistically realise that your snorts in class were a consequence of your transcendental wisdom being exposed to the banality of other people’s low intelligence.

Mediocre Plagiarism.

This is the most commonly successful form of plagiarism. You write, or transcribe, an essay of such overwhelming obviousness no one could fault you for absorbing the Zeitgeist of the age. If you are so obvious as to be stating the obvious, then no one will suspect you of plagiarism, just mediocrity. You can succeed in this form of plagiarism by appearing either dull or busy. For good workpersonship, expect a second class mark at least; but if you screw up the mark can be lesser still. The key to mediocre plagiarism lies in appearing overly busy with all sorts of extra-curricula activities that have distracted you from your studies. The tutor will sympathise with your busy work load and mark you up, even if some of the words seem disturbingly familiar and the overall effort is just passable. It is also possible to get a good mark even if you appear incapable of original thought. Be the kind of student who echoes eloquently that which surrounds them. Be the diligent voice of the age. Better still, to avoid any suspicion, find a tutor who believes in the “death of the author”, if they have any self-respect they are not going to charge you with plagiarism, even if various passages sound familiar.

Idiotic Plagiarism
I am afraid that for this kind of plagiarist there is not much hope. They set Shakespeare or Bertrand Russell against their own prose in the same essay. They have no idea of equivalence. The tutor, having been moved by the plagiarised paragraphs then comes across passages of such a faecal quality that plagiarism is suspected. So what to do for the no-hoper who wishes to pass a degree with no effort? The answer lies not in juxtaposition of brilliance and banality, of delicate prose next to egregious waffle. It lies in the earnest production of consistent banality. In other words, dumb down. Turn Yeats into your own prose. Make T. S Eliot sound like the Spice Girls. By dumbing down your stolen phrases you give reason for the marker to admire your ideas, while lamenting your prose as a product of some trauma.

Thailand: When the Dogs Howl

Dictatorship threatens to bury Thai democracy
Michael Connors
Canberra Times
May 4, 2007


IT'S NOT the kind of Thailand you will see in travel brochures advertising "Amazing Thailand", but even casual observers can sense the nation is on the edge of a political meltdown.
Last year, the world's longest serving monarch, 79-year-old King Bhumipol Adulyadej called it "the worst crisis in the world", referring to the political crisis that wracked Thailand. The then prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was fighting for his political survival amid mass demonstrations, military machinations, charges of lese majeste, corruption, and abuses of human rights.

He lost.

In September Thaksin was overthrown in a coup and by year's end a military appointed government was in place.

A Constitutional Drafting Assembly was formed to draft Thailand's 18th constitution since 1932.

No one has great hopes the new constitution currently being drafted under the shadow of the military will solve the country's woes.

The fragility of constitutional rule in Thailand has as much to do with vested and conflicting interests between old and new wealth as it does with flawed constitutional design.

And this is why it is possible to speak of meltdown.

During Thaksin's five years in office the government was charged with policy corruption that benefited his private business interests at the expense of rivals. While prime minister, his family firm invested heavily in AirAsia to compete against the national carrier, Thai Airways. He won tax concessions on his media activities, and the Export-Import Bank of Thailand provided soft loans to the Burmese regime to contract Thaksin's satellite and telecommunications firms.

As Thaksin's cronyism intensified, different groupings of business interests began to mobilise against him. They rallied under the convenient, though not completely inaccurate, cry that Thaksin was challenging the power of the king.

The current military-backed Government is now moving against Thaksin's wealth, and thus his political power. Last week, Thaksin's children were ordered to return half a billion dollars to the tax office. As more cases of corruption come before the courts, pro-Thaksin forces in Thailand are mobilising protests against the Government while Thaksin, in exile, claims disinterest in politics.

Whether the crisis will end in compromise, or will be fought to the end, is unclear.

So what of the prospects of democracy in Thailand? The Government promises an election will be held at year's end under the newly-drafted constitution. But pro-democratic and some pro-Thaksin forces are calling for the constitution to be rejected.

