“If you don’t have something nice to say about someone, come sit next to me!” I have always admired that saying of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the good President Roosevelt’s daughter, and I wish she were around to stir up some deserved obloquy against the odious monarchs of Thailand, who make your common or garden variety Islamic radical seem like a staunch defender of free speech. According to the BBC, a hapless Australian novelist called Harry Nicolaides has been jailed fro three years for “insulting” King Bhumibol and the royal family of that unfortunate principality. “Nicolaides.” the BBC reports, “was arrested as he was leaving the country last August.”
His self-published book, called Verisimilitude, was hardly well-received; in fact the only copy which is still known to exist sits on the shelf of the Thai National Library, freely available to the public.
Shackled in leg irons, and wearing standard-issue prison pyjamas, Nicolaides pleaded guilty to the charges against him at Bangkok’s Criminal Court on Monday.
King Bhumibol is revered in Thailand He was quickly found guilty, with a judge telling the court: “He has written a book that slandered the king, the crown prince and Thailand and the monarchy.”
Clearly, though, that king, crown prince, and the rest of the gang deserve all the calumny Western wit can muster. I hope that, even now, some Danish newspaper is rounding up some choice cartoons of the preposterous Thai royal family. “Royal” forsooth!
I’d like to offer another way to look at this incident, one which isn’t so sympathetic to Mr. Nicolaides.
Thailand is unique in the world for its astonishing laxity towards foreign visitors and residents.
Unlike most of her neighbors, which have severe drug laws (whippings, lashings, deportations and even death) and even have stringent regulations that can land you in jail for spitting out a wad of chewing gum in public, Thailand barely blinks an eye if you walk around half nude in public and practice a totally amoral and dissolute “life-style”.
If you’re into kinky stuff, Thailand is where it’s at. Amsterdam is an exemplar of moral rectitude in comparison.
The one feature the Thais are extremely sensitive about is their Royal Family. Why this should be so, I don’t know and I’m not going to research it, but that’s the way it is and every foreigner visiting Thailand is made aware of this upon arrival. The attitude is “You can do anything you want and you can “get” anything you want here, but leave the Royals out of it, period.” I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
In private, of course, you can say anything you want about the Royals, but once you go public, you’re asking for it. Mr. Nicolaides knew very well what he was getting into when he decided to “publish” his book. If he was after notoriety, he got it in spades.
(Informational side-bar: Thailand’s reputation as a haven for Western ne’er-do- wells has been beamed far and wide. In the last 10 years and more, this country has been inundated to an unprecedented degree by a veritable panoply of misfits, losers, rejects – the whole bit – coming from the West. How and why the Thais have put up with it, I don’t know).
Mr. Nicolaides case is similar to the infamous case of one Lori Berenson, a typical misguided “gringa” who joined or had dealings with the terrorist Shining Paty organization in Peru and in 1996 ended up in prison in the Peruvian highland city of “Puno” (elevation 12,421 ft). She’s still there.
Check out her story at
http://www.freelori.org/news/96dec07_reuters.html
Bottom line: I have little sympathy for Mr. Nicolaides. At the same time, as a civilized Westerner, I feel the sentence far too harsh. They simply should have deported the bum and be done with him.
The Thais have long taken lèse majesté very seriously. Which, if you are American, is ridiculous.
I wonder if they’ve got the settings right, Kryel? Do anything you like in Thailand (tr: “Land of the free” BTW), drugs, child sex, you name it, just don’t insult the King?
I think they’ve got the settings VERY wrong.
I have no problem at all with the concept of lese-majeste. Neither should Mr Nicolaides, a good and loyal subject of a venerable monarch. So. like you, I have no sympathy for Mr Nicolaides. 3 years in a Thai jail for insulting the King? He got off lightly IMO.
But the Thais need to be consistent. They should throw out all the half-naked tourists with their louche lifestyles and bring back the noose. Anyway, they have lese-majeste in Singapore too.
Lori is still there in prison. And pregnant.
The “don’t insult the royals” rule can be seen as a quaint Thai custom as long as they are figureheads. But when they become a focus for fascist action by the curiously named “Peoples Alliance for Democracy” then, as Roger says, they deserve all the insults and criticism we can heap on them. Speaking for myself I plan to criticise them from the safety of my study. Travelling to Thailand to do it is far to risky. I could end up in prison, or beaten by the police, or attacked by PAD yellowshirts. Forget that!
Actually, I did once put myself on the front line for my politcal beliefs, or at least what we liberals call the front line, ANYWAY when the cops came to disperse us they came running up and only broke the heads of the little guys. They left the big guys (like me) alone. I remember one cop looked at me, looked at the guy next to me: six inches shorter, with glasses and BANG glasses flying, blood everywhere. Then he lookd at me again and BANG girl on the ground retching.
Happy days.
One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can’t be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me
Serve them with a subpoena for the court of public ridicule!
Isn’t the term nobility derived from the word noble? In this case, I see no connection.
“2. TigerHawk:
The Thais have long taken lèse majesté very seriously. Which, if you are American, is ridiculous.”
Their country, their rules. As a previous poster noted, the Thais are about as welcoming and accepting as people come.
Thailand is a country with a bubbling Islamist insurgency, with aggressive neighbors (Burma, China.) I can see where the Thais are going to protective of the institution of the Monarchy that they perceive as central to the idea of an independent and enduring Thai state.
On the up side, from about 2003 through the present –although the death penalty was/is still on the books– there were no “official” executions in Thailand. On the down side, during the first half, at least, of the same period, there were no less than 2,000 and maybe 3,000 “non-judicial executions” of alleged drug dealers, petty criminals, and miscellaneous suspects “shot while trying to escape”. To my knowledge, there were zero arrests and prosecutions for any of these death squad hits, which were presumably the work of non-rogue elements inside the official security agencies.
Interestingly, the #2 National Cop and the #1 “Drug Suppression Czar” during the reign of the death squads –which may or may not be altogether over– was Pol Lt-Gen Priewphan Damapong, who was also Thaksin Shinawatra’s brother-in-law (until he divorced his former wife, Thaksin’s sister, just several months ago).
Also interesting is that Priewphan was appointed the lead investigator of the phenomenally under-publicized assassinations, in Nong Khai, Thailand in January 2006, of the pretender couple to the Lao throne, who were naturalized US citizens of Lao origin, and longtime respectable professionals in Asheville, NC.
Imagine that, the government of a sovereign state trying to enforce its own laws within its own territory. Such impertinence!