Source: FB
Christine Gray is a legendary figure in the world of Thai studies thanks to her wonderful 1986 PhD thesis Thailand: The Soteriological State in the 1970s, a brilliant and groundbreaking analysis of the modern Thai monarchy. My own work owes a huge debt to Christine's insights, as does Paul Handley's superb The King Never Smiles. Serhat Ünaldi is among the many younger scholars of Thailand influenced by her work. Christine prefers to keep a low profile, but she has taken the decision to stop allowing the lèse majesté law to silence her, and has written the following statement urging more international journalists and academics to stop self-censoring and start telling the truth about Thailand. Fairytales and lies have been allowed to persist for far too long. As Christine says: "It's time for everyone to step over the line.
Andrew MacGregor Marshall
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Her full statement can be found at:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/andrew-macgregor-marshall/its-time-for-everyone-to-step-over-the-line-christine-gray-on-l%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9/804537222898952
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Excerpt:
A New Anthem ...
What bothers me about Thailand's lese majeste (insult to the Crown) laws is that they are in the dominant idiom of sight. People, including Western scholars, are literally forbidden to say what they observe or "see" (du) with their own eyes...
The pressure and observance of these taboos has gotten so extreme we've now ventured into the realm of the ridiculously blind, and the ridiculously dangerous. Speaking as a parent, who would ever want to raise his or her child in this state of "not seeing" and therefore not knowing or trusting their own thoughts and observations? How can anyone run a university on these terms?
The essential nature of the LM laws is signified by prostration -- the literal "not seeing" or glancing on the face of the monarch while the monarch sees and knows all -- and the custom of Siamese kings' archers shooting out the eyes of those who would dare watch the royal procession. This latter custom was discontinued by King Mongkut (Rama IV) in the face of Western cries of barbarism as a means of justifying treaty demands designed to wreck the economy and the society. ..
The other sickening aspect of these laws is U.S. complicity...
...U.S. military presence during the Vietnam War. Democracy was turned upside down by us, by the British, then by Thai royalist politicians as a means of disguising the transfer of what is now apparent as being extreme wealth.
With over 100 years of Thailand's best and brightest scholars receiving degrees from Western universities, it becomes more unlikely than ever that leading Thai scholars, teachers and citizens are willing to "not see" the evidence in front of their own eyes...
I probably know the Thai monarchy of the mid-20th century as well as any farang. I deeply respect and remember members of the Palace staff, monks at royal temples, etc. and have some degree of sympathy for royalty as persons, certainly in view of the ugly (U.S. and CIA-supported) dynamics of the late 1940s and 1950s. (Believe me, as a parent and a teacher I admire deeply ingrained Asian customs of respect for teachers and elders.) But I, like every other U.S. scholar of Thailand, have been taught by a generation of teachers who carefully observed the LM rules of academic writing. I have been careful to "watch my words" and silence myself in the interests of promoting my work -- for almost an entire lifetime -- just as people close to the monarchy have waited decades if not lifetimes to make public the most obvious circumstances of their own lives or the lives of their ancestors. This is particularly true of women.
Now we, U.S. and Western scholars and journalists, are huddled and in hiding -- self censoring -- as much as the Thai scholars and citizens we should be protecting, our fear being "we can never go back" and do our research. It's clear that our scholar and teacher friends, their idealistic students, journalists, etc. are in line to get detained, disappeared or killed in the awful present and possible future. Perhaps it's time for everyone to quit hiding.
So there. I guess I can "never go back," but that's trivial in light of what's happening now in the streets and private homes and yes, I have to believe, in many of the Buddhist temples of Thailand. It's time for everyone to step over the line. It's neither honorable nor justifiable for us to remain selectively silent, leaving a few intrepid and terrified journalists or Thai activists to perform the task of simple observation.