A rejection could be interpreted as condemnation of the coup and support for Thaksin paving the way for his political comeback in some form. Others fear that should an election be held pro-Thaksin forces will win anyway.

That's why some people have given up on democracy all together, saying the rural masses in Thailand are not ready for it. Instead a mixed system that incorporates the people, the aristocracy, and the king should be devised until the masses are ready to act like democratic citizens.

Such criticism of the electoral process betrays aristocratic disdain for the masses; and it might suggest that one of South-East Asia's most liberal of democracies (from the 1980s-1990s) might be headed down the road of Singaporean guided-democracy.

The principal charge against the masses is that they sell their votes to opportunist and corrupt politicians for less than 1000 baht ($A40) and have no regard for public interest. They elect corrupt governments that plunder the public purse, so what's the point of democracy?

Thais have dubbed pre-election nights "the night the dogs howl" because vote-canvassers make late-night visits to those they have paid to ensure they vote appropriately. Their nocturnal meanderings stir sleeping dogs and whole villages wake up to the howling: an apt sound for an aching democracy.

The question of succession is another potential site of meltdown. There is no doubt that without the presence of the current king, who has immense moral power in Thailand, political order in the interests of the old elite will be hard to guarantee. And this is where the political divide on regime form among the Thai elites opens up as they decide on a form of right wing electoral populism as exercised by Thaksin or someone like him, or a guided-democracy under the tutelage of the old establishment. Between both, the promise of Thai liberalism appears to be diminished.

The third significant site of meltdown centres on the continuing insurgency in the Muslim-majority provinces in the south of Thailand. Thaksin's demise was supposed to bring an end to the daily killings by insurgents and para-military state apparatuses. It was believed his insensitive incompetence had fuelled the insurgency. Instead, the killings have intensified, and taken on a more sectarian nature between Buddhist and Muslim.

The current Government appears no more competent than Thaksin's in dealing with the crisis. The three thousand lives lost in the last three years of the insurgency may be small compared with what may soon come.

Looking at the bleak prospect of Thai politics in the coming year it is hard not to conclude that it is more than just the dogs who will be howling.

Thailand: The Fall of Thaksin

Thailand’s Future
Michael Connors
Canberra Times
September, 2006

Deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra said earlier this year that when the King whispered he would leave office. The king whispered several times, but Thaksin kept coming back like the proverbial ghost that haunts Thai villages.

Thaksin has thick skin. He was nonplussed when King Bhumiphol lectured him about the need to accept criticism. In 2003, after the UN condemned his human rights record he said ‘the UN is not my father.’ Thaksin now says he might head a government in exile – from London - and he’s called for elections supervised by the UN. He must have a good sense of humour, too.

Like some cheap cinematic ghost thriller that many Thais love, this is a man addicted to serial re-appearance. With his wealth – trebled since his time in office – he may well head an exile government from London simply to keep himself in the limelight and to counter expected exposes of corruption during his term in office.

As foreign observers, including the Australian government, condemn the coup – which is easy enough to do, one wonders why the Howard government was not critical of Thaksin’s assault on democracy and human life while he was in office. Basically, democracy and human rights were put in customs quarantine while our government negotiated and then implemented a Free Trade Agreement with Thailand. Alexander Downer’s condemnation of the coup is mere diplomatic ritual, steeped in hypocrisy.

Thaksin’s human rights abuses included the normalization of extra-judicial murder during the war on drugs, with over 2000 people killed and horrendous abuses in the South of Thailand where a separatist insurgency is taking place. When over a 1000 protesters were arrested and placed in military trucks in October 2004, 78 died en-route to a military camp. Thaksin basically said the deaths were an honest mistake, the same excuse he used when he was exposed for illegally concealing millions of dollars worth of shares in the bank accounts of his domestic servants.

When human rights activists exposed the existence of mass graves in the South of Thailand in November last year, his government ignored calls to launch an inquiry. Provincial officials say the mass graves of over 200 people are most likely Cambodian immigrants who like to ‘fight when they get drunk’. Others wonder if they are related to extra-judicial killings. Islamic Councils in the South have indicated that exhumation for the purposes of autopsy would be acceptable, but Thai forensic scientists efforts to undertake an investigation has been frustrated by bureaucratic stone-walling over budget allocation and jurisdiction.

