FRONTIER INTERNATIONAL

RUNAWAY TRAIN

2012-01-13T00:37:00.003-05:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(published in Hong Kong Economic Journal, December 4, 2011)

Wow, just in time! No sooner did the whistle blow than we made a break for it, leaping aboard the train as it creaked into motion. Still panting from the last minute dash across the platform, we were escorted to our assigned seats in the hard berth carriage. We watched platform slowly recede, far too slowly, for we had been detected and the person in pursuit of us was now just outside the window of our compartment, shouting and gesticulating wildly.   

This unusual send-off did not go unnoticed by our fellow travelers.  

Had it not been for the angry scowl of our pursuer and his incantatory use of the word “nakwaning” which was the local term for white foreigners, he might have been mistaken for an excitable driver or tour conductor seeing us off, bursting with misplaced emotion, waving an awkward goodbye.  

“Pengyou?” queried the stranger in the adjacent seat. The wiry middle-aged man’s wry smile suggested he had already surmised otherwise.  

Feeling exposed, I explained in the best, blustery Chinese I could muster that the red-faced man cutting the air with his hands, still heaping verbal abuse upon us foreigners in Shanghai dialect for all to hear, was no friend of ours, in fact we hardly knew him.   

But we knew he didn’t want us on the train; the last we saw, he was conferring with a uniformed officer as the platform slipped out of view.  

Sitting in a close huddle with my travel companions, fellow American students at East China Normal University, I felt safe at last. We compared impressions of our close escape in excited terms, exchanging quiet high-fives. After being pent up on campus and denied permission to travel, just being on a train in motion was exhilarating enough, to think we were racing out of Shanghai en route to the distant ancient capital of Xian was liberation itself.   

The adrenaline rush sustained us as the brown-grey hues of the exhaust-choked cityscape gradually gave way to misty vistas of ricefields, bamboo groves and fog-wrapped hills.   

We had boarded the long overnight train at the last minute, not because we slept late, or got the time wrong, or got stuck in traffic or failed to book a taxi in advance, --in fact I had left campus a day early and over-nighted elsewhere in Shanghai, instructing my travel companions to reassemble at the crack of dawn at a busy downtown location-- but because we had been expressly denied permission to travel to Xian.  

The stop order was issued by a low-level barbarian handler--in our eyes a snoop and a meddler-- although he had a slightly more dignified title as an official in the foreign office at the university.   

That it was his job to mind our business we didn’t mind as much as the fact that he was continually trying to profit from our vulnerability to a bureaucratic thicket erected to keep people in place. One had to ask for permission to do things that didn’t require permission back home and if we didn’t resent it, we were in any case slow to adjust. Whether it was to book a taxi, buy train tickets, and reserve a hotel room, or even change money, we had to leave a long paper trail. The snoop was the go-to-guy for stamps, permits and official forms and much akin to petty officials since time immemorial, the small stakes of the gates he kept watch on encouraged him to extract the maximum in concessions from those who needed help most.

  I hadn’t yet mastered the art of greasing palms or gift-giving, nor was I inclined to, but if you got on the wrong side of the unspoken quid pro quo, which was not difficult, you could find yourself a virtual prisoner on campus. Permission denied.   If the temptation to extract monetary benefit for trumped up paperwork is universal, there was still something peculiar about the controls placed on my group, as China’s vast social control network itself was modernizing, if not crumbling away.   

We were caught in the vestige of an increasingly anachronistic system of control that had, since the latter years of the Cultural Revolution at least, permeated an entire nation, leaving a billion people in its thrall.   

The leafy tranquil campus, formerly known as Saint John’s, was full of simmering memories that were not openly talked about but not forgotten either. Rightists and leftists, (our own personalized tormentor was said to be the latter) had gone at each other’s throats during the shifting fortunes and violent reversals of political struggle in the past few decades, only to find themselves still cooped up in the same work units, side by side with their former political foes. We heard from some teachers and students that our particular handler was a confirmed xenophobe who was still feared for the fearsome punishments he had meted out on others when the Gang of Four ruled Shanghai with a vengeance.

  Neophyte that I was to the turbulent currents of a broken political system in transition, my ignorance bolstered a fearlessness that local friends could envy but not easily emulate. Day after day I courted trouble and pushed boundaries, diving into muddy shoals, navigating murky terrain with aplomb. I ignored rules I didn’t like and quickly learned not to ask permission to do things where permission was unlikely to be granted. Give ‘em face so they stay out of your face, was more or less the wisdom of the day, and if it sometimes took extraordinary measures to minimize contact with those who were assigned to control us, it was worth it just to feel free.  

My bicycle was called Flying Pigeon but it should have been The Liberator. The beauty of getting around on wheels under one’s own power was the ability to slip through the net of control on campus, and elsewhere, just by being in motion. The streets were jammed with cyclists in those days, so it wasn’t so much the velocity of travel as the anonymity of it. Thousands of fellow cyclists might look and stare as curiosity demanded, and look they did, but on wheels one was left unperturbed in personal terms.   

In contrast, to book a taxi not only required planning in advance, usually a half a day or more, but involved paperwork explaining where to and where from, along with name, address, ID, and, in the case of foreign passport holders, FEC funny money scrip for payment.  

To travel in the provinces was even more complicated. 1983 was still in the days when the only really easy way to travel was to book a tour with China Travel Service, but being students on a Chinese campus meant we were effectively part of a danwei, or work unit, and any travel was supposed to be approved by the unit. Our assigned handler stated bluntly that our only choice was to book a tour, through him, a privilege for which we would have to pay a hefty fee, along with all of his expenses, in order that he might accompany us each step along the way. He would decide where we could and couldn’t go --for some reason Xian didn’t interest him—and more off-putting, who we could and couldn’t see.   

If the man had been reasonably friendly, like the teachers and foreign dorm staff and foreign dining hall staff, and some of the drivers, we might have gone along; after all a knowledgeable tour guide can open doors and present new vistas, but this particular handler seemed bent on doing the opposite: running interference, hemming us in and slamming doors shut.  

Being watched and thwarted was one thing. To have to pay the expenses, in foreigner-only scrip no less, of the person thwarting us was just too rich. So four of us got together and conspired to go to Xian on our own.   

Iron wheels pounding iron rails, the train carriage rocking with hypnotic rhythm, we raced westwards. Hair blowing in the damp breeze, sweat long-since dried in the open-aired train, we reviewed our good fortune. We had stuck to plan and our timing had been crisp, and yet we almost didn’t make it. It was disconcerting to hear from the others that my dorm room had been searched the night before, but it didn’t surprise me, there was no guarantee of privacy anywhere.   

We had taken care not to use phones or taxis. As for scoring train tickets, which required paperwork and passports, I turned to the black market through a trusted connection. So how did the university foreign office know we would be at the station trying to catch that particular train?   

The weak link, we surmised, piecing together the known facts as our ride sped into the setting sun, was that one member of our group had bragged that we were leaving town, and somehow word had gotten out.  

Living under surveillance, living with surveillance was not an entirely negative thing; presumably it reduced crime, but more to the point for us, all first-time foreigners, it was more or less an expected part of the China experience. For those who got a kick out of being in China precisely because it was different, and in many ways certifiably weird, to completely elude, or remain unaware of, the demi-monde of spies and informers would, in some paradoxical way be a disappointment. We alternately worried about it and laughed about it, and, for the moment, we were laughing.

  If being watched was a way of life, it was the little interventions that rankled, things like having to show ID, field intrusive questions, or being denied access on account of skin color. We got all tangled up trying to untangle provisional currency rules –foreigners needed to show an ID card for the privilege of spending the oily, sweat-stained RMB. On the other hand, dispensing Foreign Exchange Certificates, the funny money that was colored on one side, crisp and relatively uncirculated, was like wearing a sign that screamed, “Charge me more, I’m a tourist!”   

Not having “liang piao” meant being denied a serving of noodles, even with the right money in hand, while not having a travel permit meant no traveling.

  But it was the way these petty rules served as barriers to people to people contact that annoyed me most of all. I wanted to meet and mix with ordinary people in a system custom-designed to keep me apart, albeit in relative comfort. The problem of traveling with a handler was the not-so-petty way that an official could intimidate, silence or otherwise pose a threat to any friends or friendly individuals one happened to meet up with along the way.   

The ticket-checkers came back to re-check our tickets for no apparent reason, but soon we are served tea, hot water actually, by a pert young water bearer. She unplugged the cork and cloth plugged thermos and started filling the cups of thirsty passengers. When one thirsts, even water is a welcome treat.   

Enamel-coated metal cup extracted from my traveling bag, I accept a cupful of “poor man’s tea.” Uncertain nods and curious glances from our neighbors in the crowded “economy” class carriage gave way to bits of conversation and friendly gestures. I am offered a pinch of crumbled tealeaf to enrich the hot water, and a parcel of plain greasy cookies made the rounds. Our immediate neighbors, who carried the most paltry of overnight bags, hardly big enough for a book and a toothbrush, were not traveling light. Their seating area was blocked with by several large cardboard boxes.

The woman sitting nearest the boxes demonstrated that a used jam jar could be a perfectly good container for tea, as it had the added advantage of a spill-proof cap, while her male companion offered me a smoke, going so far as to pre-light “my” cigarette, which I had the ingratitude to refuse.   

The air could have been fresher, but there was much to savor. Sipping fragrant tea –it might as well have been champagne given the bubbly sensation of growing solidarity with our neighbors— we were at last on our own, having outfoxed the fox in his own lair.   

Our narrow escape from Shanghai had not gone unobserved by other people in the carriage. What a comic scene it was, what with our pursuer, sputtering and flailing frantically, ordering us to disembark!  

Soon we were chatting with what seemed to be one big happy family. They too were going to Xian, but not to see the terracotta warriors. They were transporting television sets, purchased in Shanghai, for resale in the provincial capital. The ringleader, and the woman I took to be his wife, regaled me in conversation for much of the journey; as a much-monitored foreign student living in a foreign dorm, dining in the foreign students cafeteria and otherwise coddled in a guarded university environment, it was fun to be talking with “ordinary” people who made up in street smarts what they might have lacked in bookish wisdom.  

My three fellow American traveling companions, all New Yorkers, congratulated me for the street smarts I had shown in getting us to the train on time despite the hot pursuit. Part of the feint required me spending the night before off campus, as I was the one being watched, at the home of a local friend –technically illegal but I prudently neglected to ask for permission. The other three got to the station in a Peace Hotel taxi and met me near the swarming entrance at the pre-arranged time.  

Between the pulsating rumble of the train and the genial tone of conversation, almost entirely conducted in Chinese, it occurred to me that I had finally arrived in China. As we sped into the sunset, en route to a glorious ancient capital, we were poised to escape drab communist conformity and social confines of Shanghai and to enter the real China, the eternal China.  

My actual first day had come two months earlier, and my first impression upon deplaning at Hong Qiao airport was the questionable quality of the air; hot, humid and redolent of a latrine. The streets into town were fitfully lit at best, and under the few lights there were crowds seemed to mull, some people reading, others talking, others doing nothing in particular.   

Upon reaching the university gate we were greeted by a tall Mao statue, but most of the campus was so dark that flashlights were needed to navigate.   

The dorm was a three-story brick building, a designated residence for foreigners. Before the current wave of Japanese and American students had filled the rosters, the building had been home to students from places like Vietnam and Albania.   

Perhaps it was the blanket of darkness that was thrown over campus that makes me even now remember that first night primarily in aural terms. After dropping my bags off, I took a short walk on an unlit tree-lined path made all the darker by the overhanging canopy of leaves. I got the feeling I was being followed and slowed down, until I could make out what the whispery voices behind me were saying. It wasn’t a variation of “nakwaning” which I had already heard a hundred times since arrival, but rather something else, in clearly enunciated standard speech. 

“I wonder if he understands what we are saying…”“Ting dong ting bu dong?”

I turned around and saw the silhouetted outline of two women, both dressed in light cotton shirts and slacks, hair braided in long pigtails as was the fashion of the day.  

“Ting dong.” I answered, the first words of a fine friendship with Jing, a student from Fuzhou. Jing, who carried a flashlight, lit the way and we ambled around campus, her girlfriend effectively playing chaperone. We did one circuit of campus, long enough to know we wanted to meet again, but how to get in touch? Phones were few and far between, and even if not bugged, you had to speak in the presence of the person who manned the public phone, which ruled out any privacy. It would raise too many eyebrows to call for someone at their dorm, especially if there was the appearance, or potential of, a cross-cultural romance. So we settled to meet again at a noodle shop near campus, with plans to take a walk in Changfeng Park afterwards, chaperone included.  

Back in the dorm I was unexpectedly greeted with a hauntingly familiar guitar lick by Keith Richards. In a weird Proustian twist, “Gimme Shelter” reminds me of arriving in China, even to this day. As it turned out, my immediate neighbor in the third floor of the foreign student dorm was the proud owner of a boom box cassette player. Later that night I met some of my Japanese neighbors and we struggled to communicate in a musical mix of Chinese, Japanese and English. Up early with jetlag the next morning, I was hit with another kind of aural inspiration --the Chinese national anthem-- followed by bouncy martial tunes that accompanied early morning calisthenics on the sports field next to the dorm. Foreign students were exempt from having to attend but not excused from having to hear the open-air broadcast of music and pronouncements used to whip the Chinese student body into shape.

In the days that followed I spent more time off campus than on, touring the Huangpu River with Jing and her coterie of friends, and exploring the not so clean, not so pretty back alleys of the sprawling industrial city on bicycle. But where I really got a feel for the place, and became imbued with a sense of both its former glory and the stifled, muffled cosmopolitanism of the present day, was as a visitor to the homes of relatives of Chinese Americans. I was especially moved by the vicissitudes of fate and fortune in the life of the Pei family that had once lived in a magnificent mansion on South Huangpi Road. The multistoried wood mansion, a veritable Hongloumeng residence with a garden built in imitation of Shizilin, the Pei family garden in Suzhou, was large enough to be converted into a high school after the revolution, while the attached garden was converted to a basketball court. The matriarch of the Pei family, pride subdued but proud nonetheless, still lived there, sharing a few ramshackle rooms of what was once the servant’s quarters with two of her daughters and their families.   

In a way, it was their example, their perseverance, their philosophical broad-mindedness and their basic decency that taught me what Shanghai once was and could again be. Their example allowed me to see the hardliners and Cultural Revolution stalwarts, like my nemesis in the foreign student office, as isolated xenophobes unrepresentative of the whole.   It doubled my determination not to let a petty official get between me and China, not if I could help it. The very fact that permission was denied to go to Xian made me want to go all the more.

I didn’t know anyone in Xian, but having traveled wide and far in my college years, including most of Southeast Asia, West Africa and the length and breadth of India, I was confident we could manage on our own. There would be predictable problems with finding shelter, and the dual currency system, which effectively restricted us to the over-priced hotels-and-restaurants-for-foreigners circuit, but this problem was surmountable as there was a brisk black market trade in FEC currency and presumably some inn-keepers and merchants who would take money of any color. In fact, Chinese entrepreneurs loved the Monopoly money as much as we hated it, so there was potential for some deal-making.  

I already had a thick pocketful of RMB, acquired from Shanghai friends, and even a collection of small plastic coupons that were used to disburse personal quotas in grain and other controlled essentials of daily life. Even lowly noodle shops demanded the chits, and given our glaring lack of a “jiedai danwei” or official host in Xian, I expected we would be eating a lot of noodles.  The night was long, but none of us had slept more than a few hours. Even in our dawn-induced drowsiness, though, there was a rising elation as we reached the outskirts of Xian. We were on the verge of reaching our destination, courtesy of the train that had spirited us out of Shanghai.

  I exchanged contact information with our newfound friends, and bid them well. We gathered our luggage and stepped into the pale light of the platform of Xian Station, anxious to explore the city. We felt free, almost giddy upon arrival.  

Thus it came as something of a shock to be arrested in front of our newfound friends and everyone else.  

After spending a day and night on wheels, fully caught up in the romance of rail travel, rolling through empty station in towns one had never heard of, hearing intimate tales from strangers one might never see again, stirred by the wail of trains passing in the night, freed not only from the constraints and habitual restraints of life on campus, but seemingly freed from political constraints of China itself, it was a real downer to be taken into custody.  

Thinking I knew how things worked, I had instead had been lulled into a trap. Given the hubris of incomplete understanding, I simply didn’t see it coming.   

All the while we raced towards Xian at high speed, sleeping fitfully on our hard but cozy berths, air whipping around from all the opened windows, a team of railway police were preparing to arrest and interrogate us, having been telegraphed by their counterparts in Shanghai. The train system, far from being free, was a bottleneck for social control. We might have been away from our unit and way in between cities, but we were never not under observation. Anywhere the train rolled, the social controls rolled with it. We were effectively prisoners of a “danwei” on wheels, never far from watch of the railway police.  

We were asked to hand over our passports and then led to the train station’s security office. The first bit of bad news that I could decipher was that we had been refused permission to enter the city of Xian. As we sat and sweat and worried, uncomfortable at being held against our will, we were told we would be sent back to Shanghai to face the law there.   

I handled the negotiations, feeling far less fluent than I had just hours before, while my companions seemed far less impressed with my supposed street smarts and penchant for outsmarting the authorities.   The joy of escape and the wonder of travel was replaced with sinking dread and fear of confinement. Someone had ratted on us and it was not hard to figure out who. The man with the scowl on his face had taken away our smiles and put the scowl on us. In places I had been before this, like Thailand, smiling was so common as to be contagious. Here the opposite was true. We were learning what it was like to go native in a land of unhappy campers.  

After about two hours of petty interrogation and fruitless negotiations, my sleep-deprived companions were pale-faced and haggard, incapable of smiling. No matter how we tried to spin it, there was no hiding the well-established fact that we had boarded an intercity train without proper reservations, travel permits or a minder. Worse yet, we were wanted for some unspecified violations according to a responsible person back in Shanghai.  

In desperation, thinking in terms Americans are accustomed to thinking in, I asked if I could make a phone call. The idea was to get someone, anyone on the phone and ask for advice on what to do.

  The answer was no, but I extracted a few business cards from my wallet anyway under the eagled-eyed scrutiny of the man guarding me. He scrunched his eyes, and methodically read out loud the name on one of the cards, and then asked what I was doing with the card of such a well-known person. I explained that I had met a certain Mr. Wang Bingnan (王炳南) through the Chinese Peoples Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries because I knew his son in New York.  

Wang Bingnan was not just a well known Beijing-based official, but was something of a hometown hero in Xian, a celebrated veteran of the war against Japan and a supporter of the revolution. He had studied in Japan and later served abroad as a diplomat, an internationalist at heart.   

Soon my would-be jailer and his fellow officers were examining the bilingual card, turning it over and over, as if it had more than two sides. At first I regretted letting them see it, as it apparently upped the stakes. I had foolishly upgraded our case from that of petty train station politics, to some sort of scheme at the national level as well.   

The security men decided to check the veracity of my story --and my right to possess the business card in question-- by making a long distance call to the office of Wang Bingnan in Beijing. And that’s when our sinking fortune flipped and things turned out for the better.

Not only did Mr. Wang vouch for me, but as Chairman of the Association for Friendship he was sorry to hear there had been an unfriendly “misunderstanding.” He instructed one of his subordinates based in Xian to drive to the train station posthaste to vouch for us and escort us from the station to a hotel. Within an hour we bid farewell to men who had detained us, no hard feelings, and hopped into a chauffeur-driven car which took us to the Bell Tower Hotel where we were enjoined to stay free of charge, courtesy of the Friendship Association. Having access to an official car over the next few days greatly expedited our excursions to the Terracotta Warriors, the Forest of Steles and the big and small Wild Goose Pagodas. Onward travel to Beijing was booked by the book and we left Xian feeling very free indeed, though of course we had just stumbled into a more tolerant and supportive network of control and were never really on our own.

  I later learned that the pals we made on the train were smugglers, or viewed as such, and that nearly every move I had made in Shanghai on the eve departure for Xian had been recorded and observed. My local friends had been questioned, not so much a matter about the kerfuffle with the foreign office at the university, but as to ascertain how I got the black market tickets and more ominously, about what relations I had, or might have had, with the convicted smugglers.

  “Your file is already an inch thick,” a confidant with police connections in Shanghai told me a year later. “Be mindful of what you are doing.”  

For the better part of the 1980’s I traveled the length and breadth of China as a tour-guide, cruise director and informal interpreter. I continued to take umbrage at social controls, and my confrontations with those whose job it was to police me, while never serious, continued apace.

  The main problem was my stubborn insistence on doing little things incompatible with my racial status and nationality. I got arrested for walking in a park at night with a woman during the crackdown on “Spiritual Pollution.” I missed curfew at my dorm and neglected to sign in and declare any visitors. I got in trouble during the campaign against Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization. Working with foreign news teams, I got in trouble for skirting rules designed to thwart good reporting.

And there was the incident, amusing only in retrospect, when I got detained and held for a day of interrogation, along with Chen Kaige (陳凱歌), Gu Changwei (顧長衛) and three English friends for visiting a film set in Yunnan at a location deemed closed to foreigners. There were similar mishaps and misunderstandings for traveling without travel permits in places like Hainan and Fujian and Tibet. By the time I got involved in the student demonstrations of 1989, and Tiananmen Square was declared off-limits to foreigners and just about everyone else, I was breaking rules by the hour and had acquired a long paper trail.   

Then that trail went cold as I left China for an extended stay in Japan. Even there, I had run-ins with the long arm of Chinese officialdom, mainly regarding my links to the documentaries about Tiananmen and links with dissident community, particularly after I had published some letters in the Asahi Shimbun and Los Angeles Times that Wei Jingsheng (魏京生) had written in prison.   

y paper file, if it still exists, must be thick and doggy-eared indeed, though there’s no saying it’s all in one place and what’s left of it is probably scattered on forgotten shelves here and there.   

Meanwhile, China has modernized greatly, and now computers are the name of the game, allowing officialdom to snoop and meddle on an unprecedented scale, thanks to invasive Internet technologies, search engines and social networks developed by and promoted by my freedom-loving homeland.

UPSETTING THE APPLE CART

2011-10-11T17:32:00.001-04:00

(cross-posted with Jinpeili, Wordpress)

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

The reckless greed of Wall Street is legend, and surely needs reining in, but the “leader-free” democratic claims of the OccupyWallStreet movement may prove more myth than mythic. What is it about American political culture, left, right and center, that makes for an obligatory mantra of “democracy” even in its absence, whether it be in the name of upholding the status quo, upsetting the apple cart or fomenting revolution?

On October first, I found myself at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge, not far from where my grandparents first settled in this country, watching hundreds of police cordon off the stately landmark in order to divide a gathering crowd and confront protesters already on the bridge.

Having just arrived from China, via Japan, I was curious about how America might be changing. I stood witness with a largely youthful crowd, morale sustained by rhythmic chants and the drone of drumbeats, as one of the largest mass arrests in American history followed. During the contained, subdued turmoil, I translated for a newly arrived Chinese student who was scoffed at for asking what the protests were about --not that there’s an easy answer to such a question.

For over a decade now it's been hard for Americans to exercise constitutionally protected rights of free assembly due to fears generated by the trumped up war on terror and the burgeoning bureaucracy of an intolerant security state.

Thus it came as a breath of fresh air to see people in the streets of New York peacefully assembling in public thoroughfares to protest the inequities of the status quo.

In the next few days I saw much good cheer and uplifting vignettes of awakened political consciousness in the "Big Apple revolution" but there were also disturbing signs of groupthink coalescing as various political actors and media manipulators tried to harness the spontaneous energy and angst of a frustrated generation.

The OccupyWallStreet protests are said to be leaderless; even the Washington Post and New York Times chime in from their lofty perches to say so, but it doesn’t feel that way on the ground. Still, the appearance of a vacuum is sufficiently tempting for those who fancy themselves natural leaders of the American people to join the bandwagon, gushing with opportunistic goodwill and condescending advice.

In no time at all, seasoned political “liberals” such as Al Sharpton, George Soros and Nancy Pelosi were in the game, trying to join the bandwagon, while conservative voices such as Peter King, Herman Cain and Mitt Romney made shallow disparaging remarks typical of the US right-left culture divide of decades past.

While moving amongst demonstrators in lower Manhattan, it is clear that some slogans are more equal than others, (just about anything with the mathematically spurious 99% claim is a crowd-pleaser, along with the binary good-bad pairings such as Wall Street vs Main Street and rich vs poor, etc.) Cardboard placards, on-line tweets and in-group chants converge in content and style. Statistical chance or hidden hand?

The protests seem not so much scripted as improvised within secret guidelines zealously guarded by facilitators. The high degree of discipline, necessary to the success of any movement, is both imposed and self-imposed. Self-appointed crowd facilitators skillfully co-opt wide-eyed members of the crowd through subtle psychological control mechanisms.

The Occupy movement offers a new vocabulary for a new age, an assortment of odd terms not only geared to sound irresistibly hip to the wannabe, but which serve as a useful in-group marker and to some extent helps consolidate groupthink, if not a common ideology.

Take free speech and democracy. Anyone who shows up for a “General Assembly” at a protest site, is, in theory, offered sixty seconds to express themselves. The mass deliberations are supposed to be proof of how democratic the movement is, though not much more than a sound-bite or introduction can be accomplished in the allotted amount of time. But the General Assembly is also a control mechanism, complete with a low-key bureaucracy at work, starting with volunteer security personnel, including US vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, authentication of visitors, facilitation working groups, a “stack keeper” who decides who gets to talk and in what order (with white males automatically sent to the bottom of the stack because they are presumably confident and like to talk) a “time keeper,” a “note-taker” and “mods” (moderators) for internet live streams. The evil genius of this form of free expression is that the conversation is hemmed in, subject to being steered and controlled, and anything less than glowing positive approval of what the facilitators are facilitating for can result in uncomfortable shunning or silence.

An eerie silent applause technique, said to be adopted from protests in Spain, is another crowd control technique, where an upward flutter of hands is construed as support, a downward flutter not so good.

There is the "mic check", a resourceful response to a police prohibition on microphones, in which listeners repeat in unison what speaker is trying to say. "Taking stack" is the job of the free speech dispatchers, “agenda items” steer discussion, a “report-back” sums it up. A "unity clap" concludes a session. If you don't make it into the “stack,” there is “soapbox” afterwards where one is free to ramble. There are “meditation flash mobs,” “rev fit” is health for revolutionaries, a “walk-out” is students cutting classes, “comfort” deals with showers, etc, and the “vibes-person” presumably monitors the mellowness of the mood. Women are sometimes described as “female-bodied persons” and politically correct terms like “people of color” are coin of the realm.

Yet strangely, as if taking a page from Homeland Security, there are color-coded alerts. Red means “blood,” blue means “fight,” green means “drugs” and white means “thief.”

There are calls to establish a "Liberty Plaza Anarchist College" While American-style anarchy co-mingles with the movement and gives it much of its flavor, there is a hidden hierarchy that is not anarchist at all.

If and when the first blood is drawn --a tragic inevitability in a movement that has goals of toppling the capitalist order and no intention to withdraw-- the self-serving strategy of the low-profile, hard-to-pinpoint crowd leadership will be vindicated. Those advocating revolt and issuing marching orders from the warmth and safety of a heated apartment in Berkeley, or wherever, while the masses confront the blue line of the police on the cold streets of Manhattan will have a lot to answer for.

For a clue as to where the groupthink and groupspeak of the nascent movement come from, one needs to look at Adbusters and Anonymous, the two declared sponsors of the aggressively-named “Occupy” protest that began in earnest on September 17, 2011.

Adbusters is a Vancouver-based media foundation whose eponymous magazine is the voice of an innovative movement that uses media technique to subvert mainstream media, especially advertising. Thoughtful, thought-provoking, and at times breathtakingly radical, the Canadian magazine’s senior editor, Micah White wrote a call for an “American Revolution” in June of this year, saying “we must be judicious and put the actions of the American government on trial before deciding if the sentence of execution by popular revolution is necessary and just.”

Disgruntled former supporters of Obama are already part of the protest, and if Adbusters’ anarchist opinionating and its militant collective statement are to be believed, the incumbent president need not bother trying. Should Obama opt to play the crowd card, he does so at great peril.

In using real names in association with ideas and propositions, Adbusters at least shows the courage of its convictions. Ditto for US Day of Rage which has played a quasi public role. Anonymous, however, works in the shadows, and presumably the techno-geeks like it that way. Even in the crowd there are those who hide in plain site, including the jokers who don the spooky Guy Fawkes masks, inspired from the film “V for Vendetta.” But where's the accountability, let alone democracy, in a group that hides behind an Internet invisibility cloak?

For now, the behind-the-scenes deciders and influencers are biding their time, exerting influence in subtle ways while justifiably angry Americans take to the streets and make a bid to change the dominant ruling paradigm that favors corporations over individuals. Meanwhile, the feckless American mainstream media, (it took NPR nine days to even notice the protests and the NYT is still playing catch-up ball) has flip-flopped between dismissively ignoring the protests, adoring the protests and trying ride the publicity wave.

If any good is to come from the inevitable street clashes to come, it will be thanks to the quiet courage of a much put-upon populace breaking free by thinking free.

SUPPORT PROTEST ON WALL STREET

2011-10-04T09:42:00.006-04:00

Hello readers,

I am happy to report from New York that there are signs of positive social change in late imperial America.

The photos accompanying this post were taken by the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011.

I've been in China for the last few months and unable to update this blog because Blogger is blocked by Beijing.
Although Chinese internet controls can be a nuisance, or worse, block vital information that citizens need to understand and improve the society which they live in, I don't really dispute the right of a sovereign nation to block data-mining products that collude with the US government.

The surreptitious statistical surveillance conducted by Google, Facebook and other "darlings" of late-era US imperialism takes the joy out of technological innovation and erodes trust on the creative commons of the Internet. As such I refuse to post on Facebook and am winding down my use of Google products; as attractive as some of the technology is, the company is not to be trusted.

Please look for future posts on Wordpress under my name, or by my internet tag, jinpeili.

Phil Cunningham

OF SNOW WHITE AND FUKUSHIMA MAIDENS

2011-04-16T12:47:00.003-04:00

by Philip J Cunningham

A wrenching dilemma has emerged in the midst of the nuclear radiation crisis afflicting Japan. A quasi-nationalistic “love it or leave it” attitude has gained currency, putting pressure on individuals to remain in place and face potential dangers for the sake of group solidarity.

Times of tragedy bring out the best and the worst in people, and if there’s any consolation in the harrowing days and nights since March 11, 2011 when a violent quake and giant wave rocked the Tohoku region to its core, it is in the stoicism and quiet heroism of ordinary Japanese who displayed a high degree of courage, order and decorum in the face of unmitigated disaster. Numerous journalists, volunteers and aid workers of diverse nationalities have gone beyond the call of duty to extend help to the hardest hit zones.

But there are hints of darker countercurrents seething just below the surface as well. Mercifully there is nothing on the scale of the race rioting and indiscriminate killing of ethnic Koreans that followed in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but there have been incendiary accusations --faint echoes of the same irrational desire, need, even, to pin blame anywhere it sticks—as a coping mechanism during times of stress.

