No bliss, but less stress
Re: “Not feeling blessed,” (PostBag, Oct 21).
I appreciate Mr Robin Grant’s rebuttal of my letter showing his utter disdain for dictatorship. But let me answer your misgivings point by point:
1) I am not happy with a military junta “once more”. In fact, I was dead set against some military rules in the past. But now I am simply happier with this government than the past few democratically elected governments that very clearly were putting this country in a tailspin into oblivion. If you were here in Thailand at that time, you could not fail to notice that the country was heading straight into a civil war with both warring sides could only agree to disagree — then Gen Prayut stepped in.
2) I have asked myself why, in the 21st century, this country should yet again be run by generals. I have found the answer and that answer is “politicians of all colours” bent on reaping riches for themselves and their cronies once in office at the expense of the Thai people and the country’s coffer. Another answer is the flawed democratic system that allowed them to do so.
3) On the people’s freedom, in the past three years I have never once felt frustrated by any lack of freedom as a common citizen. I criticise the government in public (which I often do — and you do often enough on the pages of the Bangkok Post) when I feel like wanting to make a point without any fear of any kind of reprisal. So, I do not understand what Mr Grant was talking about when he says that I am content “to be told what he can say and cannot say in public”.
4) On corruption. I do cringe when I learn of corrupt practices that still exist today. However, I weigh the current situation with the blatant and enormous amount of corruption, the kind that actually threatened the very existence of Thailand, going on under the past democratic governments that ignored the hue and cry of the citizens who elected them simply because they had the majority in the government.
Also the current government has recovered billions upon billions of baht worth of cash and public land from previously influential crooks and prosecute the perpetrators — a feat that no democratic governments ever dared to do.
I wonder why expats in totalitarian communist countries like Laos and Vietnam are very much content to live and work there. Also the expats busy doing business in Thailand’s neighbouring country to the immediate East seem not to be bothered with a democratic government that has been in power for the past 20 or 30 years which prosecutes, deports and murders its opposition and recently shut down an Englishlanguage newspaper.
The answer to my curiosity seems to be that the democracy-loving foreigners in Thailand are simply perplexed as to why this “tyrannical junta” seems to be working well and has put Thailand back on track to progress much more so than the past 20 years of democratically elected governments which seemed to have existed only to reap and plunder and running Thailand into the ground. So, thanks a lot for your concern guys.
Mr Grant, the Thai garden may not be all that lovely, but at least it is much lovelier than the previous 20 years under successive democratic governments during which I must have lost at least couple of years of my life due to constant extreme stress, which funnily enough, I don’t feel anymore today.
KANTANIT SUKONTASAP