Those who bemoan the loss of Thaksin because he was poor-friendly should note that according to the United Nations World Development Report, Thailand’s Human Development Index world ranking dropped from 66 in 2002 to 73 in 2005. What is more, income disparities between rich and poor have remained largely the same under Thaksin. His pro-poor policies were selectively targeted, smartly packaged and poorly funded. Budgetary allocations to education declined under Thaksin. Health spending as a proportion of budget allocation in 2005, was at 1999 levels. Thaksin’s inventiveness was to paint the public budget as his personal benevolent purse.

Those who think Thaksin had a democratic mandate should keep in mind that his minders manipulated the Electoral Commission of Thailand to his advantage. His government also played games with the National Counter Corruption Commission – keeping it dysfunctional so that thousands of corruption cases were put on hold. State lottery funds were allegedly plundered to fund party activities. The coup was not against a democratic government as such. Thaksin’s hold on to power was about ensuring his own survival – knowing full well how vulnerable he would be to prosecution without political power.


Thaksin’s record does not excuse the military coup. They have not moved against Thaksin because of corruption and human rights abuses, but because it was clear that Thaksin was basically challenging the power of the palace and stacking almost all institutions with his own supporters. When the military says they launched the coup for the sake of democracy, they mean constitutional monarchy. Democracy can mean very different things.

The military looks like it will, in cooperation with other establishment forces, move Thailand towards a more conservative law and order democracy. Their reported approach to former Senate President Meechai Ruchaphan to head a Constitution Drafting Committee is a sign of the future. Meechai opposed a number of the progressive clauses in the now annulled 1997 Constitution.

The future of Thailand is now unclear. Some of those who fought for
Thaksin's removal in order to restore democracy are now turning towards fighting the military and its appointees.

On Friday they defied martial law and organized a protest against the coup.
Despite the ban on poltiical gatherings of more than five people, no one was arrested.

Now student groups are calling for a people's assembly. Some may have guiltily enjoyed last Wednesday's coup holiday, but as the struggle against the military unfolds the hangover may last a long time.

The Queen, please don't come back

Don’t Come Back, Queen

Written on the occassion of Her Majesty's visit during the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
March, 2006.



One of the most unfortunate side effects of the Commonwealth Games, when royal personage was in town, was having to watch TV footage of an ageing and strangely hatted woman wander through small crowds with what appears to be a semi-detached wrist. This woman, who should have been given the axe several years back, was here to appear before her subjects who, it seems, can’t have a good time without a right royal needle up the posterior.

On opening night of the Games or sometime after, I hoped that a collective two-finger salute would greet her majestic big hoax. Instead down to earth Australian commoners paid due respect. She spoke of the commonwealth, I thought of a plundering empire that left a mess in its wake.

Why do we bow before the blue bloods? After all, would they even give you a lift on a hot day? Sometime in 1983, I was hitchhiking from Hobart to Launceston. As I wandered into one small town, there was the bustle and fuss that is normally associated with school sports day.

Kids were lining the streets and ribbons separated them from the road. It soon became clear to me that royalty was on the road, and that I’d have a chance to stick my thumb up at it. I passed the gathering, struggling with the weight of tent, kerosene stove and the dirty laundry of several weeks wear. The police allowed me to continue hitching and as I reached the outskirts of the town the royal convoy passed. I managed that hopeful side-glance of the hitchhiker and caught a glimpse of Charles and Di. They didn’t stop, though there was plenty of space. “Wankers”, I thought to myself. And that is exactly what the contemporary monarchy is.

I will not bore you with republican tales of growing up listening to the Dubliners. You can now experience that at an Irish themed franchise pub. My original antipathy had nothing to do with politics at that time, but simple decency. Monarchy is a euphemism for plunder and pillage, for indecent power and eloquent disguise.

All monarchies have at their origins in venal and power motives that get recast as salvation of nation, empire or race. I was young when I believed that, and I still do. There can be no democracy that has at its heart a belief in birth privilege.