The tendency to categorize, stereotype and "nail" people with indelible stigmas exists everywhere, but in relatively homogenous Japan the tyranny of small differences is codified and enforced to a high degree.

On the one hand, those who evacuated Tokyo or temporarily moved their families to Western Japan or flew overseas are being subject to ridicule as quitters, losers and, in some essential way, non-Japanese.

On the other hand, staying in place involves risks that go beyond the physical exposure to radiation, aftershocks and tsunami to the social realm of peer pressure, identity maintenance and loyalty issues. Evacuations, some forced, others voluntary, have created a new stigma, a class of people shuttled about, irradiated by no fault of their own, who are being shunned from clinics and even refugee camps for fear of “polluting” others.

Whether it’s the unenviable fate of contract and temp workers hired to quell the broken nuclear furnace or the hapless Fukushima farmers forced to destroy the milk from their dairy farms and the food from their lovingly tended vegetable patches and rice fields, or fisherman fishing in an irradiated sea, the fight/flight dilemma borders on unbearable. Already despair-driven suicides and stubborn refusals to evacuate are being reported.

In contrast to the destructive fury of a tsunami that erased entire towns from the map coupled with an ongoing radiation nightmare that is turning fertile farmland and ancestral homes into a dead zone, scattered reports of prejudice are back-page news.

But it doesn’t take long for petty arguments to ensue. Around a week after the quake, the neologism “fly-jin” took wing, batted up by foreign bloggers and bandied about by glib reporters seeking to hype up the meme of foreigners leaving Japan. Even the delayed re-opening of Disneyland has been blamed on foreign talent skipping town. Snow White has gone missing.

The fleeing gaijin meme has entered a nationalistic Japanese discourse simmering from frustration, fear, and resentment. Facing vacant embassies, undermanned offices and a floundering economy, politicians tiptoe their way across the smooth paving stones of time-worn prejudices, saying that “only Japanese” can save Japan.

Japanese are socially primed from young age to see gaijin not just as the ultimate other, but as the ultimate guest, especially if the foreigner is European in appearance. So much so that if gaijin didn't exist, Japanese would have to invent them, not so much to describe the physical reality of hairy barbarians as to create a foil by which to focus and firm up an inchoate indigenous identity.

Which is why gaijin who speak Japanese fluently and settle in Japan defy not just expectations but mental categorization.

"So, when are you leaving?" was the habitual greeting a Japanese-speaking American friend of mine heard while teaching English in small town in rural Iwate. He left two years later after completing his contract, fulfilling the apparent expectation that he would leave --because gaijin always leave-- but he has since settled in another part of Japan.

As such, non-Japanese are routinely stigmatized and marginalized in ways both pleasant and unsettling, typically a mix of the overwrought politeness, pomp and ceremony reserved for high-class guests, and the simmering resentment and condescension reserved for low-class guests who don’t know their place.

Many disparate, and frequently stupid things are said about gaijin, an impossibly broad category that theoretically includes the population of the planet minus those eligible to hold a Japanese passport, but one workable definition is that gaijin are people who leave.

The fuss about fly-jin was mostly a case of self-inflicted parody, if not prejudice, on the part of a handful of foreigners who were not content just to stay in place but chose to show their “devotion” by ridiculing the tens of thousands who left, even temporarily.

At first glance, it’s a comical situation in which foreigners ridicule fellow foreigners for not being loyal enough to Japan. But to be more righteous and loud-mouthed than the Japanese about what constitutes acceptable behavior in Japan represents a kind of colonized consciousness in which local norms and prejudices have been imbibed in a futile struggle to prove one’s “non-foreignness.”

This creates an awkward situation for those who choose to return, stigmatized as “fly-jin” for having bolted at the first Becquerel. Even that is a mere sideshow; the real unspoken victims of the open season on gaijin are the Japanese people themselves.

As the Fukushima nuclear facility continues to spew radiation, to “fight” for Japan is being construed to mean staying put with a stoic disregard for danger. Those who elect to leave are seen as threats to the social order. Any disruption or departure gives rise to doubts, and can be seen as a brake on the rolling wheels of the economy, as the trumped-up Disneyland case presumably illustrates.

This inherent social tension, only gradually being given voice to, mirrors a classic divide-and-conquer strategy in which one group of people is pitted against another in order to distract from the actual agents of culpability.

Fly or fry? It’s a false dichotomy, but those most vulnerable to the taming-through-teasing are the people of Tokyo and surrounding prefectures. The emotionally volatile “Don’t leave if you want to be a real Japanese” is showing traction and muddying the discourse at a time when some people in certain parts of Japan are facing scientifically-documented risks that need to be evaluated in a cool and rational way.

If it turns out radiation leakage is worse than what Tepco and the Kan government has been belatedly willing to admit, who's the villain here? The fly-jin?

Most of the “fly-jin” have already flown the coop and moved on to safer climes where ambient radiation and the emerging prejudices of post-quake Japan are unlikely to touch them. The real danger is for those who remain in place, especially Japanese. The mockery of a marginal class of people who have evacuated for safety –gaijin double-stigmatized by their flight-- makes it harder to respond to sensible calls for evacuation should the crisis take a turn for the worse.

What's come into play so far in social terms is not so much virulent nationalism as the regrettable human tendency to vent anger on the nearest easy target and thus discriminate against certain circumscribed "others" rather than address the problem at its source.

The internet-trending fly-jin fuss and kerfuffle is a frivolous distraction, obscuring the gross negligence of the deep-pocketed Tepco and its well-remunerated cronies and enablers in Japanese media, advertising firms and the government.

Already Fukushima-jin are reeling from prejudice, so much so that refugees who hail from hometowns close to the battered nuclear plant are being discriminated against even in refugee shelters. Worse yet, the heart-breaking reports of Fukushima kids turned away from medical clinics for fear they might be radioactive. This instant stigmatization touches on a raw nerve in Japanese culture, reminiscent of the sad fate of "Hiroshima maidens" and other radiated hibakusha whose victimhood attracted social pity from a distance, but avoidance up close at a personal level.

Will there be, in the decades to come, long after the fly-jin are forgotten, a generation of Fukushima maidens unable to marry because of the stigma of birth in a radiation-tainted hometown?

THE QUAKE SHAKES UP JAPANESE TV

2011-03-26T11:04:00.002-04:00

Philip J Cunningham

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. We have just experienced an earthquake. Please move away from the buildings to an open area...We will provide more detailed information as soon as possible...”

The polite but authoritative “we” was the voice of the Tokyo DisneySea theme park in this instance, but similar, oddly reassuring warnings of peril were being echoed across Japan, mostly following the lead of television broadcaster NHK.

Japan has a thriving terrestrial broadcast television market, which in most cities comes down to half a dozen key players. To watch Tokyo’s six main TV stations side by side, as media scholars sometimes do, is to be subjected to an overload of dazzling color, brightly-lit sets, short, snappy jingles, silly commercials and plodding documentaries.

When the biggest earthquake in memory hit Japan at 2:46 PM on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, it took less than ten minutes for the bright, cluttered screens to be drained of color, commercialism and fun. With a disaster unfolding, TV stations were under intense pressure to change the tone of their broadcasts.

To review broadcasts from that afternoon, is to be transported back to a turning point in which everything suddenly changed. The state of TV, as it existed at that precarious moment, good, bad and banal as it might have been, is now a broadcast relic, the last gasp of normalcy before the earth shook Japan to its core, the sea swept the Northeast with tsunamis and a nuclear crisis broke the easy access to electric power that has been a hallmark of modernity in Japan for decades.

Commercials, like them or not, are cultural statements if not technical works of art, but even the best of them quickly assumed a negative valence the moment disaster struck. On that fateful Friday afternoon, each station rushed to report, each in its own fashion, on the quake in real time even as the ground was still shaking.

As zero hour arrived, network TV was thrust into a series of startling juxtapositions and incongruent pairings. The audio babble alone was surreal, a wobbly wall of sound composed of overlapping jingles, earthquake bells, buzzers and alarms, bits of dramatic dialogue, background music, stentorian narration, and breathless news reports.

Japan’s biggest TV station NHK, where I worked for a number of years as a writer, news polisher and producer, is a publicly supported broadcaster that also receives government funding -- and is sometimes criticized for an apparent lack of editorial independence for that reason -- was the first station to break into regular programming to report the big quake, just 12 seconds after the first jolt.

NHK interrupted its live coverage of a meeting in the Diet, Japan’s parliament. Recordings taken from the cameras recording that session would later show famous lawmakers reacting to the quake, some standing about unfazed, others ducking for cover.

The flagship NHK is linked to a multitude of seismic data-collection sites across the archipelago and has a network of remote cameras ready in case of emergency, providing an unblinking view of public thoroughfares long before the advent of web-cams. Typically the remote lens offers a rooftop glimpse of urban scenery and close-ups of vital infrastructure, available to the studio at the flip of a switch.

As the designated go-to station for earthquakes and other natural disasters, NHK typically puts up graphics and comprehensive lists of hard-hit areas with magnitude readings, giving other stations a heads-up and time to react.

NTV, a medium sized station with a somewhat conservative take on the news, became the first of the commercial networks to take note of the earthquake, cutting from a short taped piece about Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro to a live studio shot just after 2:48 that afternoon.

Despite this supple reaction, NTV coverage quickly reverted to a series of commercials, presumably pre-booked for that time slot. This included a pretty model demonstrating how to use mascara remover towelette and facial cleansing foam followed by an ad for an American insurance company with the logo “We’re everyone’s hospital.”

TBS, another commercial station, broke the bad news next, not with a news report but just running text superimposed on top of the screen, clocking in just five seconds later than NTV. It saw no need to interrupt programming but continued to run its afternoon trendy drama, the sort of soap opera production/housewife fare for which the station is famous.

Meanwhile NHK was fully focused on the emergency, having gone from showing maps of the hard-hit regions in northeastern Honshu to live camera coverage of in-house presenters in the studio intercut with some shaky live views from train stations and tower tops in stricken areas. Tsunami warnings followed almost immediately.

Watching the other stations in simultaneity while NHK reported grim-faced on an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude, one was struck by just how many commercials and shifts of tone and mood can be squeezed into the span of a minute or two. But then, with an earthquake in progress, the hand of time seems to bend and slow down, if not halt entirely.

Ironically enough, one of the commercials is an exquisitely filmed travel pitch, about a fantasy escape to western Japan, which is exactly where rattled residents of Tokyo would seek to go in the days to come to get away from the twin perils of aftershocks and radiation.

About three minutes into the quake, the comparative coverage took on an eerie, unnerving quality. NHK panned the city skyline from a hard-shaking remote camera, while NTV showed a brief studio shot of violently swaying furniture and swinging light fixtures. Then, rather inexplicably, the latter shifted to a smooth, soothing commercial, zooming in on a fresh sliced cabbage, best eaten with a certain mayonnaise, followed by a tomato-themed ad for toothpaste meant to remedy swollen gums.

At the regional station, TV Tokyo, a timely earthquake alert flashed on the screen in a distinctly inauspicious manner. The bad news did not interrupt programming but was superimposed over an unconventional sales pitch for gravestones, featuring two comical middle-aged men, one in a tacky suit, the other in a graduation cap and gown talking about why you should only use the best grave stones because “A grave is your home for eternity.”

Meanwhile TBS continued its trendy drama of lovingly photographed stylish actors dressed in black, while Fuji TV cut to an empty news desk with chairs rolling around uncontrollably; apparently a failed attempt at a live update, with lights and cameras ready to go but no people in view.

A few seconds later, by which time the off-shore epicenter of a huge quake had been identified on NHK, three soap operas were still up and running, along with a story about fishing. And a commercial for “Body Cooler” featured a sexy actress standing on a beach as a long, smooth blue wave crashed in the background.

By the time Fuji TV finally broke the news at 2:51 PM, the story was old and redundant. Its viewers already knew about the earthquake because the Tokyo region had been shaking underfoot for minutes. From this point on, four out of six channels were offering dedicated quake coverage.

TV Asahi, which produces good news programs and sometimes battles with NHK over political differences, was inexplicably slow at the switch. While pandemonium was breaking loose on the other channels, Asahi aired an ad for a 1950s drama, showing seaside scenes of a man and a child in period costume perched on rocks in front of crashing waves, intercut with quaint scenes set in snowy rural mountains. Next up was a coming attraction filled with apocalyptic imagery, billowing explosions, people running scared, roaring flames everywhere, engulfing the map of Japan superimposed on the screen in advance of an urgent news break.

Finally, around five minutes into the tremblor, the control room switched to a newsreader who looked straight into a wobbly camera, and with considerable poise, backed by a visibly frantic newsroom, began to announce the bad news.

Six and a half minutes after the quake started to rattle Tokyo, TV Tokyo continued to broadcast its scheduled program, a jaunty tale about three jokey TV personalities who decide to try their hand at fishing. There is a close-up of a striped fish writhing in a net, then tossed into a blue basket to exclamations of pleasure about what a beautiful fish it is. At that point, TV Tokyo at last cut to full-time earthquake coverage.

BROADCAST RECORD OF SIX TV STATIONS AT THE TIME OF QUAKE

In a single afternoon, Tokyo television coverage went, in short order, from scenes of happy people pouring cups of healthy instant green tea to grim-faced newscasters estimating death tolls, from sleek, seductive ads for cars photographed under immaculate conditions, to the flotsam of cars and jetsam of houses helplessly bobbing in a black tide. Glossy takes of starlets doing their makeup and comedians promoting luxury products were replaced in sequence by jumpy camera phone images of devastation and despair.

Just as the quake struck, an insurance commercial was aired featuring a loud, obnoxious duck decked out in a curly yellow wig. By an odd coincidence, Gilbert Gottfried, the actor behind the voice of the Aflac duck in the related US commercial series was terminated a few days after the quake for making some callous jokes about real estate changes in Japan.

US AFLAC AD FEATURING GILBERT GOTTFRIED AS VOICE OF DUCK

SAMPLE AFLAC AD FOR JAPANESE MARKET, DIFFERENT DUCK

One minute the screens were beaming with joyous young actresses singing the praise of hair coloring foam, female-only phone apps and aromatic laundry scents, the next the viewer was assaulted with sad, unadorned faces numb with shock and despair. One minute a convenience store chain urged viewers to "Start a New Life". Moments later the slogan sounded like a bad joke as small towns were shown being ripped asunder by rushing waters of unspeakable destructive power.

http://www.youtube.com/user/yuanzency#p/a/u/1/uBCoUg8E0ns
SAMPLE FOOTAGE FROM TV TOKYO AT THE TIME THE QUAKE STRUCK

Three days after the quake and tsunami, Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro may have nulled his chances for a fourth term as Tokyo mayor by telling Asahi Press Club journalists that the tsunami of March 11 was “tenbatsu” or “punishment from heaven” because the Japanese have become greedy and egotistical.

ASAHI KANTEI TWITTER POST ON ISHIHARA SHINTARO COMMENTS

How odd to hear a leader in a largely Buddhist country preach the wrath of God like a small town fundamentalist, but Ishihara, who first acquired fame as a youth writer, is something of a populist, and his penchant for shocking off-the-cuff comments of the sort a more thoughtful, cautious politician would be loathe to make, is part of his idiosyncratic persona. Still, he was enough of a politician to apologize after the posting of his comments on Twitter raised a storm of protest.
In days that followed the quake and tsunami, public service announcements began to take the place of commercials, as broadcasters returned to airing taped shows with time slots that advertisers were reluctant to fill. But the anodyne messages offered by Japan's advertising council also began to irritate viewers, due to the banality of the themes, such as rabbits and other cute cartoon animals teaching the value of making friends by exchanging polite greetings.

AD COUNCIL PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT AFTER THE QUAKE

So many viewers complained about the predictable punch line, brought to you by the advertising council or "A.C." that finally the end credit was dropped. The fact that complaints reached a threshold at which the normally one-way conversation between advertiser and viewer became a heated dialogue attests to the mounting frustration and quiet rage felt by ordinary Japanese as they watched the Fukushima Daiichi disaster unfold on television.

One company that showed a rare willingness to advertise during these depressing days is none other than the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, the company most responsible for negligence and lack of adequate safety procedures at the dangerously radioactive Fukushima complex. It might seem brazen for TEPCO to advertise when it itself is the topic of the nightly news, but it is engaged in a desperate PR battle to save its deteriorating reputation and stock valuation at a time when both are in free fall.

TEPCO’s non-apology apology looked like the notice for a wake, consisting of white lettering on a black background, apologizing for the inconvenience in highly formulaic terms that clarify nothing about the company’s responsibilities for the disaster.

TEPCO’S PUBLIC RELATIONS COMMERCIAL ON “INCONVENIENCE”

The spot was appropriately subdued, after all, TEPCO has long courted some of the best-paid copy artists, advertising executives and even manga artists in the business, such as Hirokane Kenji, famous for his long-running salariman series "Shima Kosaku," also produced “Genshi-chan” or Lil’ Atom as a TEPCO mascot.

Under the spell of its own overarching corporate vision embracing the unlimited power of a nuclear future, TEPCO has demonstrated in some of its questionable business decisions, short cuts and cover-ups risking the lives of its employees, a willingness to take calculated risks to meet the admittedly voracious demand for electric power in Tokyo and the surrounding megalopolis.

TEPCO AD FOR THE ENERGY RICH GOOD LIFE (BEFORE THE QUAKE)

GREATER TOKYO REGION BRIGHTLY LIT UP BY TEPCO

Far from being a stranger to advertising, TEPCO is a "generous" sponsor of television programming. The huge corporation, Japan’s largest energy firm, has scores of subsidiaries and an ample war chest to buy the best public relations and legal protection in the business. Its “generous” support for commercial television and advertising in print has given it more than a modicum of protection from hard-hitting journalism, not unlike the unspoken power of the American tobacco and oil industries that use advertising and sponsorship to sanitize their image and deflect serious inquiry.

But you won’t learn much about that, on public television NHK. NHK, not unlike America’s NPR, might be largely free of direct commercial pressures, but it is not free of influence. Both organizations share a finger in the wind quality of being over-sensitive to flavor-of-the-month political correctness. But NHK dwarfs NPR in terms of budget, reach and influence and it enjoys direct governmental links that make it more akin to VOA or Radio Free Europe.

Best described as a quasi-governmental entity, NHK enjoys de facto, if not de jure status as the voice of Japan. By pedigree and tradition it is the platform by which Japan speaks to the nation and the world. It was the home of Tokyo Rose during the Pacific War and when Emperor Hirohito made his famous announcement at the close of World War 2, he was talking to NHK. Even today it dominates coverage of Diet Sessions, Sumo wrestling, diplomatic news and, after the Tohoku earthquake, a special message from Emperor Akihito.

EMPEROR AKIHITO ADDRESS THE PEOPLE IN WAKE OF DISASTER

While NHK hires journalists by the dozen, and produces many thoughtful, reflective documentaries, it is dependent enough on government funding to fill its budget gap that it goes easy on governmental policy and large corporations that enjoy bureaucratic support.

Quasi-governmental NHK projects a mild-mannered persona, walking the narrow line between a willingness to report and an unwillingness to offend. It could also be described as a quasi-journalistic entity, given that it offers a media mix of fresh, original programming along with gun-shy cancellation of controversial programs and government influenced news product.

Still, NHK stands head and shoulders above the rest as the earthquake and disaster channel par excellence, thanks as much to its own vast information collecting infrastructure, with bureaus, reporters and cameras across the country, and significantly, due to its government-authorized links with Japan’s Meteorological Agency and Ministry of Transport.

That’s why it’s a good place to turn for government and corporate statements about the earthquake and tsunami, but not a good place to learn about corporate malfeasance that worsens the toll of nature’s fury and creates entirely man-made disasters. As former NHK television journalist Kamanaka Hitomi found, NHK was so loath to take on Japan's nuclear power industry when she was producing a news story on the topic that she quit in protest and has campaigned against nuclear power plants ever since. An insightful indictment of the formidable “power elite” that she was up against can be found in Andrew DeWit’s recent article on Japan’s power elite, that is the link between Tepco and other large utilities and government regulators. http://japanfocus.org/-Andrew-DeWit/3501

Having spent three years in the studios and newsrooms of NHK in Tokyo, followed by a sojourn at CCTV in China, I can attest to the notion that NHK broadcast news, while more hard-hitting and thorough than that of its Chinese counterpart, is alike in the sense that it shares a hybrid broadcasting mission in which the duty to inform is balanced by the duty to reassure the public and promote harmony.

Although opponents of nuclear power still face an uphill battle in fossil-fuel poor, energy-hungry Japan, there have long been strong individual voices, from Okinawa to Hokkaido speaking out about the dangers of harnessing for electricity generation the terrible power that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders.

Adding to an enormous and profound body of work on the topic of things nuclear, Oe Kenzaburo has just commented on the 3.11 crisis, linking it in a trinity with the atomic bombs dropped on Japan and Pacific atomic tests conducted by the US military. (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/03/28/110328ta_talk_oe)

As a result of grievous damage to national infrastructure and power shortfalls, Japan will be pressed to find ways to lessen its dangerous dependence on nuclear power. Tokyo, where rolling blackouts are setting the tone for a new, less energy dependent lifestyle, is on the front line, confronting out of necessity its materialistic, energy-guzzling lifestyle square on.

There is no going back. The fantasy world depicted on Japanese TV just as the quake struck is a freeze-frame, a snapshot in time, of a time and place that has been changed irrevocably by the force of nature and the follies of man.

(as published in Japan Focus/Asia Pacific Journal, March 26, 2011)

Philip Cunningham is a professor of media studies who has taught at Chulalongkorn University and Doshisha University. He is the author of Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989. A long-time student of Chinese, Japanese and Thai affairs.

WORDS ON THE JAPAN DISASTER FRONT

2011-03-15T16:45:00.003-04:00

by Philip J Cunningham

The world of information made possible by Twitter technology is vast and fascinating, but what really rises above the Twittering noise, random comments and repetitive multiple posts of second, third and fourth hand material is the work of an intrepid individual, sharing, in short installments, an eye-witness view of an evolving situation. It is a take on the news as old as the news itself, first person testimony, offering a degree of coherence and individual fidelity that stands head and shoulders above the random, aggregate posts of a busy Twitter feed.

In a matter of just a few days, one of the most privileged, affluent societies in Asia has been hit and laid prone with multiple disasters, and though the worst may be over, it's far from over yet. Japan, indeed the world as a whole, will feel the influence of the deadly March 11 earthquake, tsunami, related aftershocks, eruptions and subsequent damage to nuclear power plants and more generally the economy for years to come.

The following is the tweet record of an American reporter, now an Asia correspondent for VOA, with 18 years experience in Japan as he covers what could be fairly described as the biggest news story of his career

The reporter is Steve Herman and his twitter tag is W7VOA.

Steve Herman and I worked together in the International Division of NHK in 1990-1, sharing a Tokyo office while working as televison producers on Asia Now and China Now respectively.

Even then, long before he became a radio correspondent for CBS and later President of the FCCJ, I thought him the epitome of a newsman, one who was living and breathing news round the clock. A solid reporter with an excellent understanding not just of international news issues but the minutae of how things work in Japan, Steve is a good guide to a big breaking story.

The veteran reporter happened to be out of Japan when the big quake struck but managed to get back in country, despite disruptions at airports and rail lines, within a day. His posts chronicle a journey across Japan as he seeks access and interviews in the three hardest hit areas, Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures.

His intial entries in this informal online diary commence with short notes about news he is reading and re-tweets of posts made by other journalists he is following on Twitter, reacting to news rather than reporting it, and appropriately enough, as it takes him the better part of a day to get on the scene. RT is short for re-tweet and sometimes he posts links to published articles that he likes or makes reference to.

Once he’s on his way to the scene of tsunami damage and dysfunctional nuclear power plants, the second-hand news and reactions to the news are gradually replaced by first-person anecdotes, sensations, interviews and reporting. When the earth starts shaking, he describes it. Then he finds out more about the quake or aftershock, and tweets the best information available to him at the time.

Sometimes it's an earthquake warning with no earthquake, sometimes an earthquake without warning.

The constant tickertape flow of tweets by him and other people on the scene start to be incorporated into news updates which are also tagged, retweeted and made reference to on the Internet, TV and radio.

In short, by looking at a series of thoughtful on the scene tweets, one can get a feel for how information travels, how information is culled and selected and how it is then broadcast and repeated until it becomes the received understanding of an event.

This sort of tweet diary is interesting even when second-hand and third hand information is collated and forwarded, but it really is at its best when it shifts to the first person, and the tweeter on the scene is telling us about things he or she sees, hears, wonders about and analyzes in an original way.

Following his twitter reports in real time is to be transported into the urgency of a breaking story in the company of a cool, seasoned guide who does not flinch in the face of obstacles or bad news. Even with the haiku-like discipline of writing in short bursts, there is narrative arc and a building sense of drama as the reporter moves onto the scene and traverses difficult, sometimes outright dangerous territory.

For all their news value and dramatic impact, tweets are also snippets of personal conversations put to print. In Steve’s case, as he makes a dash from a safe part of Japan to an area at risk, his friends on Twitter urged him not to go, to consider the dangers, to which his response was simple and firm.

“It's my job.”

Here, then, a record of informal tweets from veteran Asia correspondent Steve Herman as he does his job. While investigating a tough, multifaceted breaking story, he took the time to tweet updates about things he saw and heard and gleaned from official sources. His short, abbreviated observations were informative enough that within a few days time he had ten thousand “followers” reading and re-tweeting his posts, including fellow journalists, all the while filing formal, in-depth reports for Voice of America.

The posts here have been copied from his twitter history, and thus are in reverse chronological order. To better sense the drama of an unfolding story in which each subsequent development is unknown, one might browse his posts by scrolling from the bottom up.

Steve Herman
@W7VOA ÜT: 37.373258,140.371634
Voice of America (VOA) Bureau Chief/Correspondent, based in Seoul, mainly covering NE Asia (Korean peninsula & Japan).

(Tuesday March 15, 2011 11:59 PM Japan Time)

Dow Jones via Kyodo: Radio France to withdraw Japan staff in wake of nuke radiation detected.
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American Forces Press Service - Personnel in & around FA Yokosuka & NAF Atsugi told to limit outdoor activitie… (cont) http://deck.ly/~YqXHE
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Another aftershock now 0123 in Fukushima-ken -- not so strong.
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A bit of VOA Q&A from me here in Koriyama on how the Fukushima folks are feeling: http://bit.ly/hL7dp2 (mp3 file)
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Kyodo: Japan gov't orders injection of water into No. 4 reactor spent fuel pool at Fukushima-1.
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There are, after all, estimated 5,000 dead/missing in Iwate-ken.
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Anyone spotted DPJ bigwig Ichiro Ozawa (of Iwate-ken) post-tsunami? Blogger/Twitter buzz in Japanese that he's "missing."
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The Japan quake last week may have shortened Earth days and moved the planet's axis a tiny bit. http://go.usa.gov/4GA
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RT @martyn_williams: RT @norishikata: On 16th, 8 experts of US NRC will arrive to give tech advice to respond to Fukushima 1
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Newest quake in Tohoku 3 mins. ago is M6.0.
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It's a Shindo 3 Aomori & Iwate-ken.
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Another aftershock now at 1225 JST here in Fukushima-ken.
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TEPCO: May use helicopters within a few days to pour water on Reactor 4 at Fukushima-1 nuke plant to try to cool spent-fuel pool.
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Japan's P-wave warning system gave a 3.5 seconds heads-up for tonight's Shizuoka quake.
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Shizuoka media report some utility poles damaged by quake. Also the typical TV shots of smashed bottles on floor of stores.
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The Shizuoka quake hit at 2231 JST was M6.4 at depth of 10km nr Mt. Fuji.
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JMA: No changes observed for possible volcanic activity on Mt. Fuji.
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JMA: No relations can be found between tonight's Shizuoka quake & the M9.0. Don't know if last Friday's triggered this latest one.
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We're tweeing right now about tonight's Shizuoka temblor, not last Friday's M9.0. JMA holding news conference now.
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Translation: This wasn't the "Big One" for the Tokai region.
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JMA: Pressure pattern different for tonight's quake than would be expected from anticipated huge Tokai quake.
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JMA: 1st x Shizuoka has been hit by a Shindo 6+ quake.
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JMA: Six aftershocks so far tonight from the Shizuoka quake. No tsunami worry, but concern about landslides.
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Chubu Electric: No significant damage to Hamaoka nuke plant at Omaezaki, Shizuoka-ken from tonight's quake.
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Poignant piece about US diplomat who recently lost key Japan post & now focused on quake relief - http://bit.ly/aXcxq
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TV Shizuoka: Injuries reported following tonight's big quake.
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Kyodo also reporting fires in Fujinomiya, Shizuoka.
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NHK: Some fires reported around Fujinomiya, Shizuoka following tonight's quake.
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Mt. Fuji facts: Considered active volcano for past 5,000 yrs. 16 eruptions since 781 AD. Last eruption: 1707-8.
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Shizuoka PD: Some power outages reported following big quake.
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No tsunami alert from the two big jolts in Japan in the last hour.
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All we need now to complete the picture is for Mt. Fuji to erupt.
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Fujinomiya-machi is how the name of the epicenter location is pronounced for the M6.2.
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If Shizuoka comes away with no damage from a Shindo (Japanese scale) 6+ that'll be amazing.
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TEPCO: No reports of power outages in Tokyo from latest big quake.
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BenMabley Ben Mabley
by W7VOA

