I’m Standing At The Gates of The East / I Take My Pulse and the Pulse of My Friend

A few days ago we Bangkok res­i­dents (and oth­ers in Thai­land) received the most recent of the reg­u­lar travel warn­ings we get via email. Despite the fact it was rather mild this time, it kinda irked me. They always do.

Whilst I under­stand that gov­ern­ments have a respon­si­bil­ity to keep their cit­i­zens safe, and given the cur­rent uneasy sit­u­a­tion in BKK it’s likely wise this time around but the fre­quency and ease that a few West­ern nations issue these things for places like Thai­land and Indone­sia, when they seem reluc­tant to do so for nations such as the US despite the fact that, peo­ple like, you know, Bin Laden issue threats all the time, gets to me.

I can’t help feel­ing that doing so reflects two atti­tudes. Firstly, there is the fail­ure to recog­nise that these funny Asian coun­tries have mostly caught up, and indeed passed much of the the old world (mean­ing the old West­ern, white dom­i­nated world) in many ways. It’s a kind of odd pater­nal­ism, like the men­tal divide Churchill was famous for, when he talked of self-determination (he said it only applied to peo­ple in Europe), stuck in the mid­dle to late 20th Cen­tury, and I think it’s mostly bred by sim­ple igno­rance from a world where for many peo­ple still civ­i­liza­tion is nar­rowly defined by a fear of the unknown and ref­er­ence points long gone — in the same way that India and Japan still don’t sit on the UNSC (if we must have it at all but it seems we do).

The other atti­tude it reflects, sadly, is a kind of muted offi­cial racism. Although I guess that’s gonna be a harder sell when seen from the west, but it’s much com­mented on by we guests in this part of the world, and is very much seen that way by the peo­ples and gov­ern­ments of the region.

Hell, NZ even has a travel advi­sory out for Sin­ga­pore! Have those that issue these things ever been to that most safe of all sedate lit­tle lands? This just makes NZ look very back­ward and parochial as the first world torch moves east.

As I said on Twit­ter, NZ issu­ing a Travel Advi­sory for Thai­land is like Gore issu­ing one for Auckland.

See­ing as how they’re almost exclu­sively west­ern phe­nom­ena, how about NZ issu­ing a Travel Advi­sory for NZ warn­ing of ran­dom alco­hol fuelled vio­lence and road rage?

With all that in mind, I decided to toss Wellington’s cau­tion to the wind and visit the big demos down there by Democ­racy monument.

The fastest way in yes­ter­day was via Klong Boat (the canal boat that takes me, with one change at Prat­num, from the top of my street to Wat Saket which just hap­pens to be next to Red Shirt Central).

After the boat change I realised that I was one of only two peo­ple in the ves­sel with­out a red shirt on.

So it began.

After alight­ing I wan­dered in. There was — for as far as I could ini­tially see — chant­ing, danc­ing, cheer­ing, and some obvi­ously rather impor­tant guy mak­ing a loud dra­matic speech which, every now and then, enticed a huge roar and cacoph­o­nous shake of the thou­sands of rat­tles in the mas­sive crowd (around 80–100,00 they said), so much so that the ground seemed to shake when I finally worked my way to front of the stage.

I wan­dered for two or three hours and was hugged, smiled hugely at, given a Mao cap by a con­cerned ven­dor who was wor­ried about my head, and a bag of my very favourite deep­fried bananas.

It was very much a car­ni­val atmos­phere and I know how these things can turn, but the com­mon wis­dom is that it takes an awful lot to turn a Thai to anger, and there was lit­tle sign of that (or much in the way of secu­rity forces or police — the only cops I saw were sta­tioned next to the mass of por­taloos — which seemed to be over­flow­ing while the guys in charge of them pan­icked and the cops treated it as if this was some sort of  bad joke).

I might let the images talk:

And finally I found barbed wire  - in front of the Inte­rior Ministry:

Tagged with: Bangkok • Red Shirts • Thailand