The language, pomposity and stuffed-turkey nose-in-the air disposition of monarchy are supposed to be markers of born virtue. I doubt that there can be a shred of virtue among people who believe themselves superior to others. To be born to title is no-one’s fault, but to hold to that title, to walk red carpet and to speak of ‘subjects’ is blatant blasphemy to any humane creed.

Can I even be bothered rehearsing my political objections? Not really, go back to the pamphleteers of several hundred years ago. They said it all. To update it a little, here is my two fingers worth.

Consider the grand tax heist that only ended last decade. Consider the silliness of bowing to someone who views you as a lowly subject. Consider even more forebodingly the death of the incumbent and the arrival to the throne of a sermonising Charles holding weekly broadcasts on nose fungus and the banality of contemporary life.

Consider the Coronation. Consider an over excited octogenarian Prime Minister John Howard in attendance finally stuffing it in Canterbury as he stumbles and falls while taking a bow. Consider the news broadcasts that follow his cadaver’s return to our fair shores. Consider the fate of poor Australian expatriates in London putting up with Johnny come lately jokes.

Royals and aristocrats do not expect much from commoners, only that we follow their wise advice. They do, however expect vulgarity. So here goes. In private moments the queen passes wind. That momentary pause of waving hand is most likely one such moment. That beneficent gesture of bending to take flowers from a school girl’s hands, another.

The queen goes to the toilet. How she does, and under what conditions, is a state secret more securely kept than any other. Hopefully some rogue republican can reveal the excesses to which the government went to make sure that on the tour the royal toilet was used only by her, and once only.

Headlines I would have liked to have seen during the Royal tour include:

HOWARD PATS QUEEN ON THE BUM
QUEEN PATS HOWARD ON THE BUM
QUEEN GETS DIRTY (PICTURE OF QUEEN PLANTING A SEEDLING)
QUEENS AGAINST MONARCHY CONFRONT QUEEN
NATION GIVES TWO-FINGER SALUTE

And now my own personal message to the Queen: Your voice is snobbery vocalised, your tedious care for the world is tea’n’scone philanthropy mobilised. A wretchedly obsequious milieu will ‘maam’ you, while erstwhile republicans will bow to you. As for me, all I can say Maam, is that you’re one big Haam. Please, please, don’t come back.

Democracy From Below: Nidhi

Democracy From Below: Nidhi Eoseewong, Thailand
Michael K. Connors

(To appear in modified form with full citations in
Vin D'Cruz (ed.) Contemporary Actors and Ideas in Asia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007.)

It is 2006 and Bangkok born Thai-Chinese scholar Nidhi Eoseewong (1940 -), based in the northern city of Chiang Mai, is visiting the majority-Muslim province of Pattani to deliver a lecture on the region’s ancient history. Pattani is one of three southern provinces that since 2004 has been subject to militant violence and brutal state repression, leading to several thousand deaths.
Addressing an audience of ethnic-Malay Muslims, Nidhi brings out the common nature of shared periphery:

"I am a Bangkok native who now lives in Chiangmai. Natives of Chiangmai put a lot of importance on the name Sirimankhalaacaan, a monk whose accomplishment was the writing of text that allowed for the teaching of the Pali language. This is a point of pride for people of Chiangmai... it means nothing to Bangkok people. It is just like Pattani having meaning for people here [referring to Pattani as a centre of Islamic scholarship] that other Thai people are not aware of...This phenomenon of regional pride … should be something that all Thai people can accept and understand."

Even though they share a history of incorporation into the modern nation state of Thailand, Chiang Mai and Pattani are worlds apart.

Chiang Mai’s population is predominantly Buddhist and Thai speaking; the history of its royal courts has been incorporated into a popularised version of Lanna culture which provides the basis for the proud identity of its more civic-minded folkloric residents. Moderate climate and folkloric richness has made of Chiang Mai a tourist destination of choice; its people are admired for their light skin and gentle manner. There is no provincial shame attached to Chiang Mai; the residues of its historical distinctness have found expression in the modern meaning of Thainess.
It is from this place and its eponymous university that Nidhi writes to undo the silence and violence of state nationalist politics. In doing so, he has become Thailand’s foremost public intellectual, ceaselessly writing and educating for a politics beyond nationalist assumptions.