Earthquake - shaking significantly in Osaka for the first time since Friday
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Epicenter for the big Shizuoka quake is Fujimiya-shi (if I'm reading the kanji correctly).
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Here we go again with an aftershock in Fukushima.
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NHK live shot from Shizuoka looks amazingly normal.
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The 6.2 was ours here a few minutes before in Miyagi/Fukushima.
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M6.0 at depth of 10km for the Shizuoka quake.
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Look for fresh tsunami warnings.
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6+ on Japanese scale is potentially quite destructive.
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M6.2.
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Shizuoka 6+ Shindo!
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5- Shindo. Wow.
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I can feel it slightly here in Fukushima-ken as well.
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It's following by less than a minute the quake here. Amazing.
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Shaking seen in Shizuoka in NHK live shot.
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Its hitting Tokyo.
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Yamanashi, Kanagawa, Shizuoka earthquake warning now issued. Stand by.
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Now earthquake warning!
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It's a Shindo 4 in Miyagi and Fukushima.
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Tsunami alert may be issued according to JMA.
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Now settling down. It's definitely not the M7 aftershock that's been forecast.
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Whole hotel is moving here in Koriyama.
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It's a decent shake, lasting about 30 seconds.
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Shaking now in Tohoku at 10:28pm
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Worst quake/tsunami-hit areas in NE Japan now forecast to get freezing temps, even snow.
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Kyodo: TEPCO unable to pour water into Fukushima-1 No. 4 reactor's storage pool for spent fuel.
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RT @markmackinnon: RT @Reuters: FLASH: French nuclear agency says Fukushima nuclear accident is level 6 on INES scale - Kyodo
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martyn_williams Martyn Williams
by W7VOA
TEPCO believes 400mSv reading recorded this morning is due to debris from No4 reactor explosion - TBS
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At Matsukizushi in Koriyama enjoying the ¥1500 Saigai (Disaster) Sushi Set. www.matukizusi.com http://4sq.com/gMJK3i
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Personal note: I see my total followers no. now over 10,000. Wow. Will try to follow many of you back once we get through the nuke crisis.
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M5.2 shake at depth of 10km, centered here in Fukushima-ken.
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Another aftershock here in Tohoku at 20:07 JST. Not so big. But a good little roll.
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My latest VOA report on the nuclear crisis here in Fukushima: http://bit.ly/fh5Vme #Japan
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Moderate aftershock.
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Shaking in Fukushima again.
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NHK: A 70-year-old woman has been rescued in Iwate-ken after 92 hours buried in quake rubble.
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While chance of meltdown leading to criticality seems very remote, we're told that the spent fuel pools are exposed to the atmosphere.
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Kyodo reports spent nuke fuel pool at Fukushima may be boiling. (I'm more concerned about these exposed pools than meltdown danger).
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Small shaking now in Fukushima Pref. Light aftershock compared to previous ones.
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Just spoke with a family from the Fukushima 20-30km zone. They and others left Iwaki City, saying they don't trust gov't advisories/info.
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RT @chicoharlan: Complex nuke news + inherent Japanese language vagueness + NHK translation... So opaque. Like verbal Escher painting.
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Japan's top gov't spokesman talking to reporters again, trying to assure things might be getting better at Fukushima reactors.
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Getting word that Prime Min. Kan preparing to address nation again. Reliable source info.
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RT @martin_koelling: Tokyo station: no mass flight, still plenty seats available, BUT long lines, many mothers with kids. ...
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RT @TimeOutTokyo: CouchSurfing has started a list of people in the area willing to offer accomodation to evacuees: http://bit.ly/hCUY0J
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RT @martyn_williams: Just got a press release: Japanese porn producer pledges March profits to quake relief
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More small levels of radiation being detected around Tokyo, according to Kyodo.
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martyn_williams Martyn Williams
by W7VOA

Nikkei Stock Average Now Down 13% at 8,363.46
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Kyodo: Topix futures trading suspended briefly after plunges in Tokyo stocks.
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Nikkei stock index off 1250 points at the moment.
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Nikkei continues plunge -- off 1,000 points.
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Kyodo reporting "small amounts" of above normal levels of radiation detected in Tokyo.
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Japan benchmark stock index, Nikkei, down 8% amid nuclear crisis, quake recovery woes.
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TEPCO: Fire at No.4 reactor apparently put out.
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Kyodo: Hydrogen explosion occurs at Fukushima No. 4 reactor.
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Kyodo: Radiation 400 times annual legal limit measured near Fukushima No. 3 reactor.
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Reiterates that current rad levels will not harm human health between the 20km and 30km radius area.
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Edano: Keep calm, we can continue with our daily lives.
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(By the way, I am about 75 km from the nuke plant, for those asking).
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Edano again says actual rad release figures should come from TEPCO but reiterates high readings are likely coming from No. 4 reactor fire.
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Japan top gov't spokesman says spent fuel in Reactor 4 explosion could be causing the fresh, very high rad readings.
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Edano says Prime Min. Kan made final decision on not evacuate those in 20-30km zone.
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Edano: Very little possibility of harm to human health from these reactors. (??)
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Edano says reports part of container vessel at No. 2 reactor damaged.
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He didn't answer the questions.
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Edano, answering question, refers query to TEPCO on water injection process.
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Edano: Entire Japanese Cabinet dealing with this situation.
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But Edano acknowledges this depends on wind speed, direction.
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Edano: Harm to human minimal or not at all away from plant.
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Edano: Reiterates PM Kan's order for those around nuke plant to stay indoors & keep windows shut. Do not use ventilation. Keep laundry in.
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Edano: 800 staffers were evacuated at Fukushima-1. 50 remain working on emergency cooling.
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We're now talking about milliseverts. These are levels that can impact human health, warns Edano.
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Problem is how to maintain the cooling, says Edano.
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Edano: Water injection ops continuing at 1,2,3 reactors at Fukushima-1. Going smoothly. We believe cooling is effective.
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Edano: Hole observed in No. 2 reactor.
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Edano: Blast at No. 2 reactor came 30 mins. after incident at No. 4.
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Edano: Looks like Reactor No. 4 is exposed.
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Edano: Hydrogen being generated so we're seeing radioactive substances being released.
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Edano: Hydrogen explosion seems also to have occurred at No. 4 reactor as was case with No. 1, 3 reactors.
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No fuel rods in Reactor 4 but spent fuel is inside it.
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Reactor 4 was out of operation at time of quake.
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Edano: Reactor No. 4 is on fire.
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Edano: TEPCO will announce specific and accurate figures on radiation.
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Now Chief Cabinet Sect'y Edano speaking.
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Prime Min. Kan doesn't want to comment on each individual reactor, saying that info should come from TEPCO.
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He's going to take one question only.
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Kan requests the Japanese public act calmly.
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Kan: Every effort being made to avoid further explosions, radiation leaks.
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Kan says for Fukushima-2 everyone should evacuate 10km radius.
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That was for those around Fukushima-1.
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Those within 30km should remain indoors.
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Kan: "We need now for everyone to move out of 20km radius around the Fukushima-1 plant."
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Kan: "Very high risk of further radioactive material coming out."
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Kan: Radiation has spread from the reactors and readings seem "very high."
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Japan PM Kan: "Every possible method has been used to cool the reactor..."
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Please listen calmly, Kan says.
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Prime Min. Kan speaking now to the citizens of Japan.
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Kyodo: 2 USFJ pumping vehicles heading for Fukushima.
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martyn_williams Martyn Williams
by W7VOA
@
@W7VOA Heard the same, especially European crews
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I think this premature over-react but told that bosses of some int'l news crews in Sendai ordered them to evac to the North amid rad fears.
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NHK: Prime Min. Kan will have a "message" at 1100 (40 mins. from now).
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Japan chief gov't spokesman to meet with reporters in 45 min. Also we're expecting a statement to the nation from Prime Min. Kan soon.
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Nikkei has dropped to 9000 level.
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Kyodo: Fukushima's No. 2 reactor container damaged, radiation leak feared.
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Kyodo quotes TEPCO for first time admitting possibility of a "meltdown" at Fukushima-1
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RT @martyn_williams: Tokyo's Nikkei down 5% at 9:20. Follows 6% drop on Monday.
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Radiologists say the average person is usually exposed to about 1000 µSv/hr annually.
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Recorded rad peak emission of 8217 µSv/hr this morning At Fukushima-1 is 8x/legal limit.
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Nikkei now down about 400 points.
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Japan's benchmark stock index, the Nikkei, drops 2% at Tuesday's open.
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TEPCO: All workers being evacuated except those critical for trying to cool the reactor.
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Japan Nucl. & Industrial Safety Agency: Reactor's pressure-suppression system likely damaged
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But rad level at Fukushima-1 No. 2 reactor exceeded legal limit about 3 hrs ago.
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TEPCO: Water level rises to cover 1.2 m of No. 2 reactor's fuel rods. That's the good news...
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Fukushima nuke crisis worsening...
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My VOA report on how Sendai is struggling to hang on: http://bit.ly/fWThDF
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This one lasting a long time but not super strong.
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Another aftershock now at 0300 Tuesday.
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Kyodo: Fate of several tens of thousands of people, including about 8,000 residents of Otsuchi in Iwate-ken, remains unknown.
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Latest on US Navy support to quake/tsunami relief ops: http://bit.ly/f5J0jo
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The latest auto-prediction broadcast nationwide looks like a false alarm.
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Initial P-wave forecasting is known as the Tsuboi method. Warnings are broadcast automatically on national TV/radio in Japan.
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Nothing shaking here in Fukushima.
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Usually quite accurate...
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P-wave data allows for broadcast warnings before actual shaking happens.
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Quake warning now.
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TEPCO: Radiation 2x max seen so far detected at Fukushima nuke plant.
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TEPCO: Fuel rods fully exposed again at No. 2 reactor of Fukushima-1 nuke plant.
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Japan nuke agency now says fuel rods at Fukushima Reactor No. 2 were fully exposed for 2.5 hrs.
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Japan's top gov't spokesman says Fukushima's three reactors highly likely facing melting.
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Report from Sendai: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/Fatalities-Destruction-Litter-Japans-Tsunami-hit-Northeast-Coast-117923119.html
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Kyodo: Steam being released at No. 2 reactor of Fukushima nuke plant.
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Kyodo: Fuel rods at No. 2 reactor of Fukushima No. 1 nuke plant now fully exposed.
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Kyodo: Fuel rods at No. 2 reactor of Fukushima No. 1 nuke plant partially exposed.
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Epicenter in Ibaraki-ken it seems. M 4.8 at depth of 30 km. Nothing to fret about compared to the other aftershocks.
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Significant shaking again here now in Tohoku region.
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Vegetable prices have doubled since Friday in Sendai.
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RT @bizbayron: #NYTimes reports #USS Ronald Reagan passed through a radiation cloud in #Japan, crew on deck exposed.
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Nagano-ken quake warning now.
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M6.3 quake in Tohoku.
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Shindo 3 quake Iwate, Miyagi, Yamagata, Fukushima.
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Moderate aftershock in Tohoku region?
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Seeing street signs shaking in Sendai right now.
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Almost no restaurants open in Sendai. Now at Nakau -- only choice is kare udon, small or large. Hot water to drink, even no tea.
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Huge lines downtown Sendai at the few clothing stores, markets open.,
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Will post more photos from Sendai, along with reports, later Monday at voanews.com
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At Port of Sendai. Literally many hundreds of vehicles smashed together. Destruction in every direction. http://plixi.com/p/83900253
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Walking through path of tsunami in Sendai. Flattened buildings, overturned and crushed cars, mud everywhere. Eerie silence.
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We're heading to another tsunami devastation site near Sendai airport.
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Alarm over new tsunami as media relayed reports of incoming wave, including from gov't minister tasked with disasters.
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JMA says no tsunami but NHK reporting helo pilot observed incoming big wave and we can't move closer to the coast until police get clear sig
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I'm 3km from coast at Sendai. Tsunami observed incoming to south of us in Fukushima-ken.
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Being stopped by police where tsunami hit Friday in Sendai. Another large tsunami may hit momentarily.
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RT @HirokoTabuchi: Radiation Detected 60 Miles From Fukushima http://nyti.ms/iil46O
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1,000 bodies just reported found on shore here in Miyagi Pref.'s Ojika Peninsula.
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Entering Sendai.
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Fresh big quake in Tokyo.
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Just entered Miyagi Pref. On the expressway closed to public. Convoys of JASDF military vehicles, ambulances, water trucks heading north.
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Common sign here in Fukushima City: "No Gasoline" #jpquake http://plixi.com/p/83853549
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Kyodo: BOJ injects 7 tril. yen into short-term money market over quake concerns
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Japan TOPIX stock index now down 7%.
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Empty shelves at Family Mart, Fukushima City. http://plixi.com/p/83850029
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Nikkei stock index plunges 2% at Monday open.
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Higher than normal rad levels from Fukushima were around 0220 JST Monday. We're told no new nuke plant explosions, however.
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Will head to Sendai from Fukushima this morning. Expecting spotty 3G coverage so maybe few tweets during my Mo… (cont) http://deck.ly/~bTeXH
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Fukushima tremor now different than the Ibaraki one a few minutes ago.
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Only a Shindo 2 this latest one in Fukushima.
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And now we're rolling here again in Fukushima at 0721.
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Quake is in Ibaraki -- M4.3. Very small compared to recent aftershocks.
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Quake south of us in Tokyo just now. Shindo 3 - Ibaraki.
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Kyodo: Radiation level again tops legal limit at Fukushima No. 1 nuke plant. #Japan
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TEPCO: Unprecedented power cuts for Tokyo area to begin at 1000 JST today. #Japan
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US NRC: Available info indicates weather conditions have taken the small releases from Fukushima reactors out to sea away from population.
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Kyodo now reporting issues at yet another Japan nuke power plant -- this one in Tokai where FD says cooling system pumps have stopped.
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Have kept NHK on all night in hotels since Friday, so as able to react instantly. Tonight will be night #3. Expecting aftershocks.
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Founder Patrick Newell closing Tokyo International School for the week saying "challenging times in Tokyo no… (cont) http://deck.ly/~QOgNt
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JT: Communications circuits to get worse in quake-hit areas in days ahead - http://bit.ly/hV89ZJ #Japan
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No, really, the erupting volcano is nothing to worry about after a mega-quake, tsunami and nuke plant failures - http://bit.ly/eyJPRv #Japan
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Estimated final quake/tsunami death toll for Japan, based on various officials' comments, varies now between 3,000 and 10,000+.
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Yonhap: South Korea redirected some incoming shipments of LNG to Japan to help address potential energy shortages.
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US State Dept.: U.S. citizens should avoid travel to #Japan at this time.
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RT @japantimes: PDF of scheduled power outages http://ow.ly/4doYW In Japanese only for now.
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Here's link to the French Embassy advisory: http://bit.ly/gEVXHD
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Reuters: France urges its citizens to leave Tokyo - http://reut.rs/gdkQ1z
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I'll have something to tweet about the French Embassy thing in a minute.
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My latest VOA report from Fukushima: http://bit.ly/hjl57x #nuclear
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Kyodo: Rolling blackouts in Japan might continue through end of next month.
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It's M6.0 at depth of 10km.
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Miyagi, Yamagata, Fukushima strongest hit by this latest aftershock.
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It's a big one right now. Whole hotel is shaking.
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Again another aftershock -- it's getting bigger.
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All foreign correspondents I've met here remarking on the amazing grace of the Japanese people in face of suc… (cont) http://deck.ly/~x0nY7
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Prime Min. Kan tonight acknowledged the obvious: Japan facing worst crisis since WW2.
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Another aftershock again we're feeling now in Fukushima. Not so strong.
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TEPCO: Rolling blackouts for Japan from tomorrow. Every regional utility to share burden, take turns of 3 hour outages.
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I lived in Japan for total of 18 years & only remember electricity going off once or twice.
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NHK sagely explaining how one of the problems with transferring power along the electric grid is due to fac… (cont) http://deck.ly/~N6Xhn
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Chief gov't spokesman's words, reading between the lines, not reassuring about fate of Fukushima #3 reactor.
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Japan gov't admits food relief for quake/tsunami-hit areas not adequate.
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Kan says the situation here in Fukushima with the nuke plants is very serious.
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Prime Min. Kan calls for Japanese to conserve electricty amid shortage due to quake, nuke reactors damage.
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Kan says 12,000 people rescued so far.
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Kan is speaking from his office as word comes that the official confirmed death toll has surpassed 1,000. #jpquake
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Prime Min. Kan speaking to Japan now.
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Shindo 3 in Iwate-ken.
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A larger aftershock now.
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RT @PacificFleet: USS Tortuga on way to Otaru where it will onload 700 JGSDF personnel & deliver them to Akita #JPquake
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JMA announcing all #tsunami alerts canceled for Japanese Pacific coast. A bit of good news finally.
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It's a Shindo 3 in Iwate-ken apparently.
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It's shaking again here in Fukushima, a long smooth roll this time -- that tells me a strong quake but far away.
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Scene at radiation monitoring station in Koriyama, Fukushima-ken: http://bit.ly/hZovbV #nuclear
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Shaking here in Koriyama, Fukushima. Not very big compared to previous aftershocks.
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kenji_rikitake Kenji Rikitake
by W7VOA

Miyagi Police Dept Chief said the death in the prefecture will exceed 10,000; 379 bodies are recovered as of noon (NHK http://is.gd/qiwot3)
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We're in Koriyama, where Fukushima evacuees are being checked for radiation exposure. http://plixi.com/p/83652095
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That's JMA upgrade, not USGS: RT @jlehane3: @W7VOA Quake now upgraded to 9.0 FRI
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @n1vux: @W7VOA your source is consistent with @arclight and @badastronmer 's student's father
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Nuke vet says fuel pins cracked releasing cesium 137 & iodone 131.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @martyn_williams: 70% chance of Magnitude 7-class quake in next three days, 50% chance for three days after that - Japan Met Agency
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

@
@MikeWHoll Nuke vet is Japanese without inside info about history of the plants and industry.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

But he says cooling failure is a terrible situation. Predicts Reactor-1 at Fukushima-1 can never be used again. Removal will be "big issue."
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Nuke vet says Japan gov't taking conservative steps but from scientific standpoint the announced rad readings are not signficant.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Nuke vet says no one ever planned for tsunami above 2m high at Fukushima. But waves were 4 to 7m and wiped out power system.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

...but says "partial meltdown" not responsible term for journalists to use as no one can see inside reactor vessel to confirm.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Did background phone interview with respected, retired nuke power plant expert. Terms situation as likely partial core damage to reactor...
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

My latest VOA story on web (might be a bit out-dated already): http://bit.ly/dMMdwD #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

84 y.o. woman nuke evacuee in shelter just tried to give me her rice ball lunch! She says I have a handsome face! #Fukushima
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @martyn_williams: Sat. explosion occurred when hydrogen that was being vented from containment vessel mixed with oxygen - MOFA official
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Gov't says rad level briefly at 1,200ms at Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Thanks to Red Cross volunteer they'll get rice balls, water today. But not bath/shower facilities.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

There are about 2,000 evacuees here in Miharu, from Futaba, Okuma and Tomioka towns around Fukushima nuke plants.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Miharu town: nuke evacuees watching TV report about radiation around their homes. http://plixi.com/p/83609534
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Kyodo: Fukushima plant radiation at 882 micro sievert vs 500 allowable in 1 hour.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Many DM/replies to me asking whether/how many reactors melting down here. I'm in no position to give definitive answer right now.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Looks like M6.3 or 6.4. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Also Shindo 4 Ibaraki. Here in Fukushima in car didn't notice it.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Strong quake in Kanto -- Shindo 4 in Chiba.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Spoke w- nuke evacuee at 7-11 in Koriyama. Says doesn't trust gov't info. Understands need to avoid panic but he asks gov't to reveal all.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Empty shelves at 7-11 in Koriyama, Fukushima-ken. A lot of beer, coffee in can still left. #jpquake http://plixi.com/p/83587059
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Traveling in car with NPR reporter & Spain's Ponto Radio correspondent. As the only one who speaks Japanese I'm the interpreter! #Fukushima
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Heading east in Fukushima trying to reach evacuees from radiation exclusion zone.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Latest jolt was at depth of 10km and M6.2.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Also Shindo 4 here in Fukushima-ken.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Strongest jolt was in Yamagata-ken.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

This is a good shake -- big throughout Tohoku region.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Major aftershock NOW
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Chief govt't spokesman now briefing reporters again in Tokyo about nuke emergencies. Watching on TV from Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

So please check the voanews.com site from time to time to see my updates from Fukushima. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Updating my VOA stories on the nuke emergency here in Fukushima. I don't have net access to post the link to my stories....
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Two significant aftershocks here Sunday morning in last 20 mins. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Unless more aftershocks stir us we're crawling in the futon at only open ryokan we found near Fukushima airport for few hours of sleep.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Apologies for not replying to every query. No internet here so no Tweetdeck to follow DM's etc. Doing everything off of my Blackberry.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Newest aftershock in NE Japan: M6.1 at depth of 30km.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

This is just surreal -- the aftershocks are coming more frequently tonight.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

4 on Japanese scale in Aomori.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

We're feeling it here in Fukushima -- rolling motion, subtle.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Hitting Iwate now -- north of us.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Another quake warning now for Iwate!
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Sakaimura just got hit at 2335JST with a 5- on Japan scale (recorded as M4.4 Richter).
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

It was M4.3 -- didn't feel it here in Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

It's farther south than predicted -- in Ibaraki, 3 on Japan scale. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

We're about to get hit again according to JMA warning being broadcast.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Fresh #tsunami warning issued for NE Japan Pacific coast.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Yet another aftershock in nearby Miyagi: M5.8.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @martyn_williams: 3 civilians in Fukushima w- radiation poisoning. Were outside awaiting rescue nr plant at time of explosion - NHK
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @martyn_williams: Magnitude 6.0, 40 kms under the Pacific Ocean off Japan's eastern coast - JMA via NHK
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @SHIMADEN: @W7VOA 5 Lower Japan shake scale in Hamadori, Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Big big aftershock in Fukushima now!
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @AmbassadorRoos: US military is prepared to augment Japanese Self Defense Forces with all available assets & equipment upon request.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

We're feeling an aftershock now in Fukushima. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

In Fukushima-ken. We have 3G mobile sig but no internet access. Most places have no water. Electricity on however. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Japan Prime Min. Kan to address nation momentarily.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Another quake just hit about 7 mins. ago in Ichinoseki, Iwate-ken. 4 on Japanese shake scale.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Another strong quake hitting -- Nagano-ken.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Evac radius around Fukushima nuke plant expanded to 20km.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

How ironic: at 7/11 in Fukushima there's a donation box for relief for the earthquake...in New Zealand.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Evac area around affected Fukushima nuke plant expanded to 10km from 3km.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Chief Cabinet Sect'y Eda in Tokyo now speaking to reporters about the Fukushima nuke incident.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Loud explosion at Fukushima nuke plant.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Japan nuke agency says pressure successfully released from Fukushima No. 1 reactor. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

We have landed at Fukushima. #jpquake
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @tmiyagi: The #Japan Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency website is http://kinkyu.nisa.go.jp/ (via @buvery)
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

kenji_rikitake Kenji Rikitake
by W7VOA

JR East: Jouetsu/Nagano Shinkansen bullet train will operate from 4pm (NHK TV)
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

I'm hoping we'll find an ample supply of potassium iodide after we land in Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

It's my job. RT @MichaelCromer: .@W7VOA Dude, you SURE you want to fly into that beast's belly?
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

AP quotes experts saying if nuke meltdown, risk zone is 6km radius. #Fukushima #Japan
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Japanese media report radioactive cesium detected near Fukushima plant quoting nuke safety commission.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Kyodo also reporting that Fukushima plant may be experiencing meltdown. #Japan
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

(AP) - Japan nuclear safety commission official says meltdown at nuke power plant possible
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

We're at the gate at Itami for a flight to Fukushima due to depart in 30 minutes. Let's see if they let us fly into the belly of the beast.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

martyn_williams Martyn Williams
by W7VOA

RT @dicklp: Nuclear expert tells The Times: meltdown has technically begun at Fukushima.
12 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

TEPCO warning of blackouts today for wide areas of Japan as electricity in short supply. #jpquake
11 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Along with Spanish ABC correspondent and NPR reporter from Seoul, in cab en route Itami airport, rushing to catch plane to Fukushima.
11 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @SHIMADEN: Emergency communication on ham radio at 7.043 MHz SSB in #Japan.
11 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

RT @dicklp: Testing the road north of Tokyo. Tohoku Expressway is still closed. #jpquake
11 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

I'm at 関西国際空港 (Kansai International Airport) ✈ (泉州空港北１番地, 泉佐野市) w/ 4 others http://4sq.com/flqkq2
11 Mar Favorite Retweet Reply

Coming soon to each nation, its own internet

2011-03-12T11:45:00.002-05:00

by Philip J Cunningham

When reveille sounds, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

The US military is now thinking of ways to block and segregate the internet into smaller ‘‘cyber nations’’ which would be easier to monitor and control.

During this era of incessant online babble, blogs, tweets and cacophonous concatenations, the internet has become a virtual Tower of Babel, an ambitious, overloaded unitary structure breaking at the seams. It's only a matter of time before it crumbles.

That, in a nutshell, is the view put forward by a group of US military thinkers in the latest issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly, who see the breaking up and "Balkanisation of the Internet" as natural as it is inevitable, and not without public benefit, assuming that the 'Net reorganises along traditional, nationalistic lines.

Theirs is a clarion call to end the utopian, universal stage of internet development and instead to hunker down and build national bunkers.

The internet has been imbued with a feel-good idealism since its inception, despite it having been a quasi-military invention. It was developed by a generation familiar with John Lennon's utopian lullaby Imagine, dreamily invoking the idea of a world with no countries. And some cyber utopians took a cue from that, driven by the concept that "information wants to be free", a formulation first given voice by Stewart Brand and dramatically acted out more recently by Julian Assange.

But even if information wants to be free, there are the vagaries of human nature that have to be taken into account.
Just as a handful of hijackers can burden millions of jet flyers, in the communication commons the bad behaviour of a few can change the rules of the game; trolls lurk in comment sections, spammers clog up your inbox, data-miners violate your privacy, hackers close your system down.

These problems are being addressed on an ad hoc basis, mostly by the private sector, to make the cooperative, interdependent venture known as the internet safe for commerce and communication.

And then there is the US military, which has bigger fish to fry.

Entrusted with the keys to the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, bound by social contract to guard the nation with vigilance, it should come as no surprise that military thinkers are more worried about information control than information freedom.
The US Cyber Command, which works closely with the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, is tapping technology organisations such as Google, Intel and Microsoft for help with cyber-defence, integrating traditional concepts of military preparedness and defence of the state with new borderless technologies.

If military thinkers tend to be more orthodox in their regard for the sanctity of national borders, it is in part a reflection of the role they assign themselves to play as defenders of the nation.

Where a tech geek might revel in faster computation speeds and an advertiser might obsess over ways to get more clicks, and academics might demand unfettered freedom of expression, it is natural that military thinkers should want to consider the same technology with an eye to violations of sovereignty and security, especially with regard to command and control systems and energy infrastructure.

Inspired by the folk wisdom that good fences make good neighbours, there is a school of thought in the US military that posits a not-so-distant future in which the worldwide web will be divided up along national lines.

The Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age, authored by Chris C Demchak and Peter Dombrowski for the spring 2011 issue of the Strategic Studies Quarterly argues that the internet at present is too open and too unguarded. Cyberspace, when compared to the contours of natural space, can be understood as an under-regulated domain replete with badlands and bandits, a frontier to be tamed and subdivided.

While the closing of the free-wheeling electronic frontier will be an unmitigated loss for utopian information gurus, journalists, anarchists and many activists, for the hard-nosed military at least, but probably also some big corporate players as well, a fractured and fenced-in internet may be welcomed as a positive development.

A cyberspace cleaved into sub-divisions that hew close to traditional national boundaries would, according to military scholars Demchak and Dombrowski, offer the promise of enhanced social stability, international security and better economic returns.

Citing the "lead" taken by China -the Great Firewall of China is uncharacteristically described matter-of-factly for its effectiveness rather than being demonised as the enemy of freedom- the authors argue that controlling the internet within national borders is within technological reach for the United States as well.

They even go so far as to reference the Chinese view that characterises "Westernised social media as subversive tools" and sees the hand of "diplomatic subversion in any US-sponsored discussions of open internet".

In sum, to each nation its own internet.

If this comes to pass, it will represent a paradigm shift comparable to the establishment of the Westphalian nation state system in 1648, which was introduced to regulate an amorphous world with crisply demarcated boundaries, a concept that has captured the imagination of political and military thinkers ever since.

Even those who shudder at a Westphalian notion for the Net would agree that the wobbly status quo cannot continue as is.
The old information order, of which print journalism was once a significant pillar, and the internet now a centrepiece, is starting to collapse even as the new information order struggles to take shape and find its way.

At the US Cyber Command, the most unlikely of apocalyptic scenarios are taken seriously. The spectre of invasive malware and the possibility of malicious attacks on national infrastructure, waged with a high degree of secrecy and thus impunity, from a distance, keeps military internet experts up at night, even as it helps guarantee funding for their day jobs.

The malicious release of the border-crossing malware has jumped from annoying, costly hacks and denials-of-service to concerted attacks on infrastructure.

The mysterious Stuxnet virus, credited with infecting and damaging Iran's nuclear research facilities, is singled out by the authors as an extremely dangerous precedent; they see it as nothing less than the crossing of the Rubicon into the realm of real cyber warfare.

What we think of as "internet freedom" today may turn out in retrospect to have been but a brief, under-regulated free-for-all, a rough and ready "Wild, Wild West" in which information was free to travel anywhere and virtually free of cost to access.

Internet control gates at present may swing as freely as the half-hinged doors to a Deadwood saloon, but already one can hear the pitch of travelling salesmen offering to replace flimsy gates with deadbolts and locks, as a defence against a world too threatening for unrestricted free access.

A showdown corral is looming. It will take time for digital fences to be constructed and guarded, border posts to be installed, but once they're up, there will be less room to rove for the digital frontiersmen of today.

The bugle of military vigilance has sounded. If heeded, the utopian dream of a unitary internet, open to all and global in scope, will recede into the unreachable future faster than romantic notions of a world without boundaries and a brotherhood of man.

(as published in the Bangkok Post, March 12, 2011)

ADVERTISING THE AMERICAN WAY

2011-02-20T20:19:00.003-05:00

PHILIP J. CUNNINGHAM

I first encountered Hillary Clinton in China at a reception held at the US Embassy in Beijing in July 1998 when she and her husband, the President, were being feted on a state visit. While the voluble Bill Clinton shook hands and chatted with the guests, she stood back in the shadows, like a wallflower. They went on to enjoy an extended stay in China, comfortably distant from the noise of US internet-driven opprobrium for an alleged scandal that need not be detailed here. In short, she got fried by American Internet freedom and found temporary respite in China. Those were the days when you could escape a vast right-wing conspiracy, the drone attacks of Drudge Reports and the salacious gotcha journalism of CBS and CNN by getting on an airplane.

On February 15, 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech on Internet freedom. Although the Wikileaks case found the US government awkwardly on the “wrong” side of the rousing topic of Internet freedom, she has tried to downplay the obvious hypocrisy of her stance — in short, anything that serves US government interests is enlightened Internet policy — while portraying the Obama political team and its corporate allies as model global citizens on the road to human rights and freedom, never mind the bloody wars raging on in the background.

It used to be thought that what was good for General Motors was good for America. GM, because of the decline of US manufacturing, is a shell of its former self, but Google has emerged as a national mascot, the new pet poodle of American high-tech evangelists. The US promotion of Internet freedom cannot be taken at face value, especially after the frantic efforts made to block and discredit Wikileaks.

Instead, US official rhetoric about Internet freedom is rather code for “do it our way”, which itself can be parsed to mean: “Do as we say, not as we do.”

In fact, Clinton’s latest lecture to the world conflates the idea of Internet freedom with advertising freedom. Her speech is like the start gun in a global race for advertising revenue in which the US has a leg up and has taken an early lead.

What really counts for crony capitalists, inside the Beltway and out, is not so much the freedom of speech but the freedom to advertise, which promotes slavish materialism and ultimately an irresponsible, apolitical way of life. Making the world safe for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo means granting them the freedom to collect and analyze more of your private data in order to their boost ad revenue.

