THE BIG ISSUE: WHINE STEWARDS
>> A few hundred people, perhaps even a few thousand (say 0.005% of all Thai people), decided last week to become the experts in mourning. For lack of a better phrase, they appointed themselves as Mourning Police (MPs).
Clearly superior to all other Thais including government and actual experts on royalty, the MPs have served the nation for 10 days, and counting, by finding and shaming lesser subjects who weren’t mourning correctly.
It’s a difficult job but that 0.005% or so of Thais gathered their sneers and cleared their Facebook accounts in order to guttersnipe their fellow citizens whose action, they sniffed, weren’t up to good mourning standards.
Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Kreangam, a green shirt but not a military man and often referred to as Gen Prayut’s legal eagle, took a few questions and did the polite thing. “We’ll get to that eventually” dismissed a query on how, exactly, to refer to the late monarch. “Everyone can mourn in his or her own way” was the reply to how to dress, what colours to wear and what look should be planted on a face.
The trolls and MPs were having none of that.
Case in point. It turns out, according to self-appointed experts, you can’t mourn properly if you have large breasts. It doesn’t matter if you dress entirely in black, neck to feet, boobs are inappropriate. We learned that when eagle-eyed trolls sniped a particular actress (our lips are sealed) in a party of four TV-film stars who were photographed at a mourning ceremony.
Naturally, the foreign press was also a target. Even the Foreign Ministry quarrelled over whether crowds at the Grand Palace were “hundreds” or simply huge. Point to the Foreign Ministry. The unfortunate truth is many overseas media are currently taking often cheap and occasionally scurrilous potshots that were severely unappreciated in Thailand.
Gen Prayut told them to stop it, and even provided actual examples of why people might not be dressed by the standards of the “uneducate people” as one of their self-indulgent banners once proclaimed. Case in point: Soldiers can’t dress in black.
But if the government criticised the MPs and urged tolerance towards individual mourners, the regime cranked up the lese majeste investigation machine to “11”. Police said they were getting cases placed on their plate by the military at the rate of four per day — all secret arrests. They’re going to need a bigger jail.
And as they did so fruitlessly in their first supra-nationalist campaign right after the 2014 coup, the green shirts promised action against unpatriotic Thais abroad. There are 19 monarchy-hating instigators, apparently, in seven countries. The US, France, Australia, Japan and New Zealand are soon to get letters from Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya instructing them to feel shame for not extraditing the foulmouthed monarchy haters.
Lese majeste aside, the greatest current threat to both the green shirts and to society in general are the fast-gathering lynch mobs. On successive days in Phuket, in Phangnga, on Koh Samui, in Chon Buri, extremely large and hostile crowds gathered at a moment’s notice, bent on revenge against rumoured lese majeste statements. This was flash mobs on steroid rage.
Easy to say from your chair there that you “never negotiate with a mob” but give a salute to the hugely out-numbered district officials who did four days’ good work in dispersing mobs. Facing down four angry mobs in four days is a mean feat. But there almost certainly is a fifth mob poised to threaten polity and decency.
Both the junta, through its Minister of Truth, and Prime Minister Prayut personally called for an end to all this, mobs especially. The regime that turned lese majeste allegations into a sinecure for judges stated over and over it can deal with any charges having to do with Article 112.
But reports flowed in of physical attacks on people alleged to have uttered disrespectful words. Gen Prayut said MPs confronting or attacking Thais for not mourning precisely right risked a punch in the nose.
Every time we see another internet finger-pointing, another tirade against a citizen who hasn’t got his mourning up to par, another, for goodness’ sake, criticism that her breasts are too big to mourn properly, we truly, sadly facepalm.
The i nternet shame-trolls and street-justice warriors are hard to take. Justice Minister Gen Paiboon deserves shaming for even seeming to support them. People motivated by righteousness almost always aren’t actually right.
Full disclosure: I’m a farang but I’ve lived in Thailand longer than the majority of Thais have lived in Thailand. If Thai people are too distracted by “uneducate people” to come together to mourn the greatest man and leader they ever have known, and ever will know, then perhaps the aspirations of freedom and democratic accountability really are unattainable.