Chris Baker, a leading historian on Thailand, notes that one of Nidhi’s early writings, a 1964 short story on the horror of war, ends with a thank you note to ‘love, friendship, understanding, empathy, mutuality, and peace – everything which inspires confidence, hope, love and warmth in humanity… everyone who reads this story with the feeling of being beyond the assumptions in the word “nation”’. It is as if Nidhi’s intellectual life has been dedicated to those he thanks, and his political struggle – through his writing and commitment to education and campaigns – is dedicated to the eradication of their antonyms.

And it is in the Muslim South of Thailand that the antonyms have most stirred. It is the violence of nationalist assumptions that means many Bangkok Thais think of the deep South as disorderly, dangerous and home to unpatriotic dark-skinned Muslims. Language and education policies to assimilate this population of Malays into Thai identity have failed, despite the effort of accommodating Muslim elites. Experience of cultural oppression, brutal repression and the petty arrogance of a conquering state, have led significant numbers of people in the Muslim South to consider themselves more strongly Malay than ever before. It has led some of them to horrific violence in the name of their desired nationhood, Pattani.

The separate stories of Pattani and Chiang Mai reflect the diverse regions and peoples of modern Thailand. They are truly separate ‘nations’ in terms of language and culture. Only state nationalism, seeking to nationalise people by language policies and centralized curriculum, can ignore this fact. And it is this state project that Nidhi attacks. His writings expose the vanities of state nationalism and invokes the potential of common people to do good.

Nidhi in context
The role of the public intellectual - as trusted and probing interrogator of the every-day, of poking fun at national vanities while giving voice to higher aspirations, of making sense of capitalist development from the perspective of those made subject to it - is one that Nidhi clearly cherishes. What makes public intellectuals unique is the manner of their engagement with the very society that they are seeking simultaneously to evoke and transform, and how this engagement shapes their work.

Nidhi’s prolific writing is motivated by a politics of pluralistic national identity and renegade rejection of the state and power. He opposes Thai bureaucratic ideology that views history as the succession of kings and that promotes a rarefied Thai culture. He pokes fun at official versions of Thainess. Let me take just one example, an article on Krengjai. Roughly translated krengjai means ‘considerate deference’; it is used to explain how Thai social interaction is smoothened by mutual respect and consideration. It is seen as being a paramount Thai characteristic. Why, if this is so, asks Nidhi, do people drive madly on the roads endangering others? He bemoans that Thailand is not a krengjai society, that there is not deep respect for individuals. Why? His answer is that krengjai is actually part of a patronage system, that Thai manners reflect hierarchies, that people are krengjai only to their superiors. Secondly, as a legacy of history, the public sphere is seen as part of the state or crown, and citizens thus have a poorly developed sense of regard for it, no krengjai. People will only have this regard when they are part of the system, and this means more democracy. Note how deftly Nidhi shifts the meaning of krengjai, from its hierarchical past to assume in the present the meaning of an ethos of consideration for society. Moves such as this, taking hold of the arsenal of Thai identity and subjecting it to friendly fire, characterises much of his writing.

While Thai politics oscillates between military dictatorship and flawed and corrupt parliamentary democracy (Thailand has had 18 constitutions and nearly as many successful or attempted coups d’etat), Nidhi writes of the common people as the articulators of a common-sense democratic mentality. This is uncommon. Ever since Thailand abolished the absolute monarchy in 1932 and embraced quasi-constitutional rule, Thai citizens have been subjected to mass education campaigns on the virtues of democracy. When democratic space opens up and the military retreats this invocation to act as proper democratic citizens reaches a crescendo: Don’t sell your vote to corrupt politicians! But the nature of Thai parliamentary democracy, with non-ideological parties forming networks of corruption, has alienated most people. So, elections can be cynical affairs. Thais have dubbed pre-election nights ‘the night the dogs howl’: vote-canvassers make late-night visits to bought voters to ensure compliance. Their nocturnal meanderings stir sleeping dogs and villagers wake up to the howling: an apt sound for an aching democracy.