In this context, Hillary Clinton’s speech came off like a partisan pep-talk for US business abroad -- ill-conceived, unnecessary and unbecoming—akin to the diplomatic gaffe made by George Bush Senior in 1992 when he used the presidential pulpit to shill for “Toys R Us” during a Japan summit. To insist that the world wire itself according to US specifications, however, is more than hypocritical. It’s begging for blowback and unintended consequences that go far beyond the indignity of foisting US-style big box shopping on reluctant Japanese consumers.

Granted, America’s top diplomat has a tough job, especially given the precipitous decline in US prestige in the last decade. And a Secretary of State does not enjoy much freedom of speech, as she or he serves at the pleasure of the president, in this case, the hip, hi-tech Barack Obama who utilized Silicon Valley support to get elected President.

There’s something wistful about idyll of a beleaguered Hillary Clinton in Beijing in the summer of 1998, basking in the restful, and respectful attention of her Chinese hosts at a time when America’s nascent Internet was raking her husband over the coals for relations with an intern. Researching the Chinese press at the time for articles in Nieman Reports and the Media Studies Journal, I was surprised at just how “polite” Chinese coverage of US politics was. In contrast to the American media’s mass feeding frenzy on semen-stained dresses and the like, there was nary a mention of Monica Lewinsky in the Chinese press. Now some would say that’s censorship, and by American press standards it might well be. But is an absolute free-for-all the only way to go? Aren’t there also valid questions of decorum and maybe just old-fashioned editing?

One doesn’t have to agree with the particulars of Internet controls in China to agree that the Internet need not open all the floodgates or be ubiquitous or identical in every last corner of the globe in line with Clinton’s proclamation. The call to impose American-style “Internet freedom” on the rest of the world smacks of self-interest dressed up as humanitarian ideology. Far from offering a level playing field, the “free” transmission of information and entertainment as outlined by Ms. Clinton would favor established players with deep pockets and technological prowess, not unlike “free trade”, another American obsession.

In any case, it’s important to distinguish between the free flow of ideas as advocated by upstarts like Wikipedia and Wikileaks, and the corporate giants who rake in the profits while claiming the high ground of Internet evangelism. Facebook is a corporate behemoth, not a pillar of free speech, ditto for Google and Yahoo. These firms examine and manipulate personal details of people’s lives, and are essentially gigantic ad agencies masquerading as communication gurus. No sooner did Google acquire YouTube, a bustling hub of user-donated cultural product, than it started littering the entire site with obnoxious popup ads.

China, like any sovereign state, has the right to resist honey-voiced US calls to adopt a US-style Internet strategy, just as it has the right to keep multinational firms with questionable ethical standards at arm’s length, especially data-mining firms that trade private information for corporate profit.

If the US Internet giants get their way, we will all become as vulnerable as besieged public figures, like Hillary Clinton was during that low point in her husband’s presidency, when hardly a word, movement, transaction or sigh could be uttered without being pored over and analyzed by others.

Bolstered by the elixir of power, Ms. Clinton is now sounding the trumpet in favor of Internet data-miners who are tearing down walls of decorum, stripping away common decency and eroding the integrity of the individual.

Meanwhile, the Internet billionaires are using their new-found ad riches to buy the very privacy for themselves that their business models deny to others. Hidden behind their fortified mansions, teams of bodyguards, legions of lawyers and impenetrable bureaucratic walls, guarded Internet evangelists peddle intrusive technology, stripping away the privacy of the man and woman on the street, putting the hoi polloi on a par with the celebrities of yesteryear, but without the compensatory perks and privileges of celebrity.

THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A BIG DEMONSTRATION

2011-02-10T16:28:00.003-05:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(as published in the Bangkok Post, February 12, 2011)

Every uprising is different. But given the shared human capacity for hope, fear, courage and transformative change, certain patterns emerge. Whenever unarmed citizens take to the streets to challenge an entrenched regime, the courage and danger of the quixotic, asymmetrical quest strikes a common chord.

Already the 2011 uprising in Egypt has been compared to Iran in 1979, China in 1989, while it also bears some resemblance to people power revolts in Thailand and the Philippines. Tunisia’s recent upheaval was perhaps the most direct inspiration, but similarities with all of the above can be seen even though each upheaval unfolds in its own way.

In Cairo, crowd dynamics, crowd control, random chaos and organized resistance are playing out in ways that are not entirely unfamiliar.

Here are some things to look for:

-Truth as a casualty. In social conflict, the media comes under pressure from day one. Competing narratives battle it out, pitting the storytelling skills of the authorities against those of the protestors. What starts with banners and slogans against the state-controlled press begins to even out as the story becomes too big to ignore. Thereafter smoke and fire follow, with heartfelt cries for justice and moments of startling clarity amidst outright deceptions and cover-ups.

-TV stations as key links. Television is so effective a transmitter of information (including mis-information, mis-direction, enforced taboos and telling zones of silence) that it can, even under the boot of state control, inadvertently fan the flames of nationwide protest. Satellite and Internet TV offer alternate views. Al Jazeera, despite being banned and burned down in Cairo, has done a superlative job covering recent events.

-Orwellian censorship. The odd scent of censored news doesn’t pass the sniff test. That which was intended to pacify instead has an incendiary effect. When Egypt state TV blamed the unrest on foreigners, the conspicuous failure to mention the crowd’s singular demand for Mubarak to step down resounded louder than all the empty talk.

-Reporters and citizen journalists at risk. Be it reflexive fear of exposure or simply a vengeful way of blaming the messenger, dedicated truth-tellers often get roughed up as public disturbances unfold.

-Journalists, local and foreign, have different roles to play and different audiences to speak to, thus offering divergent views on the significance of what is happening.

-Information redundancy. If one technology fails, or is blocked, multiple ways of transmitting the news remain. The information ecosystem includes everything from cellphones to landlines, from email to hand-painted banners, chants, slogans and word of mouth.

-Social networking is not a revolt. It may be the case that messages sent out by a handful of cyber activists were critical in getting young people out on the streets of Cairo on January 25, 2011, but there is a also a great deal of wishful thinking, a kind of wide-eyed digital evangelism on the part of young netizens who would like to believe that the technologies that happened to come of age when they were teens are innately good and going to rock the world. One influential activist, a Google employee, naively compared Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to Mahatma Gandhi.

-Technology is neutral. As with the advent of moveable type, the telephone or television, new technology makes new patterns of interaction possible, but it’s not necessarily on the side of the angels. The hype about the “Twitter revolution” in Iran in 2009 propagated by the US State Department and sensational media mavens has since been debunked, just as Google’s clumsy maneuvers in China reveal a conflation of ad agency business with utopian idealism.

-Surveillance. Digitized information transmission and storage creates an information trail that permits surveillance and processing of self-incriminating detail at a level that the KGB and Stasi could only dream about. Everyone’s recording everyone else.

-Politics and media have always gone hand in hand, but today the tango is being speeded up, shaped and shifted by an abundance of actionable information in real time. The fact that the Internet was “turned off” by the Egyptian authorities speaks to the fear of politicized networking and unobstructed information flow. Ditto for the US reaction to Wikileaks.

- A world in which Internet access is universal is not a level playing field. The US may be skittish about security leaks but is otherwise bullish on the Internet. In contrast, less powerful governments react to the Internet in more tyrannical ways, fearing that which they have yet to master. Americans have long since mastered the art of co-existing with free speech. Washington has long been adept at producing PR, spinning away its troubles, maintaining a monopoly on violence and otherwise retaining political control, all of which gives it an edge in the brave new world of cyberspace.

-When a large crowd manages to gather against all odds, success breeds success. The mathematics of it can be exponential. If ten, a hundred, a thousand brave individuals get away with the impossible, a million might follow.

-Something in the air. When a large crowd asserts itself in a public space, it creates political space and with it new political breezes. An indefinable “something in the air” can kick-start a major uprising. Under the natural evolution of such circumstances, the crowd is likely to be diverse and composed of people from all walks of life.

-When the numbers soar, one is tempted to think one is on the right side of history, however illusory that aura might be. Suddenly, there’s a seductive chance to hit society’s reset button.

-The art of the unexpected. Protests, partly of necessity, burst forth without much advance warning, turning the table on status quo power arrangements at home and abroad. Power brokers scramble to catch up with footsteps on the street, often awkwardly, suddenly face to face with fearless discontents who can no longer be haughtily dismissed or ignored.

-Play-acting is part of the game. An arrogant regime may show an unexpected willingness to talk and make concessions to buy time and seek an escape route, not unlike a rich man accosted in an alley by an angry gang of paupers.

-Order in chaos. A diverse, unscripted crowd, though difficult to control, is not in a state of chaos but subtly governed by unspoken laws based on shared idealism, cultural assumptions and common habits of mind.

-In the tentative early stages of a demonstration, mass demands are likely to focus on a single goal, but as violent reprisals further energize and infuriate, crowd demands are likely to escalate and multiply.

-Absolute dedication to non-violence gives a mass demonstration both integrity and coherence. Crowds that harbor snipers and armed militants are corrupted, corroded and betrayed from within. While a moral crowd must police itself, and protect itself, it needs be on guard against violence from within and without.

-Crowd leadership. Who shall lead? Shall violence be met with passive resistance, withdrawal or action? Will extremists allow moderates to win the day? When a core leadership at last emerges, the crowd is apt to lose its innocence; rebels become politicians, for better or worse.

-Not all demonstrations are good, not all entrenched bureaucracies are bad. As street fighting-weary denizens of Bangkok know all too well, crowds can be uplifting and crowds can be menacing, sometimes both at the same time. When activists adopt colors and compete with rival activists, the pretence of unity and ability to speak on behalf of the people is gone.

-Big demonstrations in a nation’s capital assume a symbolic importance that reverberates into the hinterland, as was seen with the student-led protests in Beijing in 1989 that inspired sympathetic protests in many cities across China. On a more negative note, the torching of buildings in Bangkok in May 2010 stimulated copycat actions in several distant provinces on the part of aligned agitators.

-Hijacking the crowd. Non-violent social action directed at social injustice may be entirely well-intended, but there are unexpected consequences. Peaceful demonstrators can be out-muscled or hijacked by more ruthless elements with a narrow clarity of vision and superior organization skills.

-Cultural identity is up for grabs. When willfully distorted and narrowly defined by fundamentalists and xenophobes, cultural definitions reduce freedom. In Egypt, Mubarak has fostered a cult of Pharaonic overtones, eliding his identity with the history of a proud nation.

-Family ties. As Egypt’s new Vice-President Omar Suleiman says, “We all respect Mubarak as father.” When a politician under fire is compared to a parent, the implication is that any resistance would be unfilial, if not futile.

-Foreign meddling. To blame problems on foreigners is a common enough diversionary tactic, though in the case of Egypt it’s a nakedly hypocritical complaint. The Mubarak regime itself is the product of 30 years of foreign meddling as it has been backed and bolstered by Washington with billions of US taxpayer dollars.

-Army neutrality. In times of civic distress, the army's strength is paradoxically best shown by utter restraint, strict neutrality and the ability to restrain violent outbreaks without resorting to violence. If and when the army draws blood, it becomes tainted by perceptions of partisanship and weakens its legitimacy as protector of all citizens. The army is too blunt an instrument to be used in a citizen crackdown.

-Lack of an exit strategy. Shared risks taken in pursuit of common dreams create intoxicating bonds of comradeship. Thus it is difficult to convince those who have been energized by the whiff of danger and hypnotic pull of the crowd to yield to authorities or cede the “holy” occupied ground.

-The drug-like high of a being caught up in a human whirlwind that is part carnival, part killing field, set out in the open under the sun and the moon, makes the idea of packing up and going home seem like a betrayal, if not surrender. This was evident in Bangkok last May when rank and file members of the red shirt demonstration refused to budge even as approaching gunfire resounded down the road. There were vocal wails of disappointment when the red shirt leaders threw in the towel on May 19, 2010 and surrendered to police.

-Follow the money. Rent-a-mobs paid for by powerful patrons complicate the mix. Taking money and marching orders from billionaires, or their proxies, may allow for a good canteen and satellite uplinks, but it is a short-sighted strategy that erodes the democratic credentials of a movement in the long run.

-Class cleavages. Even if one knew nothing about the years of torture and brutal police controls in Egypt, the obscene corruption of Hosni Mubarak, -personal worth estimated worth between 40 and 70 billion dollars tells you all you need to know about why so many people, and not just the poor, want him out of power.

pc

EMBRACING THE OPPOSITION

2011-02-06T19:29:00.004-05:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

A powerful regime, facing a rare moment of vulnerability, is all of a sudden interested in reform and willing to talk. It invites its arch-enemies to the negotiating table. But once the crowds are gone, what guarantee remains that the police state will not regroup and retrench and strike back with a vengeance?

Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman met with members of the opposition over the weekend. What remains unclear is if the Mubarak regime is sincerely extending an open hand of peace to the opposition, or trying to draw them in close enough so they can be slapped or lured into a trap. Is the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood a heartfelt bid to hear all sides or a plan to sow division in a protest that to date has been notable for being leaderless, secular, spontaneous and youthful?

Given the low esteem with which the Muslim Brotherhood is viewed in Israel, Europe and the US, extending an olive branch to the banned, radical opposition might seem paradoxical at first. But it is sometimes easier for entrenched power to deal with its arch-enemy, the enemy that it knows, and not only knows, but probably needs, as an existential doppelganger. On a certain functional level it may be easier for a ruthless power to deal with, if not respect, another ruthless, tightly organized entity, rather than deal with a random mass of peaceful moderates without a hierarchical political organization.

Certainly in other places, at other times, this paradoxical embrace of the opposite can be seen in effect. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US found it easier to work with Japan’s old wartime elite than the communists, pacifists and trade unionists who opposed Tokyo’s war on Asia. In recent decades, Beijing’s rulers have found it easier to engage the Communist Party of China’s arch-enemy represented by the KMT party on Taiwan, rather than deal respectfully with rag-tag individuals such as Liu Xiaobo, and many thousands of others, who demonstrated at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thus, what appears at first glance a gesture of inclusion on the part of the Egyptian regime might in fact be a bid to exclude the moderate core demonstrators and keep the focus on mutually antagonistic extremes instead.

Suleiman, who has emerged for the moment as Washington’s go-to guy in trying to find a resolution to Egypt’s political impasse, might be acceptable to his foreign interlocutors, but demonstrators on the scene, including Nobel laureate Mohamed El Baradei, tend not to agree. Is it really realistic to expect a regime of thirty years standing and a reputation for brutality to change its game overnight? Is it likely to keep the promises it makes under pressure?

The search to find a stand-in for the Egyptian government who is minimally acceptable to demonstrators, the regime and its foreign allies alike will continue apace.

Meanwhile, Suleiman articulated his bid for recognition by trumpeting a meeting held on his terms with selected members of the opposition. In an English language summary released on February 6, 2011 by his office, the long-standing intelligence chief put forward some promising points, even as veiled threats and dark innuendos were woven into the script.

Suleiman’s official statement offers some valuable clues as to what the regime is thinking right now. The regime has not lost its cool, it is calm and seemingly in control. It puts forward a public relations release that is part complaint, part threat, part a bid to appear reasonable, and part misdirection.

The document reads like the minutes of an "action meeting;" it is at once sophomoric and stifling, full of trumped-up promise and riddled with veiled threats; sort of like a cross between the minutes of a high school student council meeting and a withering assessment made in a US State Department cable of the sort made famous by Wikileaks.

"All participants of the dialogue arrived at a consensus..."

As is usually the case when words are offered in lieu of action, terms that sound good can mean very much or very little, and even words that please the ear can mean different things to different people. The promise to deal with the crisis "seriously, expeditiously and honestly" is hard to find fault with, but what does it mean in concrete terms, given the grim context?

To hear Suleiman bemoaning the "lack of security for the populace" is ironic when the regime itself, which Mr. Suleiman earnestly represents, is the root cause of much insecurity, guilty as it is of unbridled corruption, documented brutality and a reputation for torture.

To buttress the stability-at-any-cost argument that follows, Suleiman's text makes mention of a litany of pressing problems, such as "the disturbances to daily life, the paralysis of public services," along with school closings and logistical delays slyly suggesting that the reaction to regime injustice --the determined and courageous and largely spontaneous gathering of peaceful demonstrators-- is the problem rather than the underlying injustice itself.

Surely Egypt would be less wobbly were Mubarak to resign immediately and enjoy his forty billion dollar private fortune in exile, but that's not the kind of stability Suleiman is alluding to. It is clearly stability with the regime intact that he is after.

Not surprisingly for a public relations statement that aims to create an aura of domestic solidarity while reining in a nationalism gone awry, Suleiman pins the lion’s share of the blame on foreigners, a useful target for rogues everywhere since time immemorial.

"The attempts at foreign intervention into purely Egyptian affairs and breaches of security by foreign elements working to undermine stability in implementation of their plots," is the way he puts it, but it sounds uncannily like McCarthyism dressed up in local clothing. If Mr. Suleiman wants to reduce foreign influence in a nation that depends on tourism for ten percent of its revenue and depends on US taxpayer money to arm itself and stay afloat, he might start with refusing all aid and assistance from the US and Israel.

The text is at times haughty and uncompromising in tone. Suleiman comes across as a proud and fairly dignified figure on TV, and he has an air about him that suggests the hard-to-shake confidence of the ruling class in a country of extreme wealth and poverty. The arrogant tone shifts only briefly with a nice sop to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square. It sounds like a protective mantra, a minimum condition, perhaps one proposed by those members of the opposition present. It's a formulaic line, but one worth remembering: "The 25 January movement is an honorable and patriotic movement."

The official notes on the meeting go on to say, a bit too promisingly, that a high degree of consensus was found "on a number of political arrangements."

This section that follow seems to come in response to President Obama's public statements, calling for meaningful change, now. But it also takes a defiant note, implying some things are non-negotiable, as made evident in Mubarak's mule-like resistance to stepping down, while offering some superficial changes and a promise not to run again. "No nomination for a new presidential term will take place," says the statement. What follows are vague promises of constitutional reform which may be the product of earnest internal discussion, but also serve the purpose of buying time for the regime haunted by a ticking clock.

Clause number 7, which calls for "Restoring the security and stability of the nation, and tasking the police forces to resume their role in serving and protecting the people," certainly sounds like a bid to restore the status quo.

In the past few weeks, the police were rather more part of the problem than a solution to it, alternately engaged in heavy-handed arrests and volatile provocations of the crowd, in tandem with a disappearing act that made their invisibility painfully "visible" in the context of orchestrated looting, prisoner escapes and damage to national treasures including a statue of King Tut. For those who don’t get easily upset at head-cracking, there was the unthinkable threat of damage to priceless artifacts. (This is reminiscent of the “outrage” of the Asia Society in New York during the Vietnam War which had nothing to say about the bombing and napalming of the Cambodian people but got visibly upset at the possibility that the ruins of Angkor Wat might be damaged.)

What turned out to be a minor attack on the National Museum served up an appetite for a dose of law and order, which of course did not bode well for the crowd assembling adjacent to the museum.

The most significant areas of "agreement" that the Suleiman statement puts forward --that of releasing prisoners of conscience, ending emergency law and liberalizing the media with no extra-legal constraints-- certainly sound like welcome changes, but the devil is in the details and the implementation. The document does not promise to release political prisoners, but rather announces “the establishment of a bureau to receive complaints" which in the end might address some long-term miscarriages of justice while leaving others unresolved. What progress such a bureau might achieve would most likely be slow and halting, dragging with the glacial pace common to a bureau wrapped inside of a bureaucracy.

Likewise, for Suleiman to proclaim that the state of emergency will be lifted “based on the security situation” is to say not much at all, unless it happens soon.

The text goes on to offer a salute to the patriotic and loyal role played by Egypt’s Armed Forces, which sounds a bit like a pat on the back, since Mubarak and Suleiman sit on the top of the pyramid of a military regime, but it remains intriguing inasmuch as the army has, to date, behaved better than the police. When it comes to wishful thinking, both the regime and opposition like to think the army is on their side.

The only real clause with bite is the xenophobic stab that follows: "All participants expressed their absolute rejection of any and all forms of foreign intervention in internal Egyptian affairs."

That’s reasonable reaction for a once-colonized nation on a certain level, but it is also blatantly hypocritical, and not just because the Mubarak regime depends on US aid for its survival. Presumably Suleiman is in touch with the US State Department and the White House, and may well be taking into account specific "instructions" issued to his regime that go beyond the timorous, ambiguous, and sometimes backtracked calls for change being made by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in public. Call it diplomacy, or the art of saving face for the rich and powerful.

Overall, the statement leaves one wondering if there’s any daylight between Mubarak and Suleiman at all. Suleiman is part and parcel of, and continues to serve with something akin to abject loyalty, the self-styled modern-day pharaoh Mubarak. Like a loyal consigliere, there’s a touch of humility to the subordinate man’s arrogance, and although titular vice-president, he is quick to disavow any interest in power.

Another dedicated number-two, and coincidentally an old pal of Hosni Mubarak, none other than ex-vice President Dick Cheney, has also joined the fray. He says Mubarak is a loyal friend of the US. No stranger to arrogance himself, Cheney suggests, as he did throughout his campaign to fool the American public and force a war in Iraq, that he is privileged to know things that ordinary citizens can only guess about. In any case, he rather inadvertently drives home the point that the American public is not always aware of what kind of behind-the-scene deals are being made in its name by the White House.

In the end, if the Cairo regime, in this, its moment of desperation, finds foreign influence so truly objectionable, then it would be morally and ideologically consistent to stop accepting the hard-earned dollars of American taxpayers and go it alone, facing the wrath of a people long betrayed, not just by foreigners, but by their own leaders.

EVERY UPRISING IS DIFFERENT

2011-02-04T18:11:00.008-05:00

Philip J Cunningham

Every uprising is different. But given shared human strengths and weaknesses, the dynamics of crowd behavior, crowd control, and crowd chaos play out in ways that strike a common chord. Having written about popular protest, cultural clashes and street marches in East Asia for two decades now, there are certain commonalities that come to fore as the events in Cairo, as reported by Al Jazeera and other Internet sources, unfold in real time on my computer screen.

-Truth is an early casualty of any conflict, and the media comes under pressure almost immediately. Competing media narratives diverge wildly, usually the storytelling of the government pitted against the storytelling of the protesters. Distortions to the truth range from outright lies and censorship, to mudslinging, misdirection and deliberate prevarications. There is obfuscation and startling clarity. There are also moments of heartfelt expression, courageous calls for change and sometimes shocking clandestine reports from the frontlines of the conflict.

-Television stations are a coveted resource for those seeking political control. State television, even when it is reduced to producing propaganda, is such an effective transmitter of information, (including mis-information, mis-direction, taboos and telling silences) in regards to an escalating crisis that it can inadvertently help fan the flames of nationwide protest. Even when the details of a mass incident in progress are garbled or distorted by heavy-handed censorship, the fingerprints of the heavy-handedness are visible for all to see. The odd, Orwellian quality of manipulated news, what with its revved up nationalistic fervor, glaring contradictions, threatening reassurances and a rather too loud pleading of innocence, is politically charged enough to betray meta-truths about the abject nature of the regime.

-Journalists are at risk. Be it for their truth-telling capacity or simply a vengeful way of blaming the messenger, journalists often get roughed up as public disturbances unfold. Journalists are detained and denied access to key locations, often in the name of safety. Western journalists are especially easy to find as they tend to hole up in luxury hotels where they are subject to surveillance, harassment, and confiscation of film, memory chips, cameras, etc.

-Al Jazeera TV. The upstart TV station based in Qatar has come of age, although it observes, like every news service on the earth, certain ground rules and avoids certain sensitive topics. Its unique take on world news is largely ignored by US cable TV providers, but luckily Al Jazeera Internet streaming can reach a truly global audience, providing a service to viewers whose television and cable service is tilted in favor of the national agendas of the traditional media giants such as CNN, BBC, Fox and ABC. In what might be understood as a backhanded compliment, Al Jazeera has been accused of meddling by the Egyptian government.

-The Internet. Online news services, specialist blogs, Twitter and social networking tools have helped get the story out as well. Advanced information technologies, and the costly, complex devices required to view the news on, are convenient when they work well, and they work especially well across borders at global distances, but remain largely out of the reach of the poor and can be rendered momentarily worthless when the plug gets pulled, as was the case in Egypt when the Internet was turned off. The technology itself is neutral, and there are various ingenious ways to get around blocking, but despite the freedom of expression hype, modern tools are no different from the printing press or radio in the sense that they can be used to further things good and bad and can be used to promote the cause of either side through skillful public relations and information control.

-Word of mouth. Fortunately, the information ecosystem is full of diverse platforms and incidental redundancies; if one technology fails, or is blocked, other ways of transmitting information remain. This includes everything from hardy, traditional technologies such as landline telephones and fax machines to hand-painted banners, chants, slogans and word of mouth.

-Rumors. Rightly or wrongly, rumors take the place of reliable information when reliable information is hard to come by. Rumors serve to excite people to action. The more severe information control at home, the more likely agitated citizens are to turn to the latest gossip on the street.

-Crowd dynamics. When a large crowd manages to gather and assemble, especially in an environment where political gatherings are generally banned and ruthlessly suppressed, success breeds success. If ten, a hundred, a thousand brave individuals get away with the impossible, it inspires others to follow.

-Something in the air. When a large crowd asserts itself in public space and coalesces on symbolic ground, a window is opened to possible political change, an opportunity not normally evident. An indefinable “something in the air,” combined with concrete opportunities for assembly, adequate channels for expression and a broad consensus that change is desirable if not necessary, helps kick-start a major public uprising. When this takes the form of staking out contested ground in the heart of the capital its significance is magnified in a way that enables a crowd to grow exponentially. Under the natural evolution of such circumstances, the crowd is likely to be diverse and composed of people from all walks of life.

-Safety in numbers. When the numbers soar to the hundred of thousands, not only do individual members of the crowd begin to feel uncannily safe –however illusory that protective aura might be – but it gives rise to a sense that a historic turning point is at hand. Suddenly, due to a confluence of rising frustration, mutual reinforcement, strength in numbers and chance developments, there’s a perception that an unprecedented and largely unexpected overhaul to the status quo just might be possible. It’s a bid to hit society’s reset button.

-The art of the unexpected. If a protest takes root without much advance warning in a challenging environment, it has succeeded so swiftly and against such odds as to not be taken seriously at first. Rather it is treated like a fluke, something to be haughtily dismissed by men accustomed to the privileges of extreme wealth and supreme power.

-Play-acting is part of the game. Regimes under siege will resort to all sorts of cagey strategies; everything from arrogant claims of noblesse oblige, to lying about their true aims and intentions in order to buy time with which to restore power and sweep up the opposition. “Your demands have been answered,” newly named Vice President Omar Suleiman pre-emptively announced as a clearly unplacated crowd began to gather in earnest on Tahrir Square in Cairo on February 3, 2011.

-Offers of superficial change. Powerful figures will feign ignorance, sympathy, offer up partial apologies and assume a quasi-humble posture in hopes of buying time to regain power. Hosni Mubarak could make a fiction of stepping down by appointing a loyal flunky to act in his stead. Even political theatre that went so far as to appoint an unknown to power, or even a moderate opposition figure would not necessarily be evidence of serious systemic change so long as the levers of control and the powers behind the curtain remained the same.

-Insincere concessions. All sorts of promises might be made with the aim of diffusing popular rage rather than truly negotiating or acceding to popular demands. Then, once the crowd was dispersed and the security forces regained the upper hand, a purge of the opposition would follow. Then the powers that be could quietly re-impose something close to the old, unjust status quo, with the rich as rich as ever, and the police-security elite as powerful as before.

-Blatant intimidation. “Police brutality is… a daily occurrence,” but hidden, according to a US State Department cable made available by Wikileaks. The sort of abuse that was once hidden in police stations, Interior Ministry facilities, and black sites used for extraordinary renditions at the behest of the US during “peaceful” times is now out in the open. Increasingly, callous tactics and shocking abuses of power are taking place in the streets for all to see. Speeding security vans knocking people off their feet have been caught on camera, Molotov cocktails have been thrown at protesters by regime-supporting thugs, while agents-provocateur infiltrate the crowd carrying glossy posters of Mubarak, knives, clubs, even have resorted to using horses and camels to intimidate.

-Crowd solidarity. Crowds look unitary but are in fact a diverse mix. Some individual actors in a crowd are strident believers in a cause, others vaguely sympathetic, some are opportunistic, others just curious, some full of rage, others full of joy, while others still are just hapless commuters and bystanders who get in the way.

-Crowd leadership. When the names and faces of leaders of an uprising are not evident, the confusion makes the movement vulnerable to manipulation or dissolution, even as it lends strength to the impression that the gathering is truly a spontaneous mass movement. When not a scripted disciplined, partisan effort, or a expertly directed demonstration, a crowd is near impossible to control. But a large diverse crowd, even if innocent by its very lack of organization, is vulnerable to being hijacked by better organized, and perhaps more ruthless elements within.

-Popular demands. In the tentative, early stages, crowd demands are likely to focus on a simple, simplistic plea, such as calling for dialogue or removal of a single leader. As tensions rise and the impasse grows, and as violent reprisals further energize the mob, crowd demands are likely to escalate and bifurcate, with incipient divisions within the crowd coming to the fore. Who shall lead? Shall violence be met with passive resistance or violent action? Shall the extremists or moderates be allowed to win the day? Who are the real patriots? Factions will be portrayed as insufficiently moderate or insufficiently radical.

-Every crowd is different. As demonstration-weary denizens of Bangkok know all too well, crowds can be uplifting and crowds can be menacing, sometimes both at the same time. When popular protests split into competing groups, and take on “colors” as happened in Thailand in recent years with competing red shirts and yellow shirts and blue shirts and black shirts, the pretence of unity is gone and something akin to gang warfare takes its place.

-Provinces take cues from the capital city. Big demonstrations in a nation’s symbolic center take on an importance that reverberates to the hinterland. The student-led protests in Beijing in 1989 inspired sympathetic protests in many cities across China, most prominently in Shanghai and Chengdu.

-Who speaks for the crowd? A crowd divided amongst its own, cannot articulate demands, respond to dialogue and react to concessions in a coherent way. The very definition of what the crowd wants shifts and fractures. If dialogue is taking place, it is unlikely to be fruitful in the face of rising expectations for success on the side with the upper hand.

-Lack of an exit strategy. Given the emotional momentum of shared risk, shared dreams and the bonds of instant comradeship in the midst a sea of strangers, it becomes increasingly difficult to break up the party and leave, especially in a spontaneous gathering that depends on each individual to play a role. Inside a demonstration, freedom of movement is proscribed, food and drink depends on kindness of strangers, sanitation is a mess and living in the open under the sun and moon takes its toll.

-Crowd momentum. It can be to surprisingly difficult to convince those who have put their lives on the line, or those who have been energized by the hypnotic pull of crowd dynamics, to cede the “holy” ground, even though they suffer physical discomfort and may be at personal risk. After giving their all to a cause, a human whirlwind that is part carnival, part killing field, it seems a betrayal, especially if partisan blood has already been spilled, to yield to the other side. Even under less tragic conditions, it is hard to break from the pull of a genial, dedicated crowd and acknowledge defeat by going home.

