What price the truth? In Thailand, eating a sandwich or reading a book can get you arrested. As George Orwell once said, in Southeast Asia, it’s all about the connotation
In Bangkok, a student was arrested last Sunday at a high-end shopping centre for reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Across town, a 72-year-old woman was detained for wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Respect My Vote”. Eight people were also arrested and held overnight for passing out free sandwiches.
Although none of them did or said anything else particularly subversive, their crime, essentially, was contradicting the official junta line that the country is now a much happier place.
After the May 22 coup in Thailand, and the draconian responses to dissent that followed, one form of voicing opposition became public reading circles.
With groups of five or more illegal under martial law, opponents to the coup readNineteen Eighty-Four and other books in groups of four. When such displays of reading became banned, protesters passed out “freedom” sandwiches or flashed a three-finger salute from The Hunger Games. Each was quickly banned in turn. A T-shirt bearing a slogan as benign as “Peace Please” can quite easily get you arrested.
The choice of Nineteen Eighty-Four is especially significant. It is, of course, the great dystopian novel published in 1949 that is still used to refer to authoritarian political systems. When government attempts to rewrite history, crack down on opposition and control how people think become so autocratic as to border on the absurd, we refer to them as Orwellian.
George Orwell’s epic work was made into a critically acclaimed film. Although the book was released in 1949, it is still used to refer to authoritarian political systems. 20th CENTURY FOX
George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) spent five years as a police official in Burma, as Myanmar was then known, and spoke fluent Burmese. Orwell was caught in a British colonial structure more intent on enriching itself than improving the lives of the local population. He was also an outsider disillusioned with the empire but tasked with imposing a relatively rigid European sense of law on a Southeast Asian mindset comfortable with ambiguity but uncomfortable with criticism. This context helped form the seeds for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In such an environment, the connotations of language are significant, and Orwellian terms such as “Big Brother”, “thoughtcrime” and “doublethink” have a distinctly Southeast Asian ring to them. In the book, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of war, the Ministry of Truth is involved in propaganda, etc. Contradictory language is used to change perception.
Some recent language by the Thai junta – such as helping political dissidents “meditate” in military camps – are cases in point. English-language newspapers in Thailand have been asked not to refer to the military rulers as “junta” because of the negative connotation. They prefer “leadership”, or “interim government”. In their own releases, they replace “coup” with “change” or “benevolent intervention”.
Shakespeare’s Juliet claims that “a rose … by any other name would smell as sweet”. The Thai word for plumeria (lan-thom), on the other hand, resembles a word for pain and sadness (ra-thom). Thus, the flower is indelibly associated with heartbreak and is never planted in home gardens. A plumeria by another name would be a decidedly happier flower.
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