Anti-Americanism and Anti-Thaksinism | 23.03.05
Jean-François Revel wrote in L’obsession anti-américaine
Le mystère de l’antiaméricanisme n’est pas la désinformation — l’information sure les Etats-Unis est très facile à se procurer — c’est la volonté d’être désinformé.
The mystery of anti-Americanism is not the disinformation — information on the United States is very easy to obtain — it’s the willingness to be disinformed.
Read the passage and reread it with “anti-Americanism” replaced by “anti-Thaksinism” and you get a picture of the bilateral (in fact, multilateral) avalanche of ignorance that I’m struggling against day in day out.
Granted, access to valid information isn’t as simple as that. America is big and diverse. An accurate and comprehensive account of it is a tall order for even the best minds, let alone the average Thai who needs to rely on Thailand’s horrendous media for tales about the outside world.
Thailand, on the other hand, is much smaller and more homogeneous. Yet, like America, its familiar overexposure can be blinding and deceiving, concealing numerous nuances, ironies, and surprises. This is after all a country of 60 million that is interpreted to the world by a small oligopoly of two local newspapers and a handful of foreign correspondents (and perhaps a number of all-knowing backpackers). And because the Thai media is so bad, knowing a few locals and even the language do not necessarily result in better understanding.
Still, Revel’s overall thrust is correct. To be disinformed on such a massive scale, the disinformed must be complicit. They must be willing to overlook the disinformation’s blatant self-contradictions and patent falsehoods and embrace its one-sided simplism and conspiratorial excess.
Do yourself a favor. Reject disinformation. Debunk it. Ignore it. Curse it. Laugh at it. Do anything but pass on those tired gossips and clichés in a hushed manner as though they were half-burned pieces of samizdat. You’d only make a fool of yourself.
Don’t know where to start? Just read the previous entry. And perhaps this.
Update See my definitive post: “Populism and nationalism in Thailand”.
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