-Crowd compliance. Even when the crowd leaders call on their supporters to leave, compliance is reluctant at best. Crowds are notoriously fickle and difficult to rope in. This was especially evident in Bangkok, Thailand last year when rank and file members of the red shirt demonstration refused to budge even with gunfire resounding down the road. There was visible shock and there were vocal wails of disappointment on the part of hard-core red shirt followers -mostly older folk visiting Bangkok from the provinces who had faithfully sat in the street for weeks by the red-shirt sound stage- when their leaders threw in the towel on May 19, 2010 and surrendered to police.

-Follow the money. Crowds crowing for a particular leader, especially if that leader is a billionaire and wily political operator, undermine their own legitimacy as they can be seen to be serving vested interests, and perhaps even pecuniary self-interest.

-Hijacking the crowd. The positive energy directed at social injustice can be appropriated and even hijacked to support one particular faction or ambitious political leader or a cultural or religious agenda to the detriment of the stated ideals. For example, while the pro-Thaksin activists in Bangkok might style their activities as being “pro-democracy”, and their rhetoric made ample use of the “D” word, in terms of hierarchical loyalties, they nonetheless share something in common with the pro-Mubarak crowds in Cairo. Taking money and marching orders from powerful political figures, or their proxies, erodes the democratic credentials of a movement.

-Cultural arguments. Culture is distorted and re-defined, providing a refuge for scoundrels. Whether it be Japan’s “unique” culture arguments justifying the interring at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo the “souls” of pro-imperial Japan warriors, or phony arguments about Japan being a whale-meat eating society, cultural values are invoked to inhibit debate and hide ulterior motives. In Egypt, Mubarak has apparently created a cult of Pharaonic overtones, making his identity and that of a proud nation seem like one.

-Family ties. As Egypt intelligence supremo Omar Suleiman says, “We all respect Mubarak as father.” He goes on to suggest it is not in the culture of good Egyptians to revolt. When a politician under fire is compared to one’s mother or father, the implication is that the dear leader is in an inviolable position, and that any resistance would be unfilial, if not futile. This presumptuous argument is deliberately fostered and foisted upon the people in order to inculcate the notion that the people owe their nurturance and very existence to the exalted leader.

-Foreign meddling. During an uprising, it’s almost certain there will be allegations of foreign involvement and hidden plots, and in this interconnected world it is easy enough to find traces of foreign involvement, especially on the part of powerful intelligence services. To make such accusations is a common enough diversionary tactic for an unpopular regime under siege, though in the case of Egypt it’s a nakedly hypocritical complaint. The Mubarak regime itself is the product of 30 years of foreign meddling as it has been supported, bolstered and groomed by Washington to the tune of one or two billion dollars a year, partly with the aim of "buying" peace with Israel, courtesy of the US taxpayer.

-Army neutrality. At such a juncture, the army's strength is paradoxically best shown by utter restraint, strict neutrality and the ability to restrain violent outbreaks without resorting to violence. If and when the army draws blood, it becomes tainted by perceptions of partisanship and weakens its legitimacy as protector of all citizens. The army is too blunt an instrument to be used in a crackdown.

-Class cleavages. Even if one knew nothing about the years of torture, mysterious disappearances and brutal police controls in Egypt, the obscene corruption of Mubarak, -personal worth estimated worth 40 billion- tells you all you need to know about why so many people, and not just the poor, hate him. The gross inequities of the status quo and corruption of the ruling class indeed need to be challenged as they are rightfully being challenged right now.

LOST IN THE SKY

2011-01-31T12:50:00.001-05:00

Philip J Cunningham

The US State of the Union address is consummate political theatre, the highest expression of democratic showmanship. It's full of rousing words -bigger, faster, better- and lofty phrases that take flight like balloons released at a political rally -red, white and blue- that go gently leaping into the night, soaring, glistening, ebullient and full of promise.

President Barack Obama's speech on Jan 25 had a staged quality, not just because of the tight scripting, the lights and cameras, but because applause is so much part of the show that it is written into the White House transcript of the event. It's tea-leaf reading time, as pundits ponder protocol and seating arrangements, a time for trotting out model workers and latter-day Lei Feng characters whose decency and integrity serves to sanitise, by association, the wily politicians who talk about them.

Despite the well-presented rhetoric, Mr Obama contradicts himself as surely as he looks left and then to the right, then back again, keeping up with the tele-prompter. If he appears to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth, it is a testament to wanting it both ways.

After green-lighting trillions for the corrupt on Wall Street, he acknowledges that the rich, too, should be taxed. He wants to cut taxes and increase spending. He invites the Pentagon to find some fat to trim, but sends them to war, effectively a blank cheque for endless spending.

He cites the greatness of American colleges -part of what makes them great is stubborn independence that keeps the government and military at arm's length- but wants the military back on campus.

He jokes about his government's intrusive body checks at airports as a plug for trains yet unbuilt. He's shocked at a random incident of violence at home but brushes over the chronic violence of the US war effort abroad.

Politically-correct rhetoric about racial diversity and sexual tolerance in the US armed forces sounds good, but does not change a flawed foreign policy or mitigate ill-considered, inhumane military adventurism abroad.

Mr Obama conjures up a misleading vision of American troops leaving Iraq with their heads high, failing to acknowledge the tens of thousands who left on their backs, shipped out in boxes and on stretchers, having sacrificed life and limb in a gratuitous war.

And after nine years of fruitless effort to destroy the Taliban, he's calling for more bombs over the Hindu Kush.

One clear dividend of Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent state visit to Washington is that China-bashing, a popular contact sport for opportunistic political hacks in the capital, was written out of the script.

China does figure in the speech, and in largely positive light, as a goad to American competitiveness. China is "building faster trains and newer airports'', it has solar research and faster computers, it has made efforts in education and it is supporting new jobs in the United States.

What is implied but is left unsaid is that China is the new "other'', filling the vacuum left by the demise of the USSR. It has become the new yardstick, comparison with which is the new criteria for measuring American success.

Wisely avoiding a blame game, Mr Obama instead struggles to bolster a sense of American exceptionalism, even as the economy is teetering, invoking everything from the universality of US ideals to the implicit support of the Almighty in heaven above.

He cites things that supposedly set the US apart as a nation:

"We do big things... We're a nation that says "I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company... I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree...''

All of the above may be true. But can the same not be said for China and other countries?

Then he sounds a bit like Bush Jr, recycling the swagger when he proclaims, "We have taken the fight to al-Qaeda'' and "we will defeat you''.

And the mild-mannered Democrat can be triumphalist, too. "Tonight we can say American leadership has been renewed and America's standing has been restored.''

But Mr Obama generally has a gentler way with words than his predecessor. Consider this Orwellian euphemism for the bloody and inaccurate drone attacks on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border: "Their leaders and operatives are being removed from the battlefield.''

At one point Mr Obama complains that cutbacks make America a plane without an engine, flying high due to the lightened load, but sure to soon "feel the impact''. Why ditch the engine? How about a "plane of state'' that is not weighed down with heavy bombs on its wing tips?

A most inappropriate comparison is invoked when Mr Obama -under whose negligent stewardship the American space programme has scuttled plans for Moon and Mars projects- declares that this is a "Sputnik moment''. More like a Sputnik yawn. A decade from now, if there are any men in space at all, it will be because China rose to pick up the challenge where America left off.

A space race is not without political drama, but how much better it would be for all of us if the urge for competitive aggression, invasion and application of military know-how were played out exploring the Moon and other uninhabited worlds, rather than pummelling delicate, crowded planet Earth.

Mr Obama closes with the usual religious pieties. But why, pray tell, should God bless America? If there is a God, it is jarring to think that the Almighty would take so prejudiced an interest in political boundaries as to bless one nation at the expense of others.

Remember those balloons? Soon after the exhilaration of release, they drift out of sight, then lose air and altitude. They shrink, shrivel, pucker up and then drop from the sky, one by one, with only tattered bits of rubber to show for their once lofty promise.

(as published in Bangkok Post)

A GLIMPSE AT THE POWER BEHIND THE CURTAIN

2010-12-01T10:42:00.010-05:00

by Philip J Cunningham

Wikileak's online dump of US State Department cables is interesting to peruse but not especially revelatory so far. From what documents have been made public to date, it looks like the messy work of diplomacy as usual. As veteran whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg pointed out on “Democracy Now”, the material comes from a database which has been given a security classification so low in the hierarchy of US intelligence briefings that he wouldn't even have bothered to look at it when he worked as a mid-level intelligence analyst, given the priority accorded to truly secretive and sensitive documents.

That’s not to say the data trove is irrelevant; it's the sort of raw material that makes diplomats cringe and historians intrigued. It's a random, grab-bag snapshot of official US thinking about friends and enemies, diplomatic challenges past and present. It has shed rather more humiliation than light, sort of like a bathroom stall being suddenly kicked open.

The unflattering material ranges from sordid to insightful, from Machiavellian finesse to blunt bullying, but it’s the methods of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, which call on diplomats to cull biometric data and engage in virtual stalking, that really raise eyebrows.

Much of the information is awkward but not at all secret, rather like transcripts of friends talking about friends behind their backs.A significant portion of the “statecraft” described in on-line posts certainly has an odor of hypocrisy and deception, but what foreign ministry could survive without a certain amount of double-speak?

In due time, the sheer volume of data to come may help to better determine as to whether the US government has so lost sight of its espoused ideals as to allow deception, petty thuggery and double standards to be the new norm.

The US State Department is quick to perceive skullduggery when dealing with others but it apparently cannot see the same in its own behavior.

The kind of diplomatic deal-making in which Beijing excels, for example, by agreeing to buy a billion dollars worth of XYZ in return for some political concession, at least has the virtue of drumming up business for Boeing and Airbus and extending the opportunity of air travel to ordinary Chinese.

What can be said about the US frittering away diplomatic goodwill and twisting arms to get allies like Belgium to accept token pariah prisoners who have been kept in legal limbo at Guantanamo, or to pressure Germany to hush up and halt legal proceedings against extraordinary renditions?

Is that the kind of wheeling and dealing the world’s so-called "beacon of democracy" engages in? If so, it’s not just petty but pathetic.

The supposed horror of the unveiled secrets doesn’t begin to compare to the public and documented horrors of aerial bombing, the near-daily use of which has left America’s reputation tarnished and tattered in a way no piece of paper could hope to achieve.

What the data dump offers is a compelling view of the world as seen from Foggy Bottom, the State Department's home base in Washington. It's a Manichean view that reduces the planet earth to a giant game board of friends and enemies, informants and subjects.

Historians know well that America has never been half as idealistic as it likes to see itself; it takes a certain amount of over-arching ego and sustained brutality to seize and secure a continental land mass, however sparsely populated it might have been when the great American experiment got started.

But America was, and still is, in a much-diminished sense, a beacon for immigrants fleeing oppression or simply seeking economic opportunity. The spirit invoked by the Statue of Liberty, embracing the poor and huddled masses, still shines brighter than all the lights in New York City, but somewhere during the transition from an ordinary nation to an over-extended military power, America lost touch with its better angels and set itself on the road to being the new Rome.

In doing so, the US lost what high moral ground it might have possessed after liberating Europe from Nazism and got stuck in a series of murky quagmires that have lead to the slippery slope it treads today.

There’s a temptation to date the fork in the road to the contested election of 2000 that put George W. Bush in the White House, though the roots of imperial rot go way back, back to bombs over Belgrade, bombs over Hanoi, bombs over Pyongyang and of course, back to the fount of US military immorality, bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The sudden unexpected airing of cables showing the inner-workings of the US State Department may one day be seen as a moment in Uncle Sam’s imperial history akin to the denouement in the Hollywood classic, "The Wizard of Oz" in which little dog Toto pulls back the curtain on the control room, revealing that the Wizard is not only less omniscient and powerful than was previously believed, but is something of a sham.

(as published in the Bangkok Post)

(illustrations from Wizard of Oz Pictures and Spiegel Online)

FISHING FOR TROUBLE FAR OUT TO SEA

2010-11-05T11:20:00.004-04:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

China, Japan, Russia and America are vying to assert influence over a handful of disputed isles and islets lying off East Asian shores.

At first glance, the recent China-Japan spat concerning a boat collision followed by a Russia-Japan spat concerning a presidential visit to a remote outpost, seem like much ado about nothing; but they follow in the wake of a smouldering US-Japan conflict over the disposition of US forces in Okinawa.

Disputed islets may appear to be mere points on the map; but depending on which points you lay claim to and how you connect the dots, a nation's outline shrinks or swells far beyond its shores, its periphery defined by vanguard islets that extend territorial waters far out to sea.

The disputed islets are a cacophonous crossroads in the cross-hairs of powerful regional actors. Because the islets have changed hands and flipped political polarity more than once in the past, every claimant has at least a half-convincing story to tell.

The islets and islands in the news are not merely geographic markers staking out bold territorial claims in three dimensions; they are also historical markers staking out the fourth dimension: time.

It's hard to discuss any of the fiercely disputed islets that were once part of Imperial Japan without bringing back divisive memories of a war that took tens of millions of lives.

That places like the Senkaku/Diaoyu turn out to be adjacent to massive undersea oil and mineral deposits; that the Southern Kuriles/Northern Territories are fertile fishing grounds, are both cause enough for tension, but resources are not the root of the problem.

If it were just a matter of figuring out how to best tap natural resources and fishing rights, economic disputes could be settled through negotiation and win-win joint exploitation of underwater riches. But the reality is far more complicated than that. Not only did the Okinawa impasse cause the Asia-leaning Hatoyama government to topple, but it has warped the administration of Naoto Kan, which is currently hamstrung by its provocative, pro-US Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara.

Okinawa, coveted to this day by the US for its commanding position in the West Pacific, could theoretically be a kind of Singapore, a free trade entrepot rather than a sequestered armed camp, were it not for US policy, and Tokyo's willingness toe the line.

The Southern Kuriles, recently visited by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, despite howls of protest from Japan, was not only once under Tokyo's control, but Etorofu islet was the launching point for Admiral Yamamoto's sneak attack on Pearl Harbour.

The protracted war that followed the audacious Dec 7, 1941 attack on Hawaii was, from start to finish, about the control of pinprick points on the map dotting the vast Pacific. Invoking the names of contested islets in the Pacific War -Guam, Wake Island, Midway Atoll, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa- is more than a lesson in island geography; it's a reminder of sacrifice and mass suicides, deprivation and death. It's a mournful roll call of the fallen and the dead.

Okinawa was the scene of one of the bloodiest confrontations of World War Two, with battles killing in the many tens of thousands on both sides and one-fourth of the civilian population wiped out.

Memories of past loyalties and hatreds linger while disputed place names bring suppressed emotions to the fore, complicating any straightforward solution based on shared economic opportunity or common sense.

Disputed islets tell the story of the rise and fall of empires, of audacious aggression and shocking reversals of fortune, a series of historical traumas, some of which inconveniently get in the way of present-day claims.

The Japanese right-wing in particular seems to suffer from selective historical amnesia. The warrior wannabes glorify the martial spirit, but overreact to a bump from a Chinese fishing boat, forgetting their country brought untold death and devastation to millions of Chinese. They fume about the Russian occupation of a handful of islets near Hokkaido, but chose not to remember Japan's armed invasion and conquest of Asia.

In fact, Japan emerged remarkably intact despite being the aggressor in a lost war. Had the US not hastened the war's end with the brutal shock and awe of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, essentially freezing Russia out of participation in a joint invasion of the common enemy, Japan would have been divided in two, split down the middle as Germany was, with Tokyo a Berlin of sorts, straddling an uneasy DMZ between Soviet and US zones of influence.

As it turned out, America won the race to occupy Japan, leaving Korea, ever the hapless victim of geopolitics, to be divided instead.

Okinawa too, could easily have slipped from Japanese control, permanently, as a legitimate spoil of war. Although Washington "handed it back" to Tokyo in 1972, and arguably the Senkaku/Diaoyu islets along with it, it was not pre-ordained reversion but rather part of a Nixonian horse-trade involving US domestic politics and a textile tariff dispute.

These and other disputed islets, such as the Paracels and Spratleys, lie in a veritable ring of fire, prone not only to tectonic plate shifts and volcanic activity, but abrupt political eruptions as well.

All it takes is an incident, an accident or a controversial visit and suddenly some little islet on some remote seabed looms large, bursting into public view with pent-up fury, whipping up a storm of incendiary rhetoric and spasms of outraged nationalism. But it's not just hot air; feelings run deep because the stakes are truly high.

Tokyo, under prodding from the Pentagon, is making an awkward return to its former Cold War self, re-affirming its strategic ties with the US and the "free world" in opposition to Russia and China.

A new Cold War is one possible outcome, a hot war is not out of the question. Each of the contesting powers is guilty of the understandable but faulty desire to paint in as much of the map as possible the colour of its own flag, setting the stage for continued conflict.

Vying for control of the islets is not just about resources, it's a battle to reclaim history, to demarcate and delineate for one's children and children's children, national narratives about victims and victors, the wrong and the wronged, injustice and justice.

Given the enduring power of memory, remembrance and retributive narratives of just desserts, any future attempt to settle such geographic disputes must first take history into account.

(Bangkok Post, November 5, 2010)

CHINESE PROPAGANDA

2010-10-20T00:26:00.003-04:00

by Philip J Cunningham

It's not easy being a propaganda chief these days. What with all the new-fangled technology, and talk of democracy, the spectre of yesterday's suppressed news keeps coming back to haunt you.

You shred a story and throw it down the memory hole and it bounces back with a vengeance - a hundred stories where there was once just one.

Your job is to serve the party, and the secretary-general of the party most of all. All sorts of people, inside and outside the party resent your influence; some even challenge your right to exist.

When you do your job skilfully, nobody notices. When you screw up, it's there for all the world to see.

Take the case of Liu Xiaobo.

You were under the impression it was your job to make the story go away, a mission impossible in PR terms. So, instead, you make yourself look foolish. Failing to suppress the news of a dissident getting the Nobel Peace Prize, you double down and go into over-drive. You attack the poor, imprisoned convicted criminal Liu, of course, but also castigate the arrogant award-givers. Then you attack the small Western country that is home to the handful of old, white men sitting on the committee that made the "blasphemous" award decision. Then you attack the Western world in general.

As was frequently the case during the Mao years, a vilification campaign is as hurtful as it is absurd, but ultimately it makes a mockery of its advocates and legends of those sorry souls it targets.

Those not destroyed by vilification often come back stronger than ever, emerging as influential figures in their own right, thanks to the initial drop-kick that made their name a political football in the first place.

The Maoist vilification of Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai drove both men to early graves, but it turned them into the stuff of legend. Getting whacked by an endless stream of words ultimately enhanced the reputation of two hard-core communist operatives who were, until the moment of their fall, loyal henchmen of the party and Chairman Mao.

Deng Xiaoping, who was dislodged from power three times, and each time duly vilified in the propaganda organs of the day, not only emerged with a "name" but with a body of sayings. Even off-the-cuff quotes such as: "It doesn't matter if it's a white cat or a black cat..." that were once bandied about as supposed proof of Deng's perfidy, have been memorialised and become part of the legend of the man.

Zhao Ziyang was cut from the same cloth as his tough communist colleagues at the pinnacle of state power until his fall from grace, after which he assumed a largely undeserved democratic halo.

The way the Beijing authorities have fumbled the Liu Xiaobo case is enough to ensure that this mild-mannered academic, who was but one of many comparable dissidents, will now stand head and shoulders against the rest, eclipsing rebel elders such as Wei Jingsheng, who endured even greater suffering with even greater equanimity and resolve.

The Nobel Prize committee chose to turn the spotlight on just one man in a collective cause, casting a disproportionately large shadow, but it is China's flummoxed media czars, who, by overplaying their hand, are assuring that Liu Xiaobo will be seen as larger than life.

The Chinese Department of Propaganda hasn't always been so clumsy, nor has it always been on the wrong side of history.

It has played a role in maintaining civility in public discourse, especially in advance of, and in the aftermath of, the poisonous reign of "free" speech known as the Cultural Revolution.

In the early 1960's, one of the main functions of the central propaganda apparatus was to keep the doddering old Mao, and his increasingly insane ideas, in check.

Mao, hungry for some vengeful political action, famously complained that he couldn't get a word in edgewise in Beijing, so he had proxies such as Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao publish in Shanghai the first of a long series of veiled vilifications and outright ad hominem attacks that launched the Cultural Revolution.

A wave of suicides, vigilante roundups, public humiliations, torture and extrajudicial killings convulsed the nation for years to come, bringing the life of individuals, and the nation as a whole, to a virtual standstill. Millions died, hundreds of millions were traumatised.

It's enough to make one wish that Beijing's mayor Peng Zhen and the propaganda chiefs had constrained Mao's "right" to free speech, and thus stemmed the tide of invective, winning the day for the silent majority.

While human rights organisations understandably see censorship as a unique threat to them and theirs, an idealistic egotism causes them to miss the point inasmuch as it's really not about them. At least half of the function of the propaganda department is to keep inner-party conflict out of the news, to keep Politburo rivals and wannabes from each other's throats and to prevent insider coups and political campaigns from ripping the country apart at the seams.

In more recent times, the much-maligned department served a stabilising role when the reigns of power were reluctantly handed to Hu Jintao by the ambitious and not-quite-yet-ready-to-retire Jiang Zemin.

By controlling access to the public megaphone, the propaganda department effectively reined in yesterday's leaders, thus enabling the changing of the guard. It's China's equivalent to term limits in US politics.

Were Hu Jintao to completely dismantle the party's propaganda apparatus tomorrow, we would probably learn more about Hu than we know now, but it would likely prove a hollow victory for the free press. Were it not for the restraining hand of the propaganda department, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng would still be in the news, and in the game, using prestige media to advance their coteries and causes.

Other powerful actors, who, by virtue of wealth and position, would come to hog the limelight, making an easy transition to a freewheeling press system that would allow them to exercise power by buying newspapers, TV stations and advertising influence.

But if the opening of the floodgates were so unregulated as to lead to an "anything goes" neglect of media standards, then the vilification, mud-slinging and poisonous hate speech that hurt China so much in the past, would return with a vengeance.

The ensuing chaos would give foreign reporters and local scribes much to report on and write about, but little security or social stability in which to enjoy the fruits of free expression.

Philip J Cunningham is a freelance writer and political commentator.

LOST IN TRANSLATION, LOST AT SEA

2010-09-25T00:55:00.008-04:00

(first published in the Bangkok Post, September 25, 2010)

An aerial view of one of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea, claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.

by Philip J Cunningham

From the moment a Chinese fishing trawler and pair of Japanese coast guard boats came into contact at sea on Sept 8, 2010, the waters were instantly muddied, not so much by the minor maritime incident itself, but by bouts of mutual recrimination.

Confusion and concerns raised by the incident were ramped up and amplified by the weight of history, fears about the future, and cultural differences.

Sino-Japanese relations remain sensitive and subject to sudden downturns due to the gravity of historical horrors that continue to haunt the present.

Each side's self-righteous response serves to further irk and annoy the other, setting off a chain reaction in the direction of a meltdown, if not outright conflict.

Accidents happen, as do "accidents on purpose". But even when no provocation can be proven, a collision at sea plumbs deep emotions. A calm, rational handling of the matter is elusive because the slightest misstep or chauvinistic statement resonates with painful memories of the past.

Chinese artist's rendition of the sinking of the Kowshing by Captain Togo's Heihachiro's cruiser, the Naniwa

For example, Japanese naval luminary Togo Heihachiro became a "celebrity" in Japan in 1894, when he ordered his cruiser, the Naniwa, to fire upon, and sink, the Kowshing, a British-flagged transport ship chartered by China. The son of a samurai turned naval hero went on to humiliate the Russians at Port Arthur using a strategy of stoic stealth to defeat an over-confident and under-prepared enemy, which decades later inspired Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku to execute the1941 Pearl Harbour attack.

Admiral Togo was widely feted in his lifetime, not only in Japan but also in England and even in America, though he was understandably unpopular in China for having summarily dispatched a thousand Chinese young men to a watery grave.

Divergent cultural norms have a bearing on the disposition of such a case. Not following the rules _ in this case a demonstrable reluctance to surrender _ was a breach of order and propriety sufficient for the Japanese cruiser captain to perfunctorily blow a few big holes in the hull of the uncooperative craft and watch it drop beneath the waves.

One man's war hero, another man's war criminal. Arguably there was a method to Togo's mad lack of compassion, so much so that even the British, infuriated that a ship piloted by one of their own might be treated in such a fashion, reluctantly acknowledged that the Japanese naval man known as "Johnny Chinaman" during his studies in Britain, had scrupulously followed the rulebook the British themselves had written.

When Togo sank the Kowshing, there was no declaration of war between Japan and China, nor was the British-piloted transport ship in any position to attack. Togo, under instructions to intercept, destroyed the defenceless transport ship, not because it posed a palpable threat, but because it didn't follow orders.

Tasked with preventing the Chinese troops from reaching Korea, Togo followed orders with alacrity, offering a choice of sink or surrender, then bailing out of the water only the British captain and a handful of non-Chinese crew.

Japanese troops intent on taking control of Seoul subsequently overcame their woefully undermanned Chinese rivals, paving the way to the eventual takeover of the entire Korean peninsula and Manchuria.

The naval war that ensued ended with China ceding Taiwan and other territory to Japan. Over the next five decades, China and Japan descended gradually but inexorably into a protracted war that cost tens of millions of lives.

Seen from inside the norms of Japanese naval culture, Togo was not a cold-blooded killer, but a discriminating man, both patient and polite, obedient to authority and fanatic about decorum. Certain things simply had to be done a certain way _ hoisting signal flags, issuing formal salutes _ and he could see no two ways about it.

Togo's refusal to save the drowning Chinese was not viewed as a breach of naval etiquette, because the Chinese, growing mutinous, had proven themselves unwilling to follow the most basic rules as they even turned on the hired British captain, whom they suspected to be in collusion with the Japanese.

Protocol trumped emotion and the Japanese won, not just the one-sided battle to sink what was basically an unarmed ship, but the rather more complex trial in the court of Imperial British opinion and jurisprudence, which concluded that Togo had followed the letter of British-style law to a "T", a triumph of form over substance which left little regard for 1,000 human lives lost in the water.

The victims' lack of discipline, order and decorum presumably put them beyond the pale of naval compassion.

China's future strongman Mao Zedong was just a baby at the time, but he and future generations of patriots would find in the long sorry chain of such calamitous events the inspiration to restore China's pride with a vengeance.

The bumps and scratches of the Sept 8, 2010 Sino-Japanese boat collision incident are indeed trivial in comparison, but the subsequent arrest and detention by the book of the Chinese captain has inflamed the emotions of a Chinese public well-educated in the exploits of Imperial Japan and its predations against their homeland.

Once history is invoked, the wild card of public opinion has to be taken into account.

The United States, like England during the heyday of its imperial might, currently enjoys a strategic alliance with Japan.

Although there have been serious frictions in the US-Japan relationship as of late, due to onerous US military demands for operating space in and around Futenma in Okinawa, it is unlikely that the US will show much sympathy for Chinese sentiments about the contested waters around the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islets so long as Japan is an ally that remains largely observant of American-style military protocol.

As Greenpeace anti-whaling activists and other "emotional" opponents of contemporary Japanese maritime behaviour have learned to their detriment, common sense and compassion are not necessarily extended to those who fail to abide by protocol _ the law, as Japan sees it _ when encountering a Japanese vessel on the waters.

Anti-whaling activists have seen a catamaran craft rammed and capsized; the Japanese side claims it was an "accident"; while in 2008 the Lianhe, a Taiwanese fishing vessel, was struck and sunk by the Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat Koshiki, which managed to rescue the crew.

Similar near-clashes have been reported this month involving boats from Taiwan.

The potential wealth of the contested waters, rich in fish, with a seabed underneath that may well prove rich in oil and minerals, adds to the mounting tension.

Given the deep wounds of a past that saw Japan invade and wreak havoc on China, even the most minor of scrapes in contested waters is a critical event that must be managed with political care and cultural sensitivity.

Given the Japanese tendency to play it by its own rulebook and the Chinese penchant to play it out in public, each side predictably thwarts and infuriates the other.

If the two dominant powers of East Asia once again find themselves on a collision course, history suggests that things will get much worse before they get better _ and no one wins in the end.

Still, it's not too late for all claimants to the contested waters to step back, put aside seemingly intractable claims, and take the long view.

Instead of shedding blood over rocky islets, give back to nature the sea and the seabed until future generations can equitably sort out what belongs to whom.

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

OUT OF HISTORY AND INTO THE PRESENT

2010-08-20T22:31:00.003-04:00

(from the Bangkok Post, August 21, 2010)

There is the story of a provincial politician, unique to his time and place but universal in resonance, who came to electoral prominence by rousing the poor and trampled-upon into a veritable political army.

He talked the provocative talk of the populist, if not the demagogue; one could even say he talked his way into power, but he made good on some of the promises. He recognised the latent power of the poor, though not always in good ways or with the best of intentions.

Neither handsome nor heroic, he was likeable in a corny, folksy way.

Despite his gift of gab, he was not a good listener, but he didn't drink and he worked hard and went to great lengths to get his name in the paper. From the start, he treated rural areas as his rear base and the media as a hand-maiden to personal ambition.

When he first announced his desire to lead, he was ridiculed and scorned by the established elite and their henchmen. When he vowed to deliver free health care and access to education for all, he caused panic among vested interests.

He had his lucky breaks, but was also supported by powerful establishment figures who did not see the bold maverick as a threat. He had a crack staff of assistants, including media minds, paid agents and security muscle.

He travelled the hinterland by train, bringing the drama of government to remote places where a face-to-face between leaders and the led was known primarily by its absence.

"Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em hate you," his advisers urged, anything to keep him at the centre of public attention. He wanted fame and power badly, yet acknowledged it was something deep inside him that even he did not fully understand.

As his circle of power and influence spread, flames of populism were fanned. There were fiery speeches, huge gatherings in public places, torches being waved in the night.

He ran a modern, media-savvy campaign, and liked to have journalists in his pocket, not just to dominate the newspapers and airwaves but to conduct "research" on his political foes. He kept a black book on the vulnerabilities of others to keep them in line. Some could be bought simply with money, as in absolving a bank debt; others could be gradually entrapped in the web of their dreams, by exploiting their passion for ideals.

He could be generous, bestowing wealth, privilege and power on his loyal crew, and he could take it away at whim.

Posters bearing his likeness were everywhere, his witty slogans distributed widely. At rallies one could expect a carnival atmosphere with free food, giveaways and entertainment.

Established politicians were not amused. They saw him getting too big for his breeches, and in what was perhaps an unintended consequence of mobilising the masses to serve his never-ending campaign for himself, the "hicks" started getting too smart.