The idea that most Thais are ignorant and unprepared for democracy is remarkably persistent. In September 2006 the government of Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a coup d’etat. Thaksin, a right wing populist, had won massive support because of a range of concrete policies perceived as helping ordinary people. Whatever the causes of the coup, liberal intellectuals and the military pronounced that Thaksin’s electoral mandate was illegitimate because it was either bought or based on ignorance. Several days after the coup Nidhi published ‘Untitled Article’ and called for restoration of the abolished 1997 constitution (suggesting, mockingly, that the military simply amend only those parts of the constitution on change of government). He challenged the military on the question of sovereignty:

"This article is written in some confusion by someone who has not studied law; when a constitution is abolished, does sovereignty return to the people, or otherwise to the king (this is a controversial point among law academics)? Most certainly it is not returned to the coup group. If sovereignty is returned to the people, then freedoms and liberties are boundless, because they have returned to a state of nature, and therefore the publishing of this article can not be illegal. If sovereignty is returned to the king, then the limiting of rights or freedoms has to be by royal command, and if other laws still stand, which were established by royal command, then it may be held that political expression in the public sphere is not wrong."


In late September 2006 Nidhi appeared on television and tore up the military’s dictatorial interim constitution. This was at a time when many of Bangkok’s intellectual class and most certainly many of its middle classes supported the coup, feeling that the Thaksin regime was deeply corrupt, brutal and self-aggrandizing.

The Public Writer
Nidhi’s public life as a writer began in the mid-1960s. A military dictatorship, ruling in the name of Thai-style democracy, was in place. Liberal elements were stirring, and the Communist Party of Thailand was also emerging as an insurgent force. Nidhi was clearly of a liberal colour, contributing to the Social Science Review, a magazine that published critical commentary; it was funded in the name of the US’s freedom diplomacy. In 1966 Nidhi wrote on the role of public intellectuals stating that they,

"should be leading thinkers in society that is, if there is any problem be it economic, cultural, political … they should offer solutions…An intellectual is not someone who simply has knowledge for themselves without looking at the problems in society or humanity. "

Famous Thai writer and editor Sujit Wongthep, remembers being a student in the mid 1960s who was comfortable with failure. He came across the high achieving Nidhi at a meeting of the literati speaking on intellectuals, and found him disagreeable. He spoke in a fancy manner, wore whites and had the airs and graces of a student from the prestigious Chulalongkorn University. Sujit recounts hating Nidhi even more when several of his works appeared in print. Sujit later learned that Nidhi had gone to the US (1971-1975) to pursue a PhD and had then returned to teach in Chiang Mai. He expected that would be the end of Nidhi, and that Chiang Mai would have to bear the weight of his airs and the added arrogance of an overseas’ PhD. What Sujit didn’t know is that having arrived in the US, Nidhi wondered what was the point of doing a PhD on Thailand with a westerner and set about learning Indonesian. He completed his PhD on Indonesian elites, literature and class – a theme he would return to in his own historical work on Thailand.

When Sujit established the revisionist and popular history magazine Silapawatthanatham (Art and Culture) in 1979 as an outlet for radical thinking, he discovered that Nidhi had become famous among historians for his revisionism. From the late 1970s until the mid 1980s Nidhi produced Thailand’s most innovative historical works that, among other things, challenged the national school of history centred on the anachronistic conflation of monarchy and nation. Given Nidhi’s reputation, Sujit invited him to contribute to Silapawatthanatham. The present purposes for which Nidhi wrote history also attracted Sujit. Writing in 1980 Nidhi comments,

At a time when the state in all its forms tries to control information, the heart of the history discipline, namely its attention to critical evaluation of facts, is even more necessary… History should teach people how to cope which the information which they receive from various sources in a well-rounded and creative way, in the hope that they will be able to deal intelligently with hearsay; and that there will never again be a time when a small group of people will be able to fool the majority and create political chaos through radio.

