In Turkey, it goes like “If you can’t stop the bad events, at least stop the bad news.” Again, this has already proven to be true in Thailand when the current military junta can stop the bad news so early and no need to stop the bad events anymore. Owing to its 14th and 18th announcements which barred all media from presenting critical news and views against the coup, few have such courage to do so.
Just only five days after the recent coup d’état, about 250 politicians, government officers, capitalists, activists, and academics were summoned, if not detained, by the military junta called National Peace and Order Maintaining Council (NPOMC), which was later changed for the sake of the “international perception” to “National Council for Peace and Order” (NCPO). Besides, the protests against the coup still erupted and are spreading in many parts of the country. Nevertheless, none of these were reported in mass media.
Though several analysts argued that the military putsch has no reasonable and legitimate justification, the presence of the coup-maker who stated its intention to restore peace, order, and paradoxically, democracy to the country, was strongly welcomed by anti-Shinawatra groups, in particular the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), a protest movement gathering since November 2013. Moreover, a famous politically-inclined hipster who once was a candidate in the 2013 Bangkok gubernatorial election hailed this coup as a kind of “soft revolution.”
Artikeln avslutas med desa ord som jag rödmarkerade.
For these reason, and due to the silence of mass media at the behest of the junta, I recall a quote from a novel of Gabriel García Márquez, one of the greatest Latin American writers, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It goes like this:
“You must have been dreaming,” the officer insisted. “Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing will ever happen. This is a happy town.”
For many people, Thailand now is no doubt same as the 1960s’ Latin American “Macondo”. So, “I must have been dreaming,” they talk to themselves. “Nothing has happened in Thailand, nothing has ever happened, and nothing will ever happen. This is a happy country”– or else, for their own safety, they have to pretend to be in a happy country.