It's different here | 29.07.05

How can international journalists get Thailand so wrong? While the blame rests first and foremost with their incompetence and prejudice, which are compounded by even greater incompetence and prejudice of their Thai counterparts and colleagues, there are indeed some extreme differences in cultures and values that widen the gulf of understanding. They deprive a non-Thai of even the most basic assumptions to build upon.

Some examples:

1. Jung Chang must’ve thought she was amply illustrating the harshness of her mother’s school in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo in this passage in Wild Swans (p. 63):

   The slightest mistake or failure to observe the prescribed rules and etiquette, such as a girl having her hair half an inch below here earlobes…

   Stringent, you say? Not in Thailand, where public schools require earlobe-length hair for girls and crew cuts for boys from Grades 7 to 9, plus uniforms for both.

   

   As you can see, they enforce this rule quite well. Although non-compliant students are’t normally known to be “punished with blows” as in the Manchukuo school Ms. Chang told us about, it’s easier anyway for the Thai school to get (trainee) barbers over and apply the rule directly on the delinquents. Corporeal punishments, now banned in Japan, are still practiced here, though presumably for more serious offenses — like smoking.

   (The hairstyle restriction eases in Grades 10 to 12 — girls can wear long hair insofar as they’re properly tied or braided — but uniforms are worn well through college years.)

2. The Vodkapundit must’ve believed he had a fool-proof example against adopting the enemy’s ways:

   You don’t defeat the enemy by becoming him. We didn’t beat the Soviets by establishing our own Five Year Plans…

   Thailand inaugurated its first “national economic and social development plan” in 1963 and has never recovered from this central-planning fantasy since (thank heaven it’s just a fantasy). Each one lasting five years except the very first, the current Plan No. 9 is big on “sufficiency economy”. Those with high nonsense-tolerance can follow the link and compare and constrast this notion with juche, I’ll wait.

   (Come to think of it, this is probably why Thailand didn’t defeat the Soviets, or their embarrasing, worthless distant relatives here at home. Why fight when you can let them languish in such debasing, inconsequent quarters as the press, the “academia” and the and state-owned think tanks? Gulags of the mind all.)

3. Taking on terrorism apologists, Norman Geras probably thought he was pushing this example of victim-blaming to the limit:

   In circumstances he judges not too risky, Bob, an occasional but serial rapist, is drawn to women dressed in some particular way. One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob’s path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine’s mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped.

   Not the case in Thailand, where in the eyes of many (possibly most, women included), Elaine would bear at least some of the blame. Does this imply that these people (give and take some) would think the same regarding the US and 9/11 and the UK and 7/7? Well not exactly. For them, the two countries are wholly and exclusively to blame for being attacked.

4. The Volokh Conspiracy’s David Bernstein must’ve thought he found the limit beyond which amoral euphemism gives way to good ol’double standards:

   The BBC—It’s “Terrorism” When it Happens to You: Not long ago, the BBC said that it never used the words “terrorism” or “terrorist” because, and I quote, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Thus, for example, if Hamas blew up a bus in Tel Aviv, the “T” words were never used. But, in the aftermath of the London bombings, go ahead and search the BBC’s website for “terror,” “terrorism,” and even “terrorist.” It turns out that when Islamic fanatics are blowing up trains and buses in YOUR city, one man’s terrorist is another man’s terrorist.

   Of course, that turns out to be only an ephemeral and very much reversible lapse. Still, even that is unheard of here in Thailand. From the prime minister on down to the yellow journalists (which is to say, all Thai journalists), the killers, bombers, and torchers, in the South are invariably “perpetrators” (คนร้าย), “disorder instigators” (ผู้ก่อความไม่สงบ), Southern bandits (โจรใต้, informally), or “insurgents” (in English).

   Indeed, even those terms aren’t used anywhere the interview with National Reconciliation Commission Chairman Anand Panyarachun that is featured on the NRC’s website. The bad guys simply went unmentioned. Or did they? There was a lot of talk about the government and specifically Prime Minister Thaksin, whom the NRC and the media both Thai and foreign seem to take to be the real bad guys. (Actually, the foreign correspondents, anti-Thaksin though they are, are actually less of an apologist for terrorists in the South than their local counterparts. So much for government control of the media.)

So yes, it’s a topsy-turvy world over here. Keen and critical observers will have their assumptions turned upside-down. The rest, journalists in particular, will continue to live in the worlds of their closed minds, where perception is actually preconception, all the while jeering at the “no passport” provincialism of their compatriots back home.

23:49 ▪ politics

« Uninformed comments | Main | Family engineer insists story has holes »