With power, came criticism. If he was only doing good, why was the media his first target, and why was he so afraid of the truth? The press not in his pocked found him hypocritical, for he was always making deals, deals with the very shady operators he claimed to be rallying against. He tried to explain that "good comes out of bad", revealing a willingness to "deal with the devil" if it helped him carry out his programme.

A few principled characters quit his entourage, or found themselves marginalised, while corrupt officials got a second lease on life. When threatened with censure, he was willing to drop to his knees, to plead and beg on behalf of "the people" who he claimed he wanted to serve. At other times he could be cold and brutal. He lacked a consistent ideology and just sort of made things up as he went along. His politics proved divisive, soon families were arguing and breaking up over conflicting perceptions; was he savior or dictator? His own family was not immune. His son was deeply conflicted due to unrealistic expectations, frequently finding solace in inebriation.

The judiciary was one last pocket of resistance to his rule. He could play the electoral process like a fiddle, controlling votes enough to deflect censure or impeachment, but didn't have an easy way out when he was found to have broken the law.

Soon "spontaneous" demonstrations, erupted. He gave the signal to "turn the yokels out" and break some heads. Overnight, the streets of the capital were filled with outraged supporters. He instructed them to remain in place, not leave or go home, even as tensions mounted. "Stay here till the fight is over, stay where you are."

He made his cause the people's cause in order to further his personal cause. In the end, he was brought down by his limitless ambitions. As a close associate wryly noted, "You're pretty good at talking... well, the words are still good, but you aren't, and I don't believe you ever were."

The above story is fiction. Any similarity to real persons or events is purely coincidental.

But it is superlative fiction. Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for his telling of the mythic tale, and the subsequent film, from which the above outline is sketched, won the Academy Award for Best Film in 1949.

Based on the corrupt politics in Louisiana and the American South over half a century ago, the story is infused with the idea that all actions have consequences and that the human will shapes destiny.

The Academy Award Best Picture All the King's Men is a classic that transcends the time and place of its origin, to inform and enlighten even today.

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

Populism, the political opiate of the people

2010-07-06T08:32:00.006-04:00

(from the Bangkok Post, Published: 29/06/2010)

by PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

Populism pits the "people" against the "elite" in order to foment change. Demagogues use half-truths, truisms and outright lies to make it happen.

For better or worse, populism has been on the upswing in Thailand in the last 10 years, roughly corresponding to the rise and fall of Thaksin Shinawatra's rule.

Although Thailand has seen populist behaviour before, most especially under the boot of Plaek Phibulsonggram who was a contemporary of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, and who was to some extent influenced by the rabid populism that transmuted into fascism at the time, it wasn't until Thaksin's arrival on the national stage that the Thai term prachaniyom was coined to replace the English-loan word for populism.

The good news for a Bangkok establishment fearful of red shirts taking to the streets again is that populist movements tend to fall apart rather quickly, typically due to the lack of sustainable infrastructure and hard-to-resolve internal contradictions, or, more simply, just by becoming unpopular.

Even populist leaders such as Thaksin who managed to scale the heights of power tend to fall, and fail, rather quickly, because taking over the top slot instantly converts them into a symbol of a new, unjust elite, an easy target for a fresh wave of resentment on the part of those who feel betrayed or excluded from the spoils of power.

The bad news for the establishment is this. Populism isn't conjured up out of thin air or pulled out of the ether. It is rooted to the earth, a reflection of real and perceived problems on the ground. It clings to pre-existing fault lines, makes claim to them, manipulates them, exacerbates and explodes them, in the hopes of triggering a seismic shift in power.

Once the cat is out of the bag, indeed even if the cat has run away, the underlying fault lines and rifts, are right there in the open for all to see. If such a social rift is neglected, it will produce new populists to replace the old ones.

Conditions on the ground, such as the vivid rich-poor gap in Thailand, which seemed in recent memory to be a tolerably exotic if not particularly likeable aspect of Thai society, and may indeed be no worse than other places where no protest is evident, now suddenly seems terribly unjust.

And it should, to the degree it is a reflection of an unpalatable truth, large or small, which many would prefer to ignore than countenance.

Fingering such fault lines is what populists do, and if that were the alpha and omega of populism, it would not be a precursor to fascism.

But then the demagogue comes marching in, the truth gets mangled, and the victims of injustice become unwitting enablers of a wily politician's fame and fortune.

As Henry Louis Mencken famously said, the demagogue preaches "doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots".

As such, the fortunes of demagogic politicians who seek to ride the wave of public indignation depend in large part on media reach, rhetorical persuasion and the ability to amplify complaints in a way that aggrandises the speaker and personifies the cause, until the two are seen as inseparable.

Populism would be less troubling if there was a way to lose the demagogue, but it is precisely the demagogue, who breathes fear and fire into the mix, using lies, half-truths and shrill identity politics, who sways sentiment and moves people to action.

Demagoguery is a project to rid reality of nuance, irony, complexity and even the truth, while casting things in high-contrast black and white. Populist leaders need the polarising, Manichaean divide to get traction, even if it means widening a fragile fissure or ruthlessly exploiting existing cracks in the social edifice. If they can't meet the people in person, they use the media, especially television, and nowadays the internet, while employing proxies and sycophants to do the up close and personal.

It is telling that so much UDD air-time and stage time at the Ratchaprasong red shirt rallies was frittered away ranting not about poverty, not about unemployment, not about health care or police abuse or minimum wage or slum conditions, but about a horrible, fanged, foaming, blood-thirsty death and destruction-obsessed psycho-killer subhuman monster who goes by the uppity name of Abhisit Vejjajiva.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion of the prime minister; I for one happen to find him intelligent, thoughtful, polite and almost mild-mannered to a fault, though I'd like to see him reach out more to the poor and dispossessed.

But say what you will about the PM's policies, his questionable actions to date and - perhaps more pertinently - a certain degree of ill-timed non-action, the man is no Dracula.

Populists, even when not under threat, are ever in search of enemies, the more dastardly, stark and cartoon-like the better. If they can't find the Dracula of their dreams, they paint fangs on political rivals.

At Ratchaprasong, the red shirts, in both word and deed, betrayed a desperate desire for a truly convincing enemy to whip up the degree of incendiary hatred necessary to provoke fighting in the streets that would in turn set the stage for a rescue from their very own personalised knight in shining armour. They daily portrayed their patron's rival as the devil incarnate, but failed to convince their own political base, let alone society at large.

Thai populism today does not paint a pretty picture of the legendary "land of smiles", let alone a believable and balanced one, because it conceals ruthless political ambition and thrives on manipulative lies and ill will.

But it cannot be dismissed out of hand, either. The yellow shirts used populist technique, not just vilifying their political foes, but initiating the divisive politics of shirt colour to create a destabilising we-them divide in the first place. While Sondhi Limthongkul and Chamlong Srimuang were not strictly populist in the sense that they chose to uphold the status quo and embrace the elite rather than challenge it, they nonetheless introduced a troubling kind of more-Thai-than-thou attitude which edged society closer to the slippery slope of loyalty tests and prosecution of "unThai" activities.

It was at red shirt-controlled Ratchaprasong this past May where a rather more earthy populism briefly blossomed, and subsequently withered, as the core leadership abandoned the crowd and the absent patron went shopping at a pricy boutique in Paris.

The message of red shirt propaganda, however badly twisted, smoke-screened and distorted, however opportunistically hitched to a desperate tycoon trying to regain fame and fortune, was not just hot air.

A bleak, borderline subversive vision of Thailand as a country split into two classes was shrewdly introduced, branded and marketed, court jester-style, on the red stage in which credible singers, emcees, comedians and political hacks all chimed in and tried to stay on message.

They can claim some success to the degree that a trumped up we-them divide deepened and spread around the country, but it wouldn't have taken wing if it did not contain at least a kernel of truth.

While material conditions in the countryside have generally improved, there truly is a stark divide between rich and poor that goes far beyond unequal bank accounts and extends to the social sphere, an endemic divide that offends democratic sensibilities.

If the red shirts have anything worthwhile to say, it is a truism that predates them and will outlast their demise.

There is injustice in the land and it needs urgent tending to.

Philip J Cunningham is a freelance writer and political commentator.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

2010-05-25T21:37:00.002-04:00

This essay was first published in the Bangkok Post on May 24, 2010 as "The pain and sorrow of two cities in crisis"

September 11, 2001 might well have been the worst day ever in the history of New York, but it was pretty much just another day in Bangkok.

I was riding in a taxi from Soi Aree to Sukhumvit when I first got news that my hometown had been struck by some kind of shocking attack. The Thai driver, who had his radio on, was upset. Then he told me, in a kind and commiserating way, that a plane had hit New York's World Trade Center. I understood every word he said, but somehow it didn't add up. I tried to convince myself that I had misheard, so shocking was the news.

A short time later I was with a group of mostly American friends, watching TV in horror as the second tower came down. We found what scant comfort could be had at a time of a great human tragedy by obsessively searching for information on TV and online, commiserating quietly.

The next day I had to teach even though my mind was numb, still in mourning for my hometown, the news full of apocalyptic images. I took the skytrain from Soi Aree to Siam and walked to the faculty of communication arts at Chulalongkorn University. Before class, I heard some students chatting to one another in the hallway.

"Did you hear about the World Trade?"

"No. What happened?"

"A plane crashed into it."

"Taay leao! Right there in Ratchaprasong?"

"No, silly, World Trade Center in New York."

"Oh, you had me worried for a minute."

I said nothing, but the ignorance and apathy of the second speaker left me feeling sick. I went to the dark, air-conditioned faculty meeting room, where a group of students was gathered, watching TV. Finally I thought, someone who will understand. But they were watching a badminton match broadcast from Malaysia and were reluctant to change channels. Again, I felt a silent pain I couldn't express.

On my way back to my office, I saw a fellow ajarn in the hallway, choked up, with tears in his eyes. He said how sorry he was to hear the news from New York. He didn't say much, he didn't have to; he understood.

I felt reconnected with the human condition.

In the days that followed, I carried a sense of inner pain that wasn't easily translated. I was offended by what was and wasn't on Thai TV, at once not enough news, but too much sensationalism. But what really riled me was seeing a televised report of a hair styling contest in which one of the Thai contestants had her hair done up in a double beehive, representing two towers, complete with a toy plane crashing into one of them.

I stopped watching TV. But the newspapers by then were all reporting the callous words of then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who, when asked about the terror attacks on America, replied thus.

"Mai pen rai," said the prime minister, "rao pen klang." (We are neutral).

He said Thailand was neutral so it was no matter of concern.

Ouch.

Neutral between what two sides? Killing and being killed? Terrorists and victims of terror? What was there to be neutral about?

And even if Thailand didn't happen to be a close ally of the United States, wouldn't a word or two of sympathy be in order, just on humanitarian grounds?

Now Bangkok has been struck with a huge tragedy and in an odd parallel to 9/11, Bangkok's "World Trade Center", now renamed CentralWorld, has been hit so bad by arsonists it looks like the Pentagon after a jet crashed into it.

If my own feelings about New York, and my adopted home of Bangkok are any guide, it's not just a hole in a building, but a hole in the heart of the city. And the photo of a tattered Thai flag and wide-eyed modernist statue backed by the gutted building will no doubt become an icon of the shock and pain for many.

What has happened in Bangkok in recent weeks has created an open, gaping wound that will take years to repair.

For many Thais, foreign news coverage of domestic turmoil rubs salt in an open wound, especially when it is rife with error, lacks balance, makes sensational claims and tries to fit Thailand's tragedy into simplistic narrative frames in between frequent commercials. CNN, which seems to work on the assumption that anti-government forces are always right, even during riots (except in the US), gives undue airtime to overly made-up, puffy-haired announcers with fancy graphics tools who make ignorant comments about Thailand.

No better are the surprisingly insensitive comments about the torching of Bangkok made by famous academics, such as "All of this is justified", or "The farmers of Thailand have stood up!"

Just what farmers would that be in reference to?

Much of the academic comment to date reeks more of intramural red versus yellow intrigue akin to a heated sports match than a heartfelt concern for people on the ground.

As I came to understand after 9/11, even trivial comments hurt people when they are down.

There was a sense then, and now, of disbelief. If only it were a dream, or if one could turn back the hands of time, but you wake up each day and the hard truth is still there.

But time does heal, and facing the truth squarely does help. New Yorkers were distraught, at times riven with rage and riled up by callous comments made by cavalier commentators who chose to see 9/11 as just desserts or as someone else's problem.

US President Barack Obama has been prudently silent, despite the efforts of Thaksin's lawyer/PR flack who is angling to extract a trumped up "human rights" condemnation of Thailand at a time when the country that offered to come to Lincoln's help with a supply of elephants during the US Civil War requires the understanding of an old friend.

After 9/11, New Yorkers got back to their lives and eventually the tragedy was put into perspective and taken in stride.

Best of all, New Yorkers emerged from the political crisis as open and big-hearted, tolerant and as cosmopolitan as ever.

New Yorkers discovered that terror ceases to intimidate and divide when hatred and fear are let go of and people instead come to grips with the problem in a way that allows them to fortify their spirit while getting on with their lives.

At a time in the life of my country when I required quiet commiseration and understanding, many individuals in Thailand, including a taxi driver, my students and my colleagues at Chula, reached out with quiet understanding.

I wish to share the same sentiment with the good citizens of Bangkok and the provinces who have been hurt by recent events and are still reeling with shock, sadness and disbelief.

Philip J Cunningham is a freelance writer and political commentator

IN MEDIA REDS

2010-05-23T21:24:00.009-04:00

by philip j cunningham

In retrospect, red shirt calls for free speech and unfettered television access were as deceptive as the big red banner behind their stage at Ratchaprasong, which proclaimed in English for all the world to see:

PEACEFUL PROTESTERS
NOT TERRORISTS

That unforgettable banner, background to a vitriolic karaoke show and some unforgettable hate-laden banter held in the middle of a barricaded intersection, points to an image problem that was never really resolved. Were the reds peaceful and democratic at heart, betrayed by a militant fringe, or was violence and intimidation part of the overall red program from the start?

Not entirely surprising for a movement that enjoyed funding and policy guidance from a media-savvy-Machiavellian-ex-prime minister in exile, the reds used modern communications and advertising technique to create a compelling but ultimately deceptive brand image.

Having a banner proclaim peace in English, while spewing out militant thoughts in Thai is just one example, a kind of niche marketing. Having your touts, front men and impresarios wearing shirts with subtle, if not subliminal, non-verbal messaging is another. Ditto for singing songs with harsh words and haunting, uplifting melodies, such as "nak su thuli din," which was the high point of a memorial service to the slain militant Seh Daeng. The mood was always shifting, almost dizzyingly so, and song selection could jump from bouncy paeans to Thaksin to time-honored ballads commemorating past democracy struggles in rapid succession.

The Mahatma Gandhi shirt worn by rebel leader Jatuporn Promphan raised a few eyebrows, but what about other days, and other leaders? There was radical chic (Che T-shirt) at a defiant moment but also mellow image mending on the day when UDD strategy switched to seeking foreign intervention (jacket with American flag) and so on. Some of the clothing choices were no doubt random, but there also appears to have been a coordinated, if at times contradictory, effort to control word and wardrobe for the select few allowed to face the camera’s eye.

Red shirt speakers at one point stopped to explain to their listeners that peaceful protests played better in the foreign press than violence, so the crowd was urged to remain peaceful, admirably enough. But by now who in the "core" could have failed to notice the militant boasts of Seh Daeng and the taciturn black-shirted guards guarding the perimeter?

If the rank and file protesters were fooled about the allegedly peaceful nature of the movement when violent thoughts were openly expressed on stage, (taunts ranged from suggesting the Prime Minister should be strung up to inviting the army to bring it on and fight to the death) it is because they weren't listening carefully or had started to tune out the high decibel announcements. And if the rank and file failed to observe the black-shirted guards who enjoyed freedom of movement on the perimeter of the red zone, it was in part because they didn't want to see, one eye open, the other eye closed.

A red shirt spokesman tellingly denied knowledge of who the black shirts were but indicated that the reds were appreciative of their support. While he later claimed that the red shirts at Ratchaprasong had no weapons but the bamboo used for defense, he then qualified it with a semi-truth, saying there were “no visible weapons.” The weapons only became visible towards the end, hidden along the periphery in places like Lumpini Park among other places.

Other reports, detailing the forceful confiscation of ID cards and rude behavior of roughneck guards, suggest the peaceful wing of the movement was somewhat less than appreciative, and rather more in awe of, if not afraid of, their mysterious protectors.

While there’s room to debate whether the rank and file reds, said to be mostly middle-aged women, were rural innocents, callously placed on the streets of Bangkok to dignify a basically indecent political campaign aimed at restoring Thaksin to his wealth and power, or willing participants in the same, the result was the same. They were a captive, if not captivated, audience for the stage show of a sham democracy movement crafted to bring a corrupt, lying autocrat back to power.

Cloaking the largely clandestine militant wing of an openly hateful and resentment-fueled movement under incessant bromides and platitudes about democracy, Gandhian non-violence and equality might have served to fool some observers. It also helped to reduce cognitive dissonance on the part of wavering supporters, who at times appeared as drugged out and lacking in individual agency as members of a malevolent cult, but it is surprising to see how many in the foreign media and halls of academe also fell for the same sleight of hand. But then again, there were academics who cheered for the Cultural Revolution, and even the Khmer Rouge, not to mention the legions of Stalinists in an earlier era.

Still, the prevalence of red shirt fever in the academy is disconcerting. What is it about audacious hate and violence hitched to the fortune of a billionaire that certain Doctors of Philosophy find so find attractive?

A detailed media analysis of foreign coverage is a topic for another day, but it is not too soon to make a few preliminary observations.

Most foreign reporters cannot read or speak Thai which meant that the often charming non-verbal aspects of the rally at Ratchaprasong got better coverage than the acidic vitriol that was spoken from the stage in rapid-fire Thai.

Not surprisingly, the TV coverage was generally more superficial and misleading than print coverage. Al Jazeera was much better than CNN however, while the New York Times and the American wire service AP proved wiser and more sober in their coverage than the more sensationalist reports from newspapers based in the UK and Australia.

Suffice to say, a handful of reporters, Thai and foreign, and a number of extraordinary photographers were on the front line covering the story in a truly heroic manner. They showed us the human side of pro-government and anti-government forces alike, unflinching when either side engaged in violence. Their hard-earned record, --a Japanese photographer and an Italian photographer tragically paid with their lives-- not only recorded history in the making but contribute to the exposure of hidden hands and deeper appreciation of the complexity of the conflict.

And then there were the bobbleheads on CNN in studios in Hong Kong and Atlanta who took greater care to get their make-up, hair-gel and informal banter in good order rather than the facts; a triumph of snazzy media graphics, studio lighting and precisely-timed commercial breaks over the raw truth, on touchy topics such as political bloodshed and monarchical intervention.

Even though banned from England and banned from talking to the press in France, it is not hard to hear the tin-eared Thaksin proclaiming his innocence very, very loudly, either in his own shrill voice or through the nasal voice of his newly hired Canadian publicist. That he can keep himself in the news every day is a deft accomplishment. He is at once famous and infamous, outrageous and repentant, and highly contradictory, but it doesn't really matter if everlasting fame is the goal. His aggressive media strategy deliberately muddies the waters, effectively making the media outlets who swallow his rough, off-the-cuff comments and smoothly crafted corporate PR releases hook, line and sinker an extension of his red media machine.

Still, it is troubling the way some print media who ought to know better uncritically absorbed and repeated, often without attribution, the paper storm of professionally crafted PR, op-eds and press releases released by hired flacks, Canadian lawyer/publicist Robert Amsterdam being a case in point.

Melbourne’s Herald Sun ran a piece called “Thaksin calls for both sides to step back from abyss,” on May 17, 2010, making use of ghost-written quotes provided by Amsterdam's office, all the more devious because unattributed.

“Red Shirts had good reason to protest” was published in The Australian on May 20, 2010, when Bangkok was still choked with smoke. The timing was awful, but at least it was attributed to Thaksin’s hired alter-ego Amsterdam.

Arrested red shirt leader Veera Musikapong, who indicated displeasure with the armed wing of the reds and was keen on negotiating until negotiations were reportedly nixed by Thaksin, was correct in saying that anger does not produce democracy. Ditto for propaganda, advertising and crafty press releases disseminated by PR flacks.

As Veera and some of the more sensible red shirt leaders have acknowledged, a time-out is called for, but not at the expense of truth and transparency.

Vigilance is needed to guard against the audaciously mendacious.

It’s one thing to use TV, magazines and the internet to spread propaganda, quite another to incite violence. The red shirts have proven themselves eloquent, and almost touching in terms of crowd rapport at times, and a number of them sing reasonably well, though even the songs were lies in the sense that some good traditional melodies were hijacked and stuffed with pro-Thaksin lyrics.

But for every good entertainer or engaging speaker there was another speaker who spewed vile, ad hominem attacks, or racist jokes or hate speech as a matter of course. And then there were the snipers, arson specialists and bombers lurking murkily in the shadows.

Human rights groups and media freedom groups take note: UDD and other Red Shirt channels and websites do not uphold the responsibility inherent to freedom of the press if they purvey hate speech, use the medium to transmit coded militant commands or in plain speech tell people to go out and burn and kill.

No serious free speech advocate upholds the right to scream “fire” in a movie theatre.

Yet the red core leaders, including Arisman Pongruangrong and Nattawut Saikua, have been caught on tape saying things along the lines of, “If we don’t get our way, it’s burn, baby, burn.”

The red stage and its broadcast arm was a key nerve center for followers outside of the protest zone, some hundreds of miles away. In order not to alert listeners who were not supporters, some important communications were undoubtedly conveyed in code words, much as US fundamentalists do with right-wing talk radio and militant Islamists do on the internet.

But near the end, even the pretense of code was stripped away. When the self-styled DJ Om, who sounded like an overeager Red Guard on a bad day, took to the stage to face the UDD camera during the last hours of the Ratchaprasong protest, she spoke in terms that needed little decoding for followers around the country.

“Brothers and sisters! Get revenge! Do what you have to do!” she screamed in blood-curdling tones. “Go to the provincial government halls! Go now! Get revenge!”

Shortly after that, there was a “spontaneous” decision of red shirt sympathizers (downtrodden farmers?) in Ubol, Udon, Khonkaen, and Mukdahan to torch their own local government offices. A number of beautiful and historic buildings were burned and innocent rural folk intimidated, but fortunately the “sparks” didn’t light a “prairie fire.”

In fact, the key leaders of the so-called “core” including Nattawut and Jatuporn achieved a soft landing of sorts, just as tensions were building to a crescendo in the crowd, by turning themselves in to police as the army moved slowly north. The army may have hoped to lessen confrontation by moving at a snail's pace, but they also had to contend with M79 hand grenades intermittent sniper fire on the part of rebels, before closing in on Ratchaprasong intersection. Most of the brief, bloody skirmishes on May 19, 2010 were near or around Lumpini Park.

The red leaders got off light, spared both the anger of the army and the fury of the abandoned crowd, and not long after that, Bangkok was hit hard with a shockwave of concerted violence. Since talk of “burning the city” was a documented feature of red rhetoric in earlier rallies, the periodic volleys of incendiary rhetoric launched from the stage at Ratchaprasong raises troubling questions about the ethics of the UDD leadership and the sincerity of their followers.

The word terrorist is a problematic, over-used term in contemporary political discourse, and it is almost invariably used to describe what the other side does. It is a such a loaded term it is probably better not used, but oddly enough, the red shirts used "phu kor kan rai," the Thai term for terrorist, incessantly, often in mocking self-reference, which begs the question whether or not there was a kernel of contradictory truth in their loud, adamant denials. Where the peaceful protesters covering up, diverting attention from, or obscuring something less savory below?

Sort of like a banner that puts two irreconcilable ideas in uncomfortable proximity;

PEACEFUL PROTESTERS
NOT TERRORISTS?

THE LONG RED ROAD TO RATCHAPRASONG

2010-05-17T00:03:00.014-04:00

RED SHIRT PROTEST LEADER JATUPORN PROMPHAN ON THE STAGE AT RATCHAPRASONG INTERSECTION IN BANGKOK

(published in the Asia-Pacific Journal on May 17, 2010 as "The Long Winding Red Road to Ratchaprasong and Thailand’s Future")

PHILIP J. CUNNINGHAM

The sniper shooting of Seh Daeng, Maj. Gen. Khattiya Sawasdipol, on May 13, 2010 by an unknown assailant while chatting with foreign reporters has brought to rupture the standoff between Reds and Yellows in the heart of Bangkok and signals a new stage in the movement and its repression. Seh Daeng, whose nickname means “red commander”, was the reddest of the red shirts. His daughter, who sat at his bedside in the hospital until he succumbed to his grievous wounds on May 17, 2010, has been a staunch supporter of the yellow shirts, illustrative of the convoluted politics of the era. To better put in context the convoluted color-coded politics of the present day, and to identify some of the key heroes and villains and historic reference points being talked about on both sides of the barricades in Bangkok, a brief review of Thai political activism over the years will follow.

The road to the red-shirt takeover of the Ratchaprasong intersection in the heart of Bangkok’s busiest shopping district is a long and winding one. Political activists are not unlike historians in that they frequently point to events in the past to understand what is happening in the present. Key milestones on Thailand’s winding, bloody road to democracy are introduced to illuminate the democratic and revolutionary claims and historic pretensions of the red and yellow shirted activists today.

The bloodless coup of 1932 marked the end of absolute monarchy and is regarded as the birthdate of Thai democracy. Pridi Panomyong, later forced into exile to China by co-conspirator Pibun Songkhram, remains a hero wronged by history to Thai leftists, while Pibun, who yielded top-down authoritarian power for much of the 1940’s and 1950’s is viewed as a bulwark of establishment power.

Bhumibol Adulyadej, the present king, was coronated while Pibun was prime minister, but given Pibun’s republican leanings and history of participation in the 1932 coup, he was not particularly supportive of the monarchy.

Thanks in part to the US-stoked hysteria of the Cold War, the chameleon-like Pibun, who welcomed the Japanese with open arms in World War II, and then welcomed the US with open arms in 1945, was not perceived as anti-communist enough and was replaced in a 1957 coup by the self-styled “royalist” strongman Sarit Thanarat.

Sarit, ruthless, authoritarian and exceedingly rich, was succeeded by his close associate Thanom Kittakachorn, another staunch anti-communist who likewise enjoyed generous US support.

The 1960’s saw Thailand grow under authoritarian rule, with a concomitant rise in the countryside of the Thai communist party, especially in the Isan region, which ironically was the homeland of Sarit.

One of Thailand’s brightest thinkers, an independent scholar named Jit Phumisak, who was hired by the US embassy in Bangkok to translate the Communist Manifesto, but more importantly was the author of numerous tracts on Thai feudalism and lyricist/composer of songs that are still sung by protesters today, was threatened, jailed and hounded by the Sarit regime until he joined the newly formed Thai communist guerilla movement in the mountains of northeastern Thailand in the province of Sakol Nakorn.

Jit was shot to death in the ricefields of a contested area on the side of a dirt road on May 5, 1966, an event memorialized in the haunting and melancholy song, Jit Phumisak, sung by the folk rock group Caravan. Simply put, Jit Phumisak is the Che Guevera of Thailand.

On October 14, 1973 student demonstrations erupted over corruption and the constitution, leading to the fall of the hated Thanom government which inaugurated a three-year freewheeling hiatus in which US troops were asked to leave and a home-grown democracy was tested and attempted but failed to sink deep roots.

In the case of 1973 the King intervened on the side of the students, but when the military staged a coup three years later in the face of Thammasat University student demonstrations protesting the return of Thanom from exile, the monarch sided with the military.

After the brutal crackdown of October 1976, many students went into exile or joined guerillas in the Communist Party of Thailand in the “jungle.” Typical of this generation, Caravan lead singer Surachai Chantimatorn and his fellow band members who started out as bards of the 1970’s protests, then radicalized and went into exile in China and Laos where they joined the United Front of the Thai Communist Party after the October 6, 1976 military crackdown. Things had gotten so bad in Bangkok that for Caravan, and hundreds of other “Ocotober people,” the hardship of life in the jungle seemed a reasonable choice.

Chamlong Srimuang and Samak Sundaravej, both of whom later served respective terms as mayor of Bangkok, and eventually became bitter archrivals during the Thaksin years, were on the wrong side of history, the military side, in 1976.

General Prem Tinsulanonda, who ruled Thailand with a steady hand for much of the 1980’s after replacing military factions directly responsible for the 1976 coup, bought peace and a measure of prosperity through a successful amnesty deal that brought the activist youth of the 1970’s back into the fold of society. Since then, Prem has come to represent the pinnacle of a supple establishment, serving as an elder statesman and a leading member of the Privy Council serving the monarchy.

Seventies activists dropped the revolution as the CPT withered as a result of the Sino-Soviet split within the fledgling movement and amnesty offers from General Prem. Theirs is a lost generation, characterized by wild extremes. Many willingly gave up the armed struggle, which did not suit Bangkok’s best and brightest student leaders anyway, but they had nowhere to go. Some gave up hope and idled in drugs or drink, others reinvented themselves and became academics, poets and writers. Others still, with input from the 1976 class student leaders such as Sutham Saengpratum, who were imprisoned until amnesty was offered by Prime Minister Kriangsak Chomanon under the urging of Jimmy Carter, became politicians in their own right.

Perhaps to atone for this historic misjudgment, Chamlong studied Buddhism, lived an ascetic lifestyle and became a key activist in the anti- coup and anti General Suchinda Kraprayong demonstrations of 1992, which culminated in the Ratchadamnern street killings of “Black May.”

Again the monarchy intervened, reprimanding both parties. Chamlong and Suchinda crouched for the cameras at the King’s feet, then withdrew from the struggle. A royalist interim PM was appointed, and eventually elections were held, effectively neutralizing Suchinda’s military faction, which, after all, had been entirely responsible for massacre of the demonstrators. Neutralized, perhaps, but not accounted for. The disgraced General Suchinda took a profitable sinecure position in the telecoms industry.

The interim PM, Anand Panyarachun, helped restore normalcy, especially to jittery markets, and willingly stepped down as soon as elections were scheduled. But the democratic period that followed has been full of fits and starts, resulting in a series of short-lived coalition governments, the most accomplished of which was led by Chuan Leekpai of the Democrat Party, where the young Abhisit was being groomed for a future leadership role.

During the Chuan years, and then the Thaksin years, there were scattered protests, most of them peaceful and some involving sustained camp-outs in public places. Many leftists of the October generation (1970’s activists) and the veteran activists of Black May (1992) were supportive of such street activism regardless of who was premier. Caravan, in particular, has a decades-old tradition of supporting demonstrations, especially on behalf of the poor, and they have played tirelessly at student commemorations of democratic milestones and at countless street gatherings, including mass demonstrations of the Assembly of the Poor, held in front of Government House, which created the template for long-term protests at public intersections, complete with food service, stage and security. The predominantly rural demonstrators adapted quickly to life in the open, and created vital tent cities of the kind that yellow shirts and red shirts have since emulated.