After his work appeared in Silapawatthanatham Nidhi was amazed at the public response that popular writing could provoke. A public intellectual was born. Nidhi went on to work with Sujit and other publishers to produce some of Thailand’s finest popular cultural history and analysis. In 2001 Nidhi was awarded the prestigious Sripurapha award for this contribution. The citation reads:

The importance of Nidhi Eoseewong is the use of his pen and his status as a writer and academic to point to the importance of ordinary people by noting again and again that ordinary people are the creators of history…and with this belief he established, with the faculty from Chiang Mai University, the Forum of Academics for Poor People and Midnight University…in order to strengthen and advocate for ordinary people across the country.

Nidhi has over 2000 published articles, many of them witty takes on politics, culture and Thai society. As the citation notes, Nidhi has also been involved in grassroots education initiatives and in supporting solidarity networks with villagers in their varied struggles over community rights against the market and the state. Emblematic of Midnight University, an informal after-hours university, is the way it works with local villagers and leaders in recognition of their wisdom and knowledge. Farmers and villagers with no formal education beyond primary school or lower high school have been appointed as faculty and have received honorary degrees.

Nidhi and the Cultural Constitution – Explaining Thai Democracy
If Nidhi’s contribution as an historian is indisputable, it is only in the last decade that he has begun to be recognised not simply as a chronicler of the times, but a profound thinker about liberal democracy from below.
People familiar with Thai history associate the phrase ‘Thai-style democracy’ (TSD) with the height of military dictatorship from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when the military held that the will of the people was manifest in the institutions of the state, and that elections were superfluous. Nidhi has taken the term up for his own purposes.

In the late mid-to-late 1980s the military was struggling against an emergent bourgeoisie over the desirable form of democracy. Writing at that time Nidhi notes that TSD was primarily about attacking Western institutions as inappropriate to Thailand, while it ignored the values that make democracy. Military radio attacked parliamentary democracy as corrupt but Nidhi defended it for at least allowing bad people to be voted out of office. Furthermore, TSD rejected pluralism because of its acceptance of competing interests, but Nidhi notes that political systems are about the distribution of interest. The central issue was not whether there should be division, but whether that struggle was open or secretive. In a society defined by a monolithic Thai unity, this was an argument against the ability of any institution to monopolise representation.

Working through Nidhi’s argument is an implicit economic and political pluralism which allows him to suggest that the universal values of democracy - freedom, liberty, equality, and fraternity (which he sees as originating in capitalist struggles against the absolute monarchy in the West) - should be part of Thai democracy: ‘Thinking about Thai-style democracy is thinking about how to allow those possibly universal ideals of democracy to exist in Thai society’. This requires that the bargaining power of the people be increased, by tapping into local wisdom and village life, and by building independent organizations. Furthermore, TSD, in its radical manifestation, should be about linking interests with political parties that are capable of formulating policy. Moreover, freedom of the press and information will be the prime condition for realizing democracy.
But how to understand people’s relationship to the then existing flawed parliamentary regime? While written constitutions come and go, Nidhi argues that there are norms and values that emerge in the life practices of Thai people which make up what he calls the ‘cultural constitution’. The idea of a cultural constitution is powerful, in its wake the image of an ignorant electorate evaporates and ordinary people’s behaviour can be seen as simply trying to make good with the resources they have at hand in a system that is against them. On this, Nidhi describes how ordinary people ingeniously navigate their way through the formal power of the state and the influence of local rich notables in a manner that plays one against the other, to the people’s own advantage. The ingenuity displayed in these strategic manoeuvres is part of the cultural constitution. However, as Pasuk notes, with the increasing integration of the state and local politicians through various networks (for example as businessmen and local officials conspire to build dams which displace whole communities), the space for this manoeuvre is diminishing. Given this, Nidhi suggests the necessity of controlling power and influence by embedding the rule of law. The implication is that liberalism arises not in the struggles of the bourgeoisie against the state, but in popular struggles to survive the play of power and influence by Thai elites.

