Please don’t let me close this thread for comments.

As for satire I’m not able to publish … sorry folks, satire is not understood in Thailand.

BangkokDan

My view is if you pay tax over an extended period and can show a commitment to a community you should have the right to vote. I know of very straight ex-pats in Thailand who are married, have kids, have run successful businesses for years, employing dozens of Thais and showing healthy profits and they still have to do ridiculous border runs.

But then there is an inherent racism in Thailand that is never addressed at an institutional level. This is even directed at Thais such as “brown” skinned Isaan people, the hill peoples denied I.D. cards (despite some having been inside Thailand’s borders for generations) and extends to Thailand’s neighbors such as Burmese refugees (ruthlessly exploited and murdered) etc. etc.

Thailand is presently being revealed as the tinpot place it actually is at the moment.

Harry is just a fall guy designed to send a message out to the international press who are based in Bangkok.

But, like much else in the thinking of Thailand’s elite, this present clampdown reveals a weird 1980s mindset. The Cold War is over and global media, via such things as blogs, twitter etc. etc. means that open debate is actually impossible to control.

And back to Harry – imagine if the Thai authorities had ignored that book? It would’ve fallen into total obscurity and Nicolaides would have never been heard of.

In stead, by operating in such a paranoid manner, the offending paragraph of Harry’s book has been read by millions across the world, he is the subject of numerous newspaper editorials and, thanks to this reaction, a “celebrity criminal” has been created. In this instance, the application of the lèse majesté law has been totally and utterly self-defeating.

The only positive outcome for the elite is that foreign writers, journalists and bloggers based in Thailand are now running scared. But journalists tend to have very long memories and tend to show a lot of solidarity – the message is that Thailand is moving away from democracy and freedom.

The Post obviously took them down.

BangkokDan

Ironic though, when you think of all the massive amounts of negative press Thailand receives when this sort of thing happens. Otherwise offences of this type would just never get one iota of publicity.

I would bet many tourists are put off from travelling to Thailand because of the fear factor alone. Who knows what you could end up being accused of. Those hesitating because of recent events especially.

PS – did a trackback to you yesterday, any reason why it has not appeared in your Recent Trackbacks list? Don’t know how it works, so may have done something wrong somewhere …

That’s why we as “intruders” – doesn’t matter how long you live here and how Thai you become – have to consider and respect this topic’s issue at stake as a purely internal Thai matter.

BangkokDan

It doesn’t relate solely to passports of course, and I think my comment makes that quite clear. There is no technical statutory impediment that I know of for a naturalized Thai citizen to be disqualified for all elected offices. So some prominent positions may be out of reach here but so what? Foreigners are barred from the presidency in the USA and other Western countries have similar laws.

-A.F.