To say the red-yellow divide represents a class struggle is fundamentally inaccurate, a willful interpretation that plays into the hands of a divisive populism, though accusations of class bias do indeed resonate in Thailand’s deeply unequal, hierarchical society which keeps alive, through music and memory and a free press, the dream of equality and justice.

Many grassroots members of the red shirts happen to be Northeasterners from Isan, but that is not to say that Isan people are red-shirts. It has long been the poorest part of the country, but some poor people turn out to be extremely conservative politically, dictator Sarit was from Isan and popular in the way that fascists sometimes are, but for the most part the people of Isan have been pragmatic and tend to show support for the status quo just to keep their heads above water.

The Northeast today might better be described as a mosaic, with huge yellowshirt strongholds, such as Ubon city, though right across the river on the rural side of the bridge, one can find a red hotbed. Similar complexities can be found in most of the provinces rimming Cambodia, including Buriram, a pro-government “blue shirt” stronghold who finds its patron in Thaksin-turncoat Newin Chitchob, while the more northerly Isan towns such as Udon and Khonkhaen in the north can be more fairly described as redshirt strongholds.

There is ample evidence of vote-buying and rent-a-mob activity, but there is also compelling evidence of poor people getting sick and tired of the status quo and joining the fray, which in recent years means putting on a color coded shirt and joining a demonstration.

Isan has a rebel tradition which goes back at least to the 1950’s, when its politicians, at the risk of their careers and very life, opposed the Bangkok dictators, a pattern repeated in the 1960’s with Jit Phumisak’s generation of guerilla activists (he was born in what is now Cambodia but most of the guerillas were from Isan) and in the 1970’s with the students who went into the jungle along with the Caravan generation. Not surprisingly, Caravan’s lead singer is from Khorat province in Isan, and the lyrics for Jit Phumisak were penned with the help of Khamsing Srinawk, a writer from Isan who focused on the poor and disenfranchised of the region.

Folk-rockers Caravan, and a band influenced by Caravan known as Carabao, whose lead singer was educated in the Philippines but served briefly as a messenger for the CPT, have produced dozens of songs about social injustice and the plight of the poor, setting the stage for the mix of politics and music today.

Prominent, pro-Isan leftists such as Therdphum Jaidee, and Kraisak Chunhawan, son of the elected prime minister deposed by General Suchinda in the events leading up to Bloody May, are outright anti-Thaksin, if not yellow shirt supporters, and many of the rank and file led by the socially prominent newspaperman Sondhi and the ascetic Chamlong were drawn from both former activists and Bangkok’s poor and middle classes.

Thus October people can be found on both sides of the red/yellow divide, as can poor people from Bangkok and Isan people. This is not surprising, as divisive color-coded politics have divided many a family right down the middle.

As noted earlier Seh Daeng, was the reddest of the red shirts, while his daughter, who kept vigil at his side in the hospital following the attempt on his life, is considered a yellow shirt. Seh Daeng died on May 17, 2010 just as this article was being posted.

Another example of shifting alliances is the founder of the yellow shirts himself. Sondhi Limthongkul was a business associate and political ally of Thaksin before turning against him and organizing the potent yellow shirt demonstrations. Sondhi, who survived a still-unsolved assassination attempt that took place just after red shirt demonstrations of April 2009 were quashed, has come out of political silence to express sympathy for the more grievously injured Seh Daeng, briefly bridging, through shared tragedy, a sharp political divide.

In recent years, some well-known October people and former jungle fighters have become Thaksin supporters and MPs under his tutelage.

Although many of the red shirts like to draw a direct line between 1973 and 1976 and 1992 with the red cause, and there is some continuity of personnel, the same could be said for the yellow cause which was also influenced by earlier waves of social activism.

Furthermore, some very prominent democracy activists will have no truck with either camp. Just to mention two, October 14 heroes Seksan Prasertkul and Thirayut Boonmee, both respected academics, have been conspicuous by their absence from activities both red and yellow.

But more surprising is the absence of the new generation of students. Where are the young people today? The red crowd is distinctly middle aged, if not middle class, and students are few and far between.

The presence of older demonstrators, especially from rural areas, on the streets of Bangkok is hailed in some quarters as a new kind of political consciousness, but there is also opportunism at play.

This year, as last, the red shirt rallies were crucially timed for the March-April-May period which coincides with the dry season. Soaring temperatures alone make this choice seem odd, until one considers the labor pool. This is the one time of the year the countryside becomes truly idle, and rural folk have some time on their hands due to the temporary halt in agricultural activity. This year, as in other years, all sorts of rural people descended on Bangkok in March, for all sorts of reasons. Many were seeking to supplement their meager incomes, which for some means work as day laborers or driving a tuk-tuk or taxi. For a few thousand others, there’s been the novel opportunity of joining a demonstration that says the peasants and poor are the heroes of the nation. For many, this means an all expense paid song and food gala at Ratchaprasong intersection, where the only price of admission is to sit and listen to speeches until the crackdown comes.

Then there are red leaders, and Puea Thai party members who are loyalists to a billionaire in exile. They include core leaders Veera Musikapong, Nattawut Saikua, Jatuporn Promphan, along with others such as Chaturon Chaisaeng and Jaran Ditta-apichai, the latter two “October People,” former communist guerillas with close ties to Thaksin.

“Nak su, thuli din” a rousing anthem attributed to Jan Kamachon can be heard when red shirts die and their deaths are memorialized. When the death of Seh Daeng was announced on May 17, it immediately brought the militant crowd to its feet, and to tears.

“We are treated like dust on the ground,
but fortune will reverse itself...
Don’t give in to them, that’s all that matters...
We will die side by side…
Use blood to wipe away social decay…
Ahead of us, a future that is beautiful...
the fire has been lit, it will spread…”

The tragic visions of fire and blood ring all too true. And sadly, the hierarchical habit of treating other people like dirt and dust underfoot will persist long after the smoke finally clears at Ratchaprasong.

What has been happening in the streets of Bangkok will be an open wound for some time to come, but selected elements of the struggle will no doubt coalesce to become not just the stuff of legend, but different legends, for different camps, for different reasons.

It is almost certain that Bloody May 2010 at Ratchaprasong will remain divisive and controversial in a way that contrasts with the one-sided military massacres memorialized by earlier generations of peaceful activists. For all its claims to the moral high ground as peace-loving democratic movement, the red shirt program is in certain respects more akin to fascist populism, influenced by modern media technique and traditional barrel of the gun tactics of the Thai communist guerillas.

In April and May 2010 a significant number of red shirt demonstrators and sympathizers were armed and belligerent, and if their techniques were traditional and low tech—everything from slingshots to bamboo spears and Molotov cocktails—there also were armed agents in the shadows, standing on red-held ground, using handguns, rifles and hand grenades to create mayhem and new cycles of violence and rage. It should be stressed that the identity and provenance of the “black-shirt” provocateurs remains murky.

In any case, the “Seh Daengs” and the known militant wing of the red shirts have much to answer for, as do the moneymen and policy makers directing events from a distance.

There is so much blame to go around on both sides of the barricades. Army crackdowns in the name of law and order almost invariably take innocent life, deepening the tragedy. General Anupong Paochinda in particular, was outspoken in favor of a political solution and demonstrably reluctant to use force against the protesters.

Thai folklore, future history, future poetry and song, will no doubt be replete with new-arch villains, people’s heroes and unforgettable martyrs, as has been the pattern in the past.

Like the Taiping rebellion in the late years of the Qing Dynasty, the red shirt uprising may best be understood not just as a cause of a nation’s distress but as a symptom of suppressed rage, unrest and unease in a deeply divided society that is groping unsteadily towards the future.

Thailand will continue to examine its past, and attempt to put into historic perspective current troubles, in order to better map out a new kind of future.

Philip Cunningham is a professor of media studies who has taught at Chulalongkorn University and Doshisha University. He is the author of Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989. A long-time student of Chinese and Thai affairs, his blogspot is here: http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/

He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation.
The Long Winding Red Road to Ratchaprasong and Thailand’s Future

RED ALL THE RAGE

2010-05-11T22:47:00.009-04:00

TRIUMPH OF THE SHRILL, THE RHETORIC OF THE REDS

by philip j cunningham

Thanks to internet technology and the media savvy of the money people backing Thailand’s combative red shirts, it is possible to take a virtual seat right in front of the rebel stage at Ratchaprasong and listen to speeches, live music and public service announcements morning, noon and night.

The camera focus is steady and tight, making it impossible for the virtual observer to judge the size, mood or makeup of the crowd, let alone sense the heat, chaos, confusion and odors of the gathering, but one gets a good sense of performer personality and talent, with varied gifts of gab and occasional leaps of inspiring rhetoric.

The key speakers are mostly red celebrities whose fame as activists precedes them. Nattawut Saikua and Jatuporn Promphan and Wisa Khanthap are among best word-slingers and deservedly get the prime time slots.

Other orators drone on, often shrill and humorless, as they repeat the rote, but ever shifting, party line espoused by the "Core.” One day it might be a call to end martial law, another day an absurd complaint about Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban going to have a coffee with the police instead of putting himself under arrest.

The linguistically gifted Wisa Khanthap has a reassuring stage presence; relaxed, avuncular and easy on the ear. On recent evenings he has taken to reading news highlights from Thai Rath, Matichon and Daily News to a largely rural crowd, adopting a gentle, explanatory tone akin to a teacher reading aloud to his students.

But then there’s a hothead now and then who by some twisted conviction, or the desire to play to crowd prejudices, utters thoughts so intolerant, illogical and ill-considered that one wishes he or she would just shut-up. For example,

“Aphisit is a “Yuan” his family came from Vietnam, you know that, don’t you?”

“And what about Sondhi, “Lim the Chink” where did he run away to?”

“And the yellow shirt rallies, they pay Cambodians 500 baht a day to demonstrate, they can’t even speak Thai!”

Other red shirts have made homosexual jokes about leading government figures and routinely describe cowardly actions as “gay.”

Several of the singers are talented, and they convey something akin to transcendental love during the rapture of performing a song, but sadly turn strident, shrill and full of hate when they start to pontificate like politicians.

I rather liked the pluck of one singer, though, who urged fellow demonstrators to buy her CD as a souvenir to take home after the “victory,” until she, like the other “nak rong” wiped the smile off her face and started to parrot the party line. Second-tier speakers frequently fumble the slippery talking points cobbled together by the “Core,” who use a backstage container room as their congress hall.

Worst of all are the Thaksin clones, who like their chatty mentor, speak incessantly out of both sides of mouth, making the ill-mannered billionaire fugitive sound like Mahatma Gandhi, while portraying genuinely good-mannered and gentlemanly Abhisit as a demon foaming at the mouth with blood dripping from his fangs.

Nattawut gives good rhetoric, though as with many of the red speakers, sophistry, not logic is the strong card. In fact, his combative style is reminiscent of George W. Bush.

“Send in your army divisions, send in your police, bring in the tanks, grenades, the AK 47s and kill the people, there will blood everywhere,” he goads, “Or use two men and two guns to arrest one man, that’s it.”

“If you crackdown at three AM, by nine or ten in the morning red shirts will descend on Bangkok, the nation will rise up.”

“Bring it on! Come on, come on!”

“And now, for a song…O Democracy, brothers and sisters mowed down…O Democracy!”

Nattawut does for “democracy” what Bush did for “freedom.” It’s enough to make you hate a good word as it is warped to be synonymous with killing, conflict, and war.

The single most inspiring, and disconcerting performance I happened to catch online, however, came on Monday evening around nine as pressure for the reds to disperse was met head-on by a stubborn unwillingness to leave.

Red leader Jatuporn took to the stage and mesmerized the crowd with earthy incantations and rousing rhythms. He had all of Ratchaprasong in his hand for a timeless moment, making the warm-up speakers look like hack comedians on a bad night in a half empty club.

The heavy-set Jatuporn displays a rare élan on stage, and when he finds his groove it’s unexpectedly inspiring, sort of like seeing the serene poker face of an ancient bas-relief king come alive with the rousing jazzy voice of Louis Armstrong. Here, some excerpts:

“Struggle is only way to survive. Once you decide to fight, losing is nothing, winning is all.”

“How dare you bargain with us? We're not here for the living, we're here for the dead.”

“Ratchaprasong is haunted by the souls of the dead denied justice. We are men, we are human, we love our friends, when our friends die for us, we will stay on, fighting for the martyrs.”

Resounding in rhythm or not, red rhetoric is hot and full of spin, sometimes outright incendiary, but it is generally unmoored from the truth and any sense of fair play.

Seeing how belligerent and gleefully confrontational the Red Shirts have been for several weeks now, --what with slingshots, rocks, sharpened sticks, mass vigilante actions, along with a parallel but unattributed campaign of horrific violence from the shadows, the most recent media makeover making the reds out to be modern-day adherents of Hinduistic “ahimsa” rings hollow.

“We won't surrender,” says Nattawut. “To give in is death, struggle is survival. They died for us so we fight for them, nothing is higher than their sacrifice, we will not surrender, we will die, nothing is more beautiful than this struggle in the whole world.”

There is more than a nascent fascism lurking in the hearts of the hardliners, but there are also moderates who mean well. From the stage one hears a headache-inducing jumble of nihilistic populism, Thaksin hero worship, dated CPT propaganda and banal CEO platitudes.

Perhaps more telling, some of the tired, hoarse Core activists are running out of things to say.

The production values of the Ratchaprasong show are professional, with competent camera work, decent lighting, crack editing, theme-coordinated stage props and soaring, overhead crane shots. Big screens and a sound system on the site suggest a rock concert experience.

But the language of hate and divisiveness is at odds with the sound and light spectacle. This potent video mix of bad politics and good art brings to mind Leni Riefenstahl’s film classic, “Triumph of the Will.”

Bangkok’s red rally is animated by the politics of rage, but it’s not the outgrowth of a grungy beer-hall putsch.

Call this show “Triumph of the Shrill,” a tinny, tropical gala with only the faintest echoes of the frighteningly photogenic Nuremberg mass rally.

If Thailand goes down the road to perdition, there’s no saying if the trains will run on time, but the road to social collapse, a glimpse of which we can get at Ratchaprasong today, will be almost certainly be graced with clever talk, tasty food and bouncy music.

(published in the Bangkok Post as "Triumph of the Shrill, the Rhetoric of the Reds")

THE AUDACITY OF MENDACITY

2010-05-03T10:45:00.004-04:00

Where lies the truth amid the mendacity?

(published in the Bangkok Post, May 3, 2010)

I watch the unfolding of massive street protests in Bangkok from a geographic distance, but not without emotional identification as I work from a library, putting the finishing touches on a paperback version of a book about the Tiananmen student protests of 1989.

Flamboyant Maj-Gen Khattiya Sawasdipol has compared the red shirts to the students at Tiananmen, one of many careless comments that serves to obscure rather than illuminate what is really motivating the protesters.

Suffice to say the Beijing students, provocative though they were, relied entirely on peaceful expression and carried no weapons --not slingshots, not M79 grenades, not spears, not clubs-- and though agents provocateurs did appear as if from nowhere during the orgy of violence of the June 4 crackdown itself, there were no black-clad Ninja hiding behind civilian shields, aiming their guns and rifles at military targets.

It's a terrible challenge to understand what's happening on the streets of Bangkok, and there's scant comfort in noting that almost no observer, whether on the scene, in the academy, in the newsroom or barracks or halls of governance seems to have a clear grasp of what's going on either.

Impatience for a crackdown is palpable, though there is still a chance for patient, peaceful measures to work. A bloodbath cannot be entirely discounted, especially if the military acts peremptorily in reaction to perceived divisions within its ranks or simply by being goaded into a merciless show of force.

The only on-the-scene observers who profess to get the whole picture are the most prejudiced voices of all --the partisans who wear shirts of contrasting colour-- and while there may be some important truths in what each of the battling factions have to say, they deliberately leave gaps in their logic and holes in their reporting that are filled instead with hot air and hate speech.

One can spend all day and night looking at everything in English and Thai on the "red shirts" on the internet, and end up feeling one knows even less than before, and that may be by design.

The way the wayward reds daily douse the media with more than it can handle is reminiscent of the days when Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister kept the media off-balance by constantly changing the topic, saying outrageous things and taking the initiative with bold schemes.

Given that hardly a day passes without some shocking new street action on the part of the reds, one begins to sense a continuity of propaganda, if not personnel, as if some of Thaksin's would-be Rasputins were among the arthritic revolutionaries advising the rebel reds.

The seductive paraphernalia of the yellows and the reds --the colour schemes, the slogans, the anthems, the songs of Caravan and Jit Phumisak, the headbands, the daredevil esprit de corps, the appealing folkways of street food and elemental living in the open-- all serve to invoke the ghosts of protests past, especially Oct 14, 1973, Oct 6, 1976 and Black May 1992.

And comparison with those events is not as easy to dismiss as the awkward comparison to Tiananmen, because they are part of Thai social history and inform actions in the present, both in terms of living memory and a received knowledge of, and nostalgia for fighting the good fight.

Though "not learning'" from history has its perils, fighting the last war or "learning" the wrong lesson is also fraught with risk.

The people on the wrong side of the barricades are not always on the right side of history, even if there is an appealing narrative that suggests it should be so.

This is especially true in fluid Thai society where individuals sometimes find themselves not only on opposite sides of the barricades from former classmates and comrades, but even on the opposite side from where they last stood themselves; and they may change sides yet again.

Such ironies abound.

We see men of "peace" calling for war and men of war reluctant to unleash the terrible power that society has entrusted to them. Gen Anupong Paojinda, at the time of this writing, is under criticism for being too calm, too cautious and too circumspect. His reluctance to kill is willfully misinterpreted to mean he is either utterly ineffective, or, worse yet, one of "them".

The yellow shirts, themselves veterans of prolonged streets protests and a startling and disruptive airport takeover, show no tolerance, let alone the recognition of a kindred spirit, for rival protesters blocking a street full of hotels and high-end shops.

While Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is under pressure to act ruthlessly against his own better judgment, members of his party muddle the waters further and lower themselves to the level of the mob by making imprudent and insupportable accusations about the "loyalty'" of the reds.

It's a cheap shot, akin to the nasty red-baiting of US anti-communist demagogues in the 1950s, and not unlike the attitude that Arizona has more recently taken towards people who look like "immigrants''.

There is no place for a loyalty test, for who is to judge the mental state of others and by what impeccable criteria?

On the other hand there is a growing body of physical evidence for violent crimes committed, and violence should be prosecuted by law.

As someone who experienced the Tiananmen protests in Beijing in 1989, I can understand the power of defiance in the face of great odds, even the irrational desire to sacrifice comfort, common sense and safety in the name of a cause. There is a real, though transient and volatile, camaraderie on the street that creates a false sense of invulnerability.

But there are few causes worth sacrificing lives for, and none that come to mind in the current conflict. If there is a non-violent way out, every last effort should be made for a peaceful resolution.

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

About the author
Writer: Philip J Cunningham
Position: Writer

THE GRAY LADY GETS IT WRONG, AGAIN

2010-04-21T12:52:00.007-04:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

The New York Times set the tone for its recent China quake coverage with a devious headline:

“After Quake, Tibetans Distrust China’s Help”

What’s wrong with the headline, affixed to an April 17, 2010 report from China by Andrew Jacobs?

Let’s first consider headlines you are unlikely to ever see on the pages of the New York Times or any other decent newspaper.

“After 911, Jews Distrust America’s Help”

“After Katrina, Blacks Distrust America’s Help”

Now take another look at the NYT headline. It’s simply not up to good journalistic standards, is it? In fact it is insulting, if not borderline incendiary.

To say that “Jews distrust America’s help” is to be crude and insensitive. Such a headline commits a double indignity, slyly suggesting that Jews are not really American and Americans are not really Jews.

Ditto for any ethnic group you chose to test the decency of the headline with. Black, white, Irish, Italian or whatever ethnic group you like. It is insulting and it is inaccurate.

And it strikes close to home, so the NYT wisely avoids it.

Now what about China? Ethnic Tibetans in Qinghai are Chinese citizens. Even the Dalai Lama agrees with that.

So what business do the suits on 41st Street in Manhattan have declaring independence on behalf of ethnic Tibetans in Qinghai?

If you desire to play up ethnic tensions while reporting on an earthquake, as the NYT apparently sees fit to do, it would be linguistically more accurate to say that “ethnic Tibetans distrust Beijing” or “local Communist Party officials” or whatever group you seek to pit against the quake-ravaged citizens in that particular region of China.

Just look at those poor people, victims not just of nature's wrath but undemocratic governance as well!

Such schadenfreude is not unusual in tabloid journalism nor is it unknown at the uppity Times, which in a similar vein sensationalized the May 2008 typhoon in Burma to the point that a naïve reader might agree with calls for the US to invade and take over to save the Burmese from themselves.

The editorial voice of the "Gray Lady," often echoes the harangues of its star columnists Nick Kristoff and Tom Friedman. The tone is smug, the moral posture is high-dudgeon, framed as it is within a triumphalist American narrative. Americans make serious mistakes, and the NYT reports on many of them (when not besides themselves coddling sources in Washington and supporting various wars and so-called humanitarian interventions) but come what may, the royal “we” are basically the good guys.

NYT coverage of Asia is rarely free of agenda. Take China, example. Beijing has an undeniable record of economic accomplishment, which is reluctantly reported, but it gets hammered, not just for demonstrable faults, but for not being more like “us.”

Coverage of Thailand has taken on an oddly pro-Thaksin tone, despite the bloody machinations of the former authoritarian ruler, perhaps because he was masterful at going through the motions of a democratic process that Americans like to validate.

Earth calling the New York Times; people and places that do not adhere to your version of American values are not always in the wrong.

Despite some superb writing and crack investigative reporting, the NYT is infected by a ready-made Manicheaen narrative that sullies its objectivity. It’s as if the understandably partisan coverage inherent to sports, in which the home team can make mistakes but do no wrong, while the other team can accomplish good things but do no right, has leaked into the news pages as well.

It has recently been pointed out by David Rosen in Counterpunch, for example, that NYT coverage of allegations of abuse on the part of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, dims in comparison to the apparent glee with which the NYT has gone after the Pope for abuse scandals in distant Europe.

Sometimes the Gray Lady really is an eminence grise of sorts, embracing the status quo and maintaining political correctness close to home while wagging the finger and assuming a tut-tut, take-no-prisoners approach abroad.

BLESSED ARE THE FUN-MAKERS

2010-04-16T22:05:00.002-04:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(published in the Bangkok Post, April 17, 2010)

The sight of red-shirted protesters taking a break from the incendiary heat of political battle to gently douse one another with water in the spirit of Songkran past and present is a small but meaningful step towards repairing dangerous social ruptures and healing the pain of recent political violence.

By taking time out to celebrate a common cultural identity grounded neither in race, religion nor flag, but a delightful folk tradition that elevates fun-loving to a degree rarely seen elsewhere, Thai street combatants have shown a depth of character and resilience that bodes well for resolving civil discord and restoring a sense of normalcy.

The Khao San Road area was hard hit by conflict but was also the site for some transformative fun of the sort that had the world media raising a collective eyebrow.

Going from bullets to buckets of water in a few short days is jolting to the senses, and confounds the media narrative of doom and gloom in the streets, but it does show a glimmer of hope for a peaceful resolution to a seemingly intractable conflict.

The basically good-natured, transformative capacity of both the crowd and the crowd controllers has been evident all along, though last Saturday's shocking violence threatened to be a game changer.

Up until the outbreak of violence on April 10, the exact origins and motivations of which have not yet been clearly established, protesters and security forces alike showed enormous restraint, humour and patience in conjuring up creative, non-violent ways to do their thing.

This, not the aberrant outbreak of gratuitous violence that is attributed by many protesters and the government alike to a malevolent third force, should be the guide to future actions.

It is critical that conscientious individuals on both sides of the barricades retain their essential autonomy and goodness and not be carried away by crowd psychology and group dynamics to the point of hurting others.

Soldiers and rebels alike need to isolate, identify, contain and eventually help adjudicate any criminal behaviour acts, whether attributed to rogue soldiers, terrorists or fellow partisans.

Meanwhile, protesters of any colour or stripe should feel free, and be free, to continue to air grievances, exercise free assembly and free speech, with the understanding that violence be avoided at all costs.

And while soldiers and government officials need not be treated with fawning respect, they too deserve to be kept free of bodily harm.

If and when violence does break out, as it did on ''Black Saturday'', it behooves all to step back and reflect deeply, rather than seek revenge in the heat of the moment.

Unexplained acts of violence continue to put the nation on edge. Whether violators of the peace are agents provocateur or just ''normal people'' who tragically get carried away with unbridled emotion, it is important to stem the tide.

Hardline, hardcore tactics do not serve the best interests of the crowd or those duty-bound to control the crowd.

As annoying as traffic disruptions due to demonstrations may be, as irritating as songs and slogans of society's discontents may be to those entrenched in the status quo, the temporary closure of a major intersection is tolerable if not democracy-affirming, in comparison to dictatorial control.

If an army clique or coup group should in the days ahead pre-emptively deprive the people of their basic rights and freedoms in order to get the traffic moving again, then the chaotic days of yellow shirts and red shirts will seem carefree in comparison to the jack-booted world in which tanks take the place of protesters and the noisy media is reduced to a slick propaganda machine.

People of all political persuasions, vehemently though they may disagree about certain issues, should cooperate at least enough to prevent the axe, currently hanging by the thinnest of threads, from smashing down on dissent of all kinds. There is an unfortunate tendency for both the media and the powers-that-be to focus on a crowd and begin to take seriously its claims only when it gets violent in word and deed. There needs to be a reversal of this trend. In order not to validate violence, peaceful gatherings crying out for social justice should be listened to with the utmost earnestness and respect. Those with the stamina and political will to continue peaceful protest ought rightly do so, showing their solidarity, willpower and goodwill through rightful words and rightful actions.

At this delicate juncture, it would be a tactical mistake for either protesters or army people to make a sacrificial lamb of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, tempting though it may be to clear the deck for the sake of political theatre.

Mr Abhisit is a thoughtful, reflective leader who appears to possess both the brains and decency necessary for compromise and dialogue, though he needs to unmoor himself from the tainted political machine that propelled him to power.

The likely result of forcing Mr Abhisit to step down on account of bloodshed provoked by other political actors is that either the military will step up, or chaos will ensue, further undermining the chance for democracy to take root and instead paving the way for a return of the kind of strongman rule that past generations of students and citizens sacrificed so much for so long ago.

Those who feel they have been deprived full participation in all the best that Thailand has to offer, have the right, and indeed the responsibility, to help correct social injustice, even if it means taking to the streets and disrupting some traffic.

But to attack the person of the prime minister or army encampments or media installations shows neither goodwill nor common sense. Anyone with a whit of familiarity with Thailand's history of bloody coups recognises the pattern; coup plotters sow discord, spread hate and seize state organs to assert political/business dominance with the help of military factions behind the scenes.

Do the downtrodden protesters from the farms of Isan and the North really want to be proxies in a humourless and unforgiving power-grab?

The Songkran water-splashing suggests otherwise. Despite difficulties, Thailand's quintessential free spirit is alive and well. If cool heads can prevail and incendiary incidents are not allowed to spiral out of control, then peace has a chance. Every small act of peace-making, every gesture of tolerance, and every attempt at dialogue contributes to reversing a dangerously negative polarity. With time, patience and persistence, the sundered social fabric may at last be mended and rewoven in a just and more equitable way.

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

GOOGLE AND ALL THAT BUZZ

2010-03-25T10:04:00.003-04:00

By Philip J Cunningham

Google's departure from China appears to have been a business retreat dressed up as an ideological offensive, in which a specious argument about free speech was used as a fig-leaf to cover the company’s failure to penetrate and dominate a market of its choosing. But it also reflects outdated, Cold War style thinking.

In any case, Google.cn is gone, and while local employees and loyal users may feel lost in the lurch, it is worth considering the upside to Google's departure from the world's biggest internet market.

Google has grown so big so fast and has enriched itself to such an absurd degree that it is in danger of losing the trust of its customers. Like a bloated corporate monster careening out of control, it smashes down walls of privacy and discretion while sucking up personal data like a celestial vacuum cleaner; --scanning other people's mail is bad enough-- but it also uses that and other personal data to reap billions in advertising dollars.

It can be seen as a large, if not the largest, intelligence operation of its kind, sifting through data in real time at a rate that traditional spy agencies could only envy.

Like a shark that doesn’t know how to stop swimming, it is a non-stop eating machine, devouring competitors and chewing up kindred companies, all for what purpose? Free speech? Democratic expression? Personal freedom? That's what CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the Google Personal Democracy Forum, but speaking to advertisers, he probably came closer to the truth, saying, “We love advertising!”

Questioned about the ethics of information hoarding at a recent forum in Abu Dhabi, Schmidt snapped back, “Is there a government you would prefer to be in charge of this?”

Governments run the gamut of good and bad, but their existence is predicated on social compact to be stewards of the common good, pledged to serve and protect the people.

What can be said about a private company that scans personal information on an unprecedented level for no greater good than stockholder profit?

Simply put, we cannot believe that Google is incapable of doing wrong. Indeed their claim to do no evil has a Shakespearian air of protesting too loudly.

Even with sterling intentions and the strictest of standards, it stands to reason that this dollar-driven global information giant may turn out to be, without fully realizing it, something less than good.

To guard against such an eventuality, it is important that at least one robust market in the global information ecosystem be free of Google products, just as it's important for global agriculture to have GM-free zones. Genetically modified food, like Google Modified Information, let’s call it “GMI”, may be the wave of the future, but then again it may not.

Just as GM foodstuffs have, in a few short years, reached their way into nearly every nook and cranny of America’s food chain, Google has insinuated itself into the information chain, public and private, in a way that uproots traditional norms of decency while making itself hard to deracinate, if not indispensable.

It’s not the whiff of science behind GMO and GMI that is troubling, but the blind faith that its primary stakeholders can do no wrong. The deliberate gaming of genetic and informational ecosystems may be of some utility, but the jury is still out about systemic defects and the voracious elimination of alternatives.

Because it penetrates society quietly, insidiously and incrementally, you wake up one day, and all of a sudden, the “buzz” is everywhere. Perhaps that helps explain the lengths the masters of these dubious new technologies go to convince the public that they are not just not evil, not just innocuous, but actually good for us.

But is it not better to let one hundred wild flowers blossom, than allow agribusiness to weed out competitors until there is only one kind of crop?

Google has produced some fascinating products that are borderline addictive, but increasingly, the firm is showing itself to have cult-like characteristics, from the fanatic fan-boys who defend it, right or wrong, in every forum, to the soft-spoken co-founder Sergey Brin, whose slightest paranoid whisper can shake the organization and make the media take notice.

Google itself is a highly secretive and curiously opaque subculture, despite its almost willful come-what-may willingness to expose ordinary citizens to the public eye through aerial maps and street photos, indelible posts and silly videos, email data-mining and oops, here and there some information spills.