He notes, also, that part of the cultural constitution is the popular utilization of symbols when people are struggling against power, including the monarchy. The monarchy is an indivisible part of Thailand’s cultural constitution since time immemorial; it is perceived as having sacred powers to rule over people and care for their wellbeing. While Thais have seen constitutions come and go, if the cultural constitution is threatened they rise up. In his discussion of royal succession Nidhi makes his most dramatic point. By differentiating between the institution of the monarchy and the present and future incumbent, Nidhi sees the cultural constitution as endowing the people with the right to a monarchy worthy of the position (that is, the relationship is based on a form of social contract), thus implicitly sanctioning some kind of elective principle, by whatever means, of the future Thai monarch.
Nidhi reads into the Thai ‘cultural constitution’ some of the universal values of democracy, but grounds them in existing institutions and changing levels of consciousness, thus making the cultural constitution a dynamic and changing entity. ‘Thai-style Democracy’ and ‘The Cultural Constitution’ were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s respectively. They are prescient. The cultural constitution that Nidhi so brilliantly outlined continued to influence the shape of popular politics and helped shape Thai liberalism in the 1990s.

Transgressing Boundaries: the Public Intellectual
If this is a profile in courage it is of a man who sought to give authentic voice to the culture and people around him. He appears untouched by the lure of power, and while others clamour for committee appointment, Nidhi stands at a distance. Nidhi’s courage is not greatly different than that of the thousands of people in Thailand who seek truth and justice in the matters that affect them. Nidhi shares with these people an ability to withstand the powerful taboo against transgressing official notions of Thainess. Kasian Tejapira notes that since the1980s academics have not been subject to physical intimidation. Instead the state sought to go soft on them, to bring them back into the national body. In this context, instead of violence, fear prevails in the service of self censorship. That fear is based, Kasian says, on a well inculcated sense of the boundaries across which one may not pass: the nation and the monarch, or Thainess. In being conscious of these boundaries, academics have cultivated a disposition that, when confronted with injustice, they are afraid to act in ways that would upset social order. They are afraid that, ‘their superiors in their academic circles will not dote on them or give them patronage’; that they will be denied access to position, status and privilege. This is the “voice in the head” that makes them servants of the state and capital. It’s a process well and alive the world over, including Australia. While Nidhi has been greatly transgressive of boundaries, he demonstrates cognisance of limits when it comes to commentary on the contemporary monarchy, an institution protected as much by harsh laws against lese majeste than by the cultural constitution. All involved in the study of Thailand police themselves on this question.

One major flaw in Nidhi’s work is that in his progression from accomplished historian to the public intellectual, he is not above playing the “Us and Them” card in the service of defining his pluralistic notion of national identity: Westerners (farang) rarely appear in his popular writings as individuals or people with different and competing ideals, rather they stand as a monolithic entity that acts as a foil for the things in folk culture that Nidhi reveres.
In closing, let’s return to history. In his preface to the English translation of Pens and Sails Nidhi writes, ‘I’m…not certain whether the English version of this book will be of much use to students of Thai history, because these people should be able to read Thai already’. This seemingly Thai-centric view of the world hides something much more nuanced. For Nidhi, history is active engagement in one’s own society: we can read him here to be saying that history is only worth it if there is critical agency behind it: it is the present interrogating the present through the past.

As a historian and commentator, Nidhi appears content in his conviction that his old friends (empathy, love, understanding) have been worth serving. The dedication has paid off: his evocations of the popular mood, his sociological and ethnographic insights are rich and alive because he brings to his craft as public intellectual an ability to arouse surprise, anger, laughter and empathy. Reading Nidhi’s work makes me want to engage more with my own society, to be part of the hustle and bustle of ideas and struggles that shape it, to understand the people that great ideologies claim to speak for. That is what I understand Nidhi to mean when he says that people should learn to read Thai.

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Some of the history in this this piece derives from Chris Baker's concluding chapter in a translation of Nidhi's Pen And Sail: Literature And History in Early Bangkok including The History of Bangkok in the Chronicles of Ayutthaya Available via amazon.com