Ron McMillan's Blog
25 Years On….
About 25 years ago I was living in South Korea, feeling the strain - and down on all things Korean. Unjustified contempt showed its ugly face when I disparaged Koreans while in conversation with a friend by the name of Mark McTague - an ex-Peace Corps worker who knew Korea so much better than I did (and who, a quarter-century on, is right now kindly proof-reading Yin Yang Tattoo). I decried Koreans as automatons, as sheep who traveled in mindless flocks without a stray thought crossing their rigid mindsets. [the weakness in the defence is glaring, I know, but I was young at the time].
Mark put me straight: I couldn’t be more wrong, because in every Korean was an anarchist chomping at the bit to escape the rigidity of their smothering Confucian society.
Events of the two or three years immediately following that lesson completely supported Mark’s understanding of Korea and refuted my ignorant prejudices outright. In 1986 and 1987 the nation’s students - the traditional if mostly toothless voice of dissent in South Korea - in a brilliant feat of uncommon bravery and vision of their own, turned the tables on what had been more than a quarter century of military thuggery posing as legitimate government.
Since the announcement in 1982 of the Summer Olympics coming to Seoul in 1988, the cabal of the foul ex-General ‘President’ Chun, Doo-hwan held the Games over the peoples’ heads: toe the line or Korea might lose the Games - and how much shame would that bring upon us all? was the unsubtle but effective blackmail card devised to force a cap on dissent. Effective, however, only up until a point. That point came when student unrest across the entire country had every city in the South soaked in tear gas - I often played news photographer in the middle of it, hard hat, tear-gas mask and all - and when, like the anarchist gamblers they really were, the young Koreans gave Chun’s regime back their ultimatum, but with a devilish twist of their own: give us democratic reform, or WE lose YOU the Olympic Games.
This was all brought back to me today when I walked out to Sukhumvit, the main road into central Bangkok, to find it clogged with ‘Red Shirts’, anti-government demonstrators who for the last five weeks have brought parts of the city to a standstill and who, two nights ago, finally bashed heads with the police and military in a horrible clash that cost at least 21 people their lives. What surprised me about the main thoroughfare being blocked with protesters was that these thousands were clearly new arrivals, flocking into the city from the north and eastern provinces. Carnage on the streets on Saturday, instead of sending the demonstrators home, collective tails between legs, seems to have inspired yet more outrage at the original source of the protests. They rode towards town in open trucks, tuk-tuks, on motorcycles and in the backs of pick-up trucks, to loud vocal support from ordinary Thais lining the pavements.
The Reds are, of course, identified with Thaksin Shinawatra, the (after a Thai fashion) democratically-elected Prime Minister (and billionaire) who was thrown out by military coup in 2006 and who has, ever since, lived in luxurious exile, traveling on a variety of passports purchased from sycophant foreign nations. One suspects that Thaksin himself is footing the enormous bill for thousands of protesters to live in encampments in the capital for weeks on end - as well as for stages, gigantic PA systems, communications networks, radio and television broadcasts et all.
Yet the feeling I experienced this afternoon was a new one for me - at least for this quarter-century. I sensed the possibility that a broader uprising might be under way, a vocal outlet for growing resentment in the urban and rural poor who have for decades seen the gap between themselves and the elite wealthy urban minority grow into a chasm that the poor cannot imagine closing - except at times like these, when protests give them a voice, for the first time in their lives.
The protests have almost certainly spelled the demise of the (unelected) present government, but I have to wonder what sort of force for real change might have been unwittingly unleashed, and how impossible it may be for whoever is backing this protest to keep it in step with their own self-serving needs. This genie might not go back into the bottle.
Call it wishful thinking or ill-informed, delusional misunderstanding, but might this be the beginnings of a watershed shift in Thai politics? I know one thing: for decades Thais have watched other Asian countries make broad sweeping moves towards more egalitarian political systems, not least in Korea, but even in places like Taiwan and (perish the thought) Indonesia. When will it be Thailand’s chance, might be the question on a lot of Thai lips now.
When, indeed.
Fascinating stuff, Ron. So if the genie is probably out, is that a good thing? Will the process and result of the uprising actually be a good thing for the country in your view? And is daily life continuing for folk like you more or less the same?
By Simon Varwell on Monday 12th April 2010 at 11:17am
I speculate that the genie might be out of the bottle - but I’ve been very wrong before. Just over 20 years ago, in late May 1989 I flew out of Beijing on a plane full of journalists who thought, as I did, that the Tiananmen protests were going to fizzle out. Look how wrong I got that.
Life for the majority of people, even in Bangkok, proceeds as normal; it’s the long-lasting nature of the demonstrations that is fairly unprecedented, and that makes me wonder if finally a significant number of the ordinary blokes in the rice fields have had enough of the disparity between rich and poor in Thailand and more than enough of the never-ending cycle of dodgy governments who, never having been voted in, have little need or desire to deliver anything like democracy or even democratic reform.
By Ron McMillan on Tuesday 13th April 2010 at 7:53am
Excellent post. I remember my comment about the anarchist nature of the Korean psyche as an idea that came to me from observations of disparate points in the culture, points which are no doubt far more complex than I represent here. But I noticed the child-rearing - the parental catering to little 2-year old tyrants as they sat on the ground, anywhere, and kicked and bawled for what they wanted (maybe because they knew the straitjacket the kids would get stuffed into in a few years), how classes of regimented public school kids would melt in an instant into masses of (if they had them) chandelier-swingers as soon as teacher was out of the room (because when he was in the room, it was “March or die!”), how they value and respect the spontaneous spirit as it’s captured in art (pottery, calligraphy), and how so many of them are bet-the-farm gamblers. It seemed to me that being such an anarchist-at-heart is the only way to preserve sanity in such a deeply Confucian, hierarchical, and authoritarian culture where so many of your impulses have to be filtered, channeled, or simply blocked.
I know nothing about Thailand, so I can only hope that those who’ve been pushed to the margins are pushing back. Let’s hope that they don’t get used.
By Mark McTague on Friday 16th April 2010 at 4:40am