Although trying to understand Google from the outside is a bit like examining a black hole, judging from the limited event horizon visible to outsiders it would appear that dear leader Brin is the individual who set the self-destructive China publicity stunt into motion. Not surprisingly, the Google vision tends to reflect the Manichaean values of co-founder Brin’s idiosyncratic Soviet and American upbringing, conflating China with the USSR, even though the Cold War paradigm collapsed by the time he was in high school.

In the place of the bipolar world of Cold War certainties, we live in a more nuanced, multivalent world.

But the rise of the internet, while touted by never-say-die Cold Warriors as a tool to combat state propaganda, has inadvertently begun to serve up decentralized propaganda of its own; full of mindless mashups, advertising jingles, corporate slogans, recycled canned entertainment and decontextualized information for disunited people.

Google has been innovative, and instrumental, in making fractured conversations, selfish self-regard, multimedia overload, and fragmented text the new cool.

But there are indications that this sort of cyber Balkanization works against social harmony and shared values, and instead breaks up the population into narrow niches and dubious demographics, much as data-mining does, creating not a more humane, integrated world, but a disintegrating tower of Babel where like-minded monocrats self-entertain while exchanging like-minded tweets, texts and trills without hearing, or heeding, the voice of others.

pc

STOP ROCKING THE BOAT

2010-02-24T16:14:00.003-05:00

We live in age of political extremism. It's not necessarily a reflection of the tough issues of the day; there have been tougher times to be sure, and it's not just bad manners; politicians have probably always been street fighters at heart, despite their grinning photo-ops, and their groomed appearances to the contrary.

Today's noisy 24/7 media overload may be part of the problem inasmuch as bad news sells better than good; discouraging scandal entertains more than encouraging statistics, and misinformation on the internet has a life of its own.

But there is something about the uncompromising vitriol of the current age, perhaps magnified by the paradigm shift in digital communication, that is ripping the social fabric to shreds and threatening the health, safety and resilience of entire nations as a whole.

The worst thing about the morass of politics today is the myopia of spoiler politics; if one side fails to get its way, it responds to no higher calling than to ruin it for the other side. It's like two people fighting to get on a raft, each pulling the other off, willing to risk drowning rather than cooperate with a rival.

US Senator from Indiana, Evan Bayh, recently announced he will step down next year rather than seek another term, given the unpleasant, polarised environment the US Congress has become. He poignantly laments not being able to be friends with Republicans, to dine together, socialise together and work out compromises with the other half of Congress, as was normal operating procedure in the good old days when his father, Birch Bayh, was senator.

Thailand, like America, is currently going through a rough patch in its national politics, in which rude trumps polite, violence is seen as a viable option and might makes right. The national dialogue has declined to the point where communication and compromise are almost impossible.

Unlike America - which has been "muddling through" for over two centuries with a system of government affectionately known as the "worst" system of governance except for all the other systems which are even worse - Thailand is a post-1932 democracy with a predilection to coups, vulnerable to both chaos and strongman politics.

The Thai media is full of talk of overthrowing the government and blood in the streets. There are whispers of coups and counter-coups and coups to provoke coups. Bombs and grenades go off, innocent lives are threatened, the business climate declines. Where is it going? Where will it end?

Though violence has not been part of the equation, the sorry state of the US Congress and the mean machinations of US politicians are likewise cause for concern; when the US screws up big, whether it be the economy or military adventures, the world trembles.

Despite the relatively minor policy differences between the two mainstream parties, Republicans and Democrats now slug it out in public for all to see, as if politics were entertainment, a contact sport.

Each side is always looking to score a point and, failing that, at least inflict a foul on the other guy.

In Thailand, as in the United States, political squabbles - which, properly understood, are power games among the elite - have become conflated with cultural wars.

Thaksin Shinawatra is said to have a huge upcountry following but is hated in Bangkok.

Yellow shirt leader Sondhi Limthongkul has a solid support base in Bangkok but not in rural areas.

The polarised social worlds these two men have come to symbolise is not so much an impassable social divide as it is a manufactured split, born of political posturing and populist agit-prop.

Both men have changed their positions many times. Both men are members of the wealthy elite, both are well-connected and so fundamentally similar in outlook that not too long ago they were political allies and business confidantes.

Those "halcyon" days hark back not to a less divisive age; one need only invoke the memory of Black May 1992 to be reminded of that, but things were divided up in such a way that put them on the same side of the fence.

Tragically, an even earlier generation of activists, the so-called October generation, who in the height of their youthful idealism were willing to risk life itself in order to refute and reform, if not revolutionise, the corrupt body politic, are now split almost evenly, and thus rendered impotent as a unique generational force, by the shifting tides of allegiance along the red shirt/yellow shirt divide.

Red and yellow street actions may bear a physical resemblance to revolutions past, what with the headbands and megaphone speeches and folk songs and daredevil defiance, but today's street theatre makes a mockery of the genuinely democratic sacrifices of Oct 14, 1973 and Oct 6, 1976.

Nowadays, self-promoters hijack the paraphernalia and street tactics of the people's struggle in service of elite establishment types and militant tycoons.

Don't the old comrades care anything about the ordinary people any more? Can't people with different views talk anymore?

PM Abhisit Vejjajiva shares with Thaksin and Mr Sondhi a background of wealth, hi-so status and a Western education; but he stands apart from his two elders, not so much in class status as in temperament. It would appear he lacks the unbridled ego, the blinding ambition, the instinct for the jugular and the Machiavellian talent for getting things done by hook or by crook.

Indeed , Mr Abhisit is not unlike Barack Obama in that both men share a rare unflappability. Both men possess first-rate temperaments that allow them to remain remarkably calm and even-keeled at a time when everyone is rocking the boat.

This deep-plumbed geniality does not suffice to successfully steer the ship of state in a good direction - both men have disappointed their followers in droves because of their amiable inaction - but at least they may prevent it from capsizing until other talents can be brought on board.

Indeed, keeping the peace so that the centre may hold is so critical to the equitable functioning of society, and so important to the interests of ordinary citizens, who have no desire to become collateral damage in someone else's war, who just want to earn a living and enjoy their free time and get on with their lives, that having a leader who is polite, thoughtful, reflective and just plain riap roi trumps political genius.

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(published in the Bangkok Post, February 23, 2010)

TWO TIGERS, ONE MOUNTAIN

2010-02-23T11:07:00.003-05:00

US-China relations have gotten off to a less than roaring start in the Year of the Tiger, but the venom of mutual incrimination can be avoided if both sides engage in some retrospection and put things in an historical perspective.

Indeed, the positive achievements of the world's most important bilateral relationship are so numerous, profound and complex, that it has become part of the landscape and second nature to younger generations who never experienced the frigid depths of the Cold War and the polarizing antipathies in which the global East and global West defined one another as the quintessential enemy.

While there's no space to enumerate the many people-to-people initiatives that made today's peaceful economic integration of two great economies possible, it is worth reminding ourselves that the rich and constant exchange of people and goods across the Pacific that we take for granted today was almost beyond imagination just a generation ago.

Because the mutual gains of economic interdependence and intellectual and cultural exchange have been such game-changers the accomplishments and sacrifices of previous generations may be obscured from view. Those who have contributed to US-China amity have built so sturdy an edifice that we find ourselves standing on a foundation of good deeds and accomplishments so massive that it is almost impossible to view as a whole.

The big picture is basically good, but because politicians are ruthlessly competitive and the drumbeat of the 24x7 media needs conflict to thrive (and sell more ads) we live in an age of angry nitpicking.

The tone of US-China argument is at times strident and acrimonious, full of false bravado and over-wrought nationalism. But in practical terms, we are talking about bumps on the road rather than insurmountable obstacles. The actual conflict has been on the level of a teapot tempest that vents more heat than light and rattles us today only to disappear tomorrow.

Speaking of tea, there is a link between the intransigence one sometimes sees in US-China relations and the "tea-parties" of domestic politics. When frustrations mount, raw emotion sometimes wins the day and ridiculous, counterproductive things are said and done. All this would be funny if it were not for the fact that such hyped-up "manufactured dissent" distracts from serious dialogue and deters the search for joint solutions to important problems such as degradation of the environment and global warming.

China-bashing, from the US side, and America-bashing from the Chinese side, are to global harmony what tea parties are to American democracy. Goodwill is frittered away and the foundations for dialogue dismantled in the quest to score points and snag some short-term gain.

The breakdown of dialogue in the US Congress is so severe that respected lawmakers are quitting just to get away from the mudslinging. In China, as in the US, jostling for power and prestige, rather than working devotedly in service of the people, is a recipe for self-inflicted disaster.

The peace and prosperity we enjoy today, a heroic accomplishment built on the backs of less fortunate ancestors, is threatened by a lack of cultural humility and historical perspective.

A quick review of some current contentious issues underscores the value of putting things in a historic perspective, with introspection enough to consider how others might view the same problem.

How can we talk about Tibet without referring to the region's sorry feudal past, interventionist US and British political machinations, CIA funding of the Dalai Lama and so on?

How can we talk about US arms sales to Taiwan without referring to a half-century of US weapon sales, set in motion by a well-oiled anti-China lobby, without considering its divisive influence, not to mention the corruption and military profiteering involved?

On the question of Iraq, China proved to be on the right side of history. China did not join the trumped up "Coalition of the Willing" that cheered the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, setting in motion a long, dirty war based on lies, deception, vendettas and opportunism.

Given the precedent of Iraq, how can the US and Britain chastise China for not chastising Iran when the US and British have a documented history of meddling both in Iraq and Iran, including the overthrow of governments, installation of pro-West puppet governments and exploitation of oil?

How can the US State Department and NSA, in cooperation with Google, assume the high-ground in complaints about mail-prying and information control in China when Google itself has become one of the world's biggest invaders of personal privacy and human rights with its Orwellian surveillance capabilities, aggressive data-mining and creation of individual files and advertising profiles, based in large part on the science of reading other people's mail?

How can the US lecture China on the proper way to handle militant Muslims in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, when it is bombing and shooting militant Muslims on a daily basis in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan?

What about human rights? History shows that every nation has at times been callous in its treatment of its people. There are human rights problems and judicial injustices both in China and the US that need to be addressed.

But the US, which incarcerates more people for longer prison terms than any other country in the world, including jail for non-violent offences, is not in a good position to do the talking. Nor do anti-communist agitators and National Endowment of Democracy funded groups promote honest dialogue. Instead, the neo-conservative noisemakers use their phony high-dudgeon righteousness as a needle to prod China.

But human rights are important, and independent groups not attached to the US government such as Amnesty International and Duihua, as well as lawyers and lawmakers in China, have a role to play. More to the point, over-aggressive policing and unfair judicial decisions, whether in the US or China, are national problems, even a matter of national shame, but not true bilateral issues.

Good foreign policy, like a good human rights policy, starts at home. The US and China both would be well advised to engage in some introspection and reflection, attending first and foremost to problems of their own making, problems in their own backyards, before pointing fingers at one another and spoiling the peace and prosperity that so many worked so hard at so much cost to achieve.

(published in China Daily, February 22, 2010)

The author is professor of media studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Doshisha University, Japan.

THE BANALITY OF NOT BEING EVIL

2010-01-15T10:48:00.005-05:00

By Philip J Cunningham

There’s something irremediably banal about Google’s corporate motto. It’s hip, it’s hype and it’s hypocritical.

"Don't be evil" is a curiously negative construct; eschewing evil is not necessarily about doing good. In sum, a sophomoric yet shrewd manner of self-presentation that is not without its believers.

It speaks to the informal, idealistic ethos of a student-run Silicon Valley garage start-up, even though Google is now a multibillion-dollar entity with nearly 20,000 employees and computer links and arrays vast enough to map, copy and store billions and billions of private bits, day after day.

But pretending not to be a big company does not make Google a small company any more than their witty motto means they are doing good.

There are numerous shades of gray between not doing evil and evil, especially if one’s core business is information mining in service of advertising.

Neither the super suave Mad Men nor real life ad men pretend their business is about maintaining a high moral standard. Advertising, an ethically-challenged field of endeavor in the best of times, favors the big-wigs rich enough to afford its product, while seeking to indoctrinate the little guy, --capitalism’s answer to communist propaganda.

But Google’s difficulty in hewing to its motto extends beyond ad revenue to brave new frontiers of surveillance, digital profiling, and the questionable storage of vast information files on individuals that would be the envy of the old Stasi or KGB.

Where’s the "do no evil" when it comes to collecting data and profiteering off the private lives of others?

Google’s hunger for information is largely a one-way street; how much to we know about Google and its inner workings and its secret deals? How good is it to its word when it comes to not reading other people’s mail?

Even Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, a capitalist as aggressively focused on profit and market share as the legendary Mr. Potter played by John Barrymore in “It’s a Wonderful Life” has gone on record to criticize Google for scanning the content of user emails for the sake of advertising research.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has acknowledged that private information is stored and might be shared with authorities, blithely absolving the company of responsibility by saying “we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act.”

In recent weeks, air travelers have been forced to consider, with an understandable mixture of alarm, resignation and dismay, the prospect of intrusive, full-body scans at airports.

Those in favor of scans that effectively strip away clothing assure us that the scanners won’t store, transmit or otherwise take pleasure in a geekish technology that renders real the unfulfilled promise of X-ray glasses of comic book yore.

Yet even with appropriate restraints in place, there’s something spooky about such intrusions upon one’s physical person.

Then again, in information terms, the internet-using public is scanned every day and is as good as naked, while aggregate pictures are being passed around for the profit of companies for whom “reading” private preferences is the coin of the realm.

Internet users communing alone with their computers at all times of day and night leave a long, detailed electronic trail about their fears, fetishes, tastes, likes, dislikes, health concerns, political leanings, and pet peeves that open numerous windows of vulnerability, almost as if the internet were a trusted friend, which it decidedly is not.

We have to take it on faith that the gentlemen at Google don’t read other people’s mail, but even assuming, quite generously, that they generally don’t, who’s to say they or their corporate colleagues and successors won’t succumb to the temptation to gaze upon --in plain print, photo and video format, or in slyly telling algorithmically-generated profiles-- the bare body of the public.

Nothing better demonstrates the banality of claiming not to do evil than two math nerds who, without conspiracy or grand design, stumbled upon a formula for raking in billions of dollars in advertising revenue by offering free internet searches, email and other net services, that, once scanned, recorded, mined and interpreted, could be used to target commercial ads.

Google founders Sergey Brin, and Larry Page may well be decent guys with no intent to do evil, but they created a Frankenstein. They are wealthy enough to leave the “dirty work” of mining information nuggets and handling the multi-tentacled information-gobbling monster to assistants, human and robotic.

The political commissars in China, masters of clumsier but equally intrusive methods of data-mining and information control, got a much-applauded comeuppance this month when Google, through a hip little manifesto effectively gave China the finger.

Google’s allegation of governmental hacking, while serious, is not proven, and even if it were, it does not let Google off the hook for it’s initial willingness to enable censorship in the first place.

It is also possible that Google, which has not gobbled up as much market share in China as it has elsewhere, may be exhaling one last triumphant hurrah, using its banal motto as cover, before beating an inglorious retreat.

If so, it’s yet another example of American hubris and imperialistic hypocrisy, which says in effect, do as we say, not as we do.

(published in the Bangkok Post)

pc

IS AMERICA LOSING IT?

2010-01-12T00:19:00.002-05:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

It's one thing when fear of terror causes people to lose their nerve, quite another when they start losing their minds.

The Obama administration appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It's not clear if it's terrorists, real and imagined, who have got the Democratic establishment all jittery or if it's just the usual Republican Party suspects, know-nothings in all important respects except for their uncanny ability to unnerve their Democratic rivals.

President Obama, like many a Democratic pol from the days of LBJ onward, seems spellbound by calls from the right that he be tough on terror, bullish on "free markets" and aggressive in military affairs.

So the candidate who called for peace and helping the poor instead wages war, beefs up the security bureaucracy and enables the very rich to get richer - even as ordinary folk lose their jobs, health and homes in the millions.

What we get from Mr Obama is hard to distinguish from Mr Bush, but for the improved rhetoric and a winning smile instead of a smirk.

President Obama was gracious enough to admit that the buck stops at the top, and because the buck-passing game continues as before, President Obama has implicated himself as part of the problem.

After a serious lapse in security work, another one of those classic failures to connect the dots, Mr Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed the Bush response to Katrina, saying "the system worked" when it clearly didn't.

It's a wonder she still has a job.

The only upside to the failed Christmas bombing plot was that vigilant citizens, an inept bomber and a good measure of luck saved the day.

The bomb plot understandably has put America's airlines and airports on edge, not just because a handful of terror freelancers have been whipped up to a frenzy by malevolent Islamist handlers to such a point as to "volunteer" to kill themselves in order to kill others, but because American bureaucracy is so sclerotic and inefficient that an anguished father in Nigeria could courageously plead with US authorities to beware of a son tangled up in terror, only for his plaintive cry to be ignored.

Meanwhile, a recent benign security breach of the sort that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reported 2,819 cases of in the last fiscal year, has gotten undue attention from at least one Democratic bigwig desperate to appear tough on "terror".

The "terrible injustice" that permitted a foreign man, apparently intent on kissing his girlfriend goodbye, to get away with the "wrist-slapping" punishment of arrest and a standard fine for breaching a poorly-guarded perimeter at a New Jersey airport has Senator Frank Lautenberg all tied up in knots.

Sen Lautenberg, considered a "liberal" by his Democratic peers, was quick to whip up a populist response. So "outraged" was he that a foreigner could get away with such a thing, he called for Mr Jiang's visa to be cancelled.

Foaming at the mouth, he further argued that what the man did, and the message it sent out about America, had "to be seen as a terrible crime".

The hapless Jiang Haisong, a Chinese doctoral student at Rutgers University, legally resident in the US, entered the departure area of New Jersey's Newark Airport while sending off his girlfriend, presumably to spend a few last minutes together before she caught a flight to California.

Perhaps he merits the full $500 fine for his myopic act, but it was TSA negligence - a man off-duty and a broken camera left unrepaired - that made the careless romantic gesture possible, and it was TSA, not the mild-mannered geek doing a PhD in molecular science, who proceeded to lock down the airport and treat hundreds of travellers as potential terror suspects in a way that defied common sense, courtesy or respect.

Nowadays air travellers are cattle to be herded this way and that; those who dare complain are seen as troublemakers.

After Mr Jiang's arrest, the New Jersey senator started crowing louder.

"He's really an unwelcome guest," Sen Frank Lautenberg told reporters. "He should be returned to his homeland."

Media outlets with predilections to respond favourably to Sen Lautenberg's prejudiced comments piled on, with an ABC affiliate calling Mr Jiang the "most hated man in New Jersey," and a writer at NJ.com braying for a more fiercely punitive approach in "Punishment does not fit the crime".

But cooler heads prevailed, one seasoned observer noted dryly that Sen Lautenberg was really just trying to "out-Schumer Schumer" - a bit of Democratic Party-speak meaning that the New Jersey senator was trying to steal the media circus spotlight normally focused on the senator from New York.

It's a cheap shot for a man as powerful as Sen Lautenberg to pin it all on a Chinese graduate student, though it is not hard to see how such grandstanding might plug into populist antipathy for the nation of China, widely resented for its stunning economic success at a time when America is feeling down and out.

One suspects the TSA would have reacted similarly if a friend of Sen Lautenberg, or even a stray cat, had set off a system-wide alarm, though the xenophobic senator's response would almost certainly have been more muted.

Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is not alone.

America's political class is increasingly dysfunctional, if not hopeless.

It is simply wrong to covet attention, or seek to divert attention, by picking on little people.

It's time to stop putting the public through the mill of militaristic compliance with random rules and rude abuse by the likes of Sen Lautenberg when politicians of his ilk are engaged largely in partisan political theatre without appreciable safety benefits.

But there's much to be thankful for, not just in the way vigilant citizens helped to thwart a real attack on the Detroit-bound flight, but in the extreme rarity of such attacks within US borders, despite US foreign policy being part of the problem, embroiled as it is in unpopular and politically provocative military conflict in the far corners of the globe.

America is still the richest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world, though you wouldn't know that from the way politicians are over-reacting and falling prey to fear-mongering.

Travellers in the United States have largely taken the gradual diminution of courtesy and common sense on the chin, stoic and uncomplaining for the most part, even as traditional privacies are increasingly violated and little freedoms are stripped away, one article at a time, like a full-body strip search.

Reasonable precautions are generally met with a high degree of compliance, but airports are starting to resemble armed camps to an unreasonable degree, guided by the confused and jittery politicos in Washington, who, it would seem, are willing to do anything to "win" the war on terror, even if it means losing their minds.

(published in the Bangkok Post, January 12, 2010)

BARACK OBAMA DOES THE WORLD

2009-12-11T07:45:00.005-05:00

by Philip J. Cunningham

It’s official. US President Barack Obama, long suspected of being the type of person who wanted to have his cake and eat it too, wine and dine with Wall Street while tossing rhetorical crumbs to the poor, dispossessed and hungry, all the while hobnobbing with the rich and famous and amassing draconic executive privilege, has, in his Nobel speech, just proved himself to be the world’s biggest phony.

The two-faced master of the mellow sound-bite has just outdone himself in trying to convince a jaded world that war is peace, that imperialism is liberation, that down is up and two plus two equals five. Even at this most international of events, in a world that desperately needs some leaders willing to look beyond the narrow self-interests of the nation state, he preaches America the good, America the beautiful, America the just. Music to the ears of a stateside schoolchild or your died-in-the-wool Yankee xenophobe, perhaps, but hardly cosmopolitan in spirit.

Rather, his speech is mean-spirited. He goes out of his way, and beyond the bounds of decency, in his effort to show that war is necessary and American warfare is especially just. His argument is lame and conflicted. He says war’s been around for a long time so, hey, get used to it. If he was making a speech in favor of legalization prostitution or opium, there might be some point in making the “oldest profession” kind of argument, but surely that flimsy line of thinking has no place coming from a man who has unique and unparalleled access to the world’s most deadly nuclear arsenal. Surely that pale logic doesn’t justify a war, any war, the war of the moment, the Af-Pak War of Obama’s design, just because there have been wars in the past.

Obama gets shockingly narrow and parochial at times, saying in effect that America is good and anyone who opposes America is bad. He pins war crimes on the other guys, but doesn’t begin to address war crimes of his own nation. Suspicion of American is not justified, it’s “reflexive.”

The weirdest thing about Obama, in contrast to other presidents, is that he has been granted a war criminal gets out of-jail-free card, not so much by cronies in the Party machine that put him up for election, much as Bush and Cheney escaped impeachment and trial for war crimes because of their domestic base, but because the US public gives Obama a benefit of the doubt that was never extended to his supposed polar opposite, man of war, G W Bush.

It’s true that Obama’s presidency is historic for breaking the race barrier, it’s refreshing to see a biracial president in the company of his African American wife. But those who break such barriers, in the name of us all, and generally to the benefit of society as a whole, like peasant turned emperor Mao Zedong, are not perfect and do not get a free pass to commit other crimes just because they are on the right side of a protracted struggle.

The acceptance speech he gave for an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize had some built-in hedging, anticipating, and perhaps responding to Arianna Huffington’s observation that there’s a certain irony in a war president getting the peace prize. But then again, the Nobel Prizes have always been quirky, if not a bit kooky, outside the science awards at least; awarding the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger being a case in point.

Obama’s speech, like much of his political life, tries to have it both ways. It’s his bifocal vision that makes him interesting to listen to, until you realize he’s utterly lacking in meaningful convictions, and is instead forever tacking left or right as the opportunity of the moment demands. If there is an internal moral compass at work, the needle jerks around a lot.

Why, one only need to look at the text of his speech to see a flim-flam man all over the place. War is not glorious, but warriors are. America’s wars are morally justified, others are not. He respects Gandhi and King, but he’s loves NATO and the US Army too. He lauds “humanitarian” armed intervention of the sort that helped tear the once-solid nation of Yugoslavia asunder, but would not for a moment forgive Alaskans, or Americans anywhere else, if they wanted to secede or seek independence, especially with foreign military assistance.

It’s a one-way street, all over again.

Obama bemoans inevitable civilian casualties, yet posits the US as the standard bearer of just war, even though hundreds of civilians have already been killed on his watch. If his predecessor made an ass of America, the main difference is that he's giving a superficially more dignified performance; call it a donkey instead.

Obama shrewdly, if not a bit oddly, acknowledges the cruelty of the Crusades, which conveniently took place some seven hundred years before America was even founded, but he glosses over more obvious, more relevant and more recent lessons in man’s inhumanity to man. He eschews in particular poignant, tragic examples of the American Man’s inhumanity to man, such as the Vietnam War, in which several million Vietnamese were killed because “the men” in the Beltway couldn’t get their act together, playing hot potato with an unpopular, unnecessary war.

It’s true that a handful of terrorists with outsized rage have and can inflict horrible terror on innocents. It’s also true that take-no-prisoners, spare-no-one-in-the-way approach immortalized in all its deadly valor by famous American generals, --Curtis Le May is perhaps the most egregious example—but it’s a tradition that goes back at least to the time of General Sherman and up to General Westmoreland, if not more recently in the US occupation of Iraq.

Obama opines that a handful of bad men can murder innocents due to modern technology. This has been true for a long time. Robert MacNamara, a wartime Secretary of Defense in a position to understand such things, admitted that Le May, and a handful of technocrats and yes-men around him, single-handedly ordered the murder of 100,000 Tokyo civilians in a single evening by ordering B-29s to fly low and light the city on fire.

Forget the Crusades. What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

These two cities, rebuilt from almost total, almost instantaneous destruction, extended invitations that were demurely snubbed by Obama during his recent lackluster Asian junket. Apparently he’s not in the mood to think too hard about peace these days.

The US Commander-in-Chief chides nations for pursuing nuclear weapons, something his nation possesses in spades, and he chillingly speaks, with the power of a terror-inflicting arsenal at his command, of “accountability” for others. And just who is America accountable to?

The arrogant unilateralism of the Bush years rolls on.

Still, one must credit Obama for being at least being self-aware, especially in contrast to the equally narcissistic but considerably more ham-fisted Bush, his predecessor as White House resident decider-in-chief.

Obama is, after all, nothing, if not self-invented, nothing, if not deeply reflective, which is what makes him such a charming writer. He wants to please you, the reader, like a slightly mischievous school-kid who craves teacher’s approval. He wants so badly to be liked, that he’s apt to say very different things to very different people.

His books and school-boyish charm had much to do with his rapid rise as Democratic Party darling. On the one hand, he adopts the “aw shucks” modesty of a man who is not sure he deserves such a prize, knowing full well that being seen as a man of peace conflicts with his day job.

But he’s always been a bit arrogant under the cloak of self-deprecation. Before getting elected he intimated that his victory was our victory, remember “Yes We Can!” Once in power he has been quick to chide critics, mostly through his underlings and the now fraying fraternity of youthful net-savvy supporters, and of late has even been getting up front and personal, as his recent upbraiding of Congressman John Conyers Jr. suggests. Why are you demeaning me? That’s not part of the unspoken deal I thought we had. Being “liberal” means never having to criticize me.

Image management is central to the modern American presidency, why, there’s so much spin and spit and polish and hot air, it makes China’s clumsy, crusty leaders look almost genuine in comparison.

Obama sounds like a man still running for president, he declares war on the hitherto neglected Af-Pak region, but promises troop withdrawals that time nicely with a second bid for the presidency. Like a savvy pol, he knows on which side his bread is buttered, only Americans can elect him, so on this most international of all nights in Oslo, he plays not so much the immediate audience, as to the distant electorate.

He behaves as if he’s in debt to the Democratic Party and supporters who put their money where their mouth was, such as John Roos, Ambassador to Japan, whose previous political experience can be summed up as “generous contributor to the Obama campaign.”

It’s almost obligatory these days to describe the US president as “eloquent” even when he’s not, such as during his recent Asian junket which was much ado about nothing in word and deed.

But words can kill, and Barack Obama’s Nobel speech is a dangerous inasmuch as he’s devilishly good with language. His words serve as a green light to a new deadly war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s not that he cried “fire” in a crowded movie theatre so much as he’s tossing lit matches --incendiary words in favor of violence-- into a tinderbox that threatens to send the world on fire, tumbling down a slope of greater chaos. He’s giving a thumbs up to dropping bombs down from above, putting more boots on the ground, in a war likely to lead to yet more war, all the while wrapping it up and casting it in the most glowing boilerplate rhetoric available.

In making his case for war, he employs, without apparent irony, emotive words such as love, peace, justice, and even the theologian’s “oughtness.” He pulls out all stops, and drops all pretense of modesty, speaking of his work “here on earth.”

He’s not just sounding Orwellian, he’s sounding alien and strange.

Earth calling Obama: Where’s the man you said you were?

BARACK OBAMA DOES TOKYO

2009-11-17T03:20:00.004-05:00

by Philip J Cunningham

President Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown Tokyo concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the US president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in familiar endearing tones, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.

Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”

The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.

Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa, Futenma in particular, and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.

Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, allowing him to say things like “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.

In such a sumptuous symphonic hall, with a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals, it would be a rude intrusion of the reality-based world to consider US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo prison and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign

Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”

Went silent? What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.

If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."

Memo to Obama foreign policy team: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.

And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.

"In Prague," Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”

Obama wants to disarm and keep his weapons too. Yet somehow it doesn’t sound right for the commander-in-chief in charge of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal to lecture others on the disarmament issue, especially in Japan of all countries, where the stealthy storing and transport of US nuclear weapons has been a bitter point of contention.

If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" it does not necessarily follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them."

He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, (though it clearly has latent capability) but it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass. Non-proliferation regulations, it seems, are for those without the bomb, not those with it.

Barack Obama peppered his speech with references to his diverse heritage, including mention of his half-sister and his brother-in-law. Suitable subject matter for a book, in fact a very good book, but what in the world does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?

Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?

This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.

The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually accomplishing very much.

(a version of this article appears in the Bangkok Post)

Obama speaks of war and peace in Tokyo

2009-11-16T08:29:00.008-05:00

(a shorter, newspaper version of this blog post appears as "Obama does Tokyo" in my November 17 post)

by Philip J Cunningham

Obama’s Tokyo speech, delivered on November 14, 2009 at a glittering downtown concert hall, gave a select audience the chance to savor the president’s trademark rhetoric, read aloud in now-familiar tones and cadences, accompanied by slightly jarring Janus-like sideward glances, eyes darting back and forth between twin teleprompters.

Designed to set an upbeat tone for the president’s Asia trip, it fell short of his much-hailed Cairo speech as paean to international amity, but served to convince East Asia, despite the late date of his visit, and two distracting wars on the other side of the continent, that the Pacific is somehow the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The pep talk might as well have been subtitled, “America still rules the Pacific.”

The best, if not the most sincere of the many tasty sound-bites offered up in his Yankee-will-not-go-home speech came early, almost haiku-like in brevity, befitting the recollection of a childhood memory. During a visit to the Amida Buddha in Kamakura with his mother, he was distracted by the green tea ice cream.

Thereafter the speech shifts to protocol-laden niceties about the Emperor and warm hospitality of Japan, the usual bromides to reassure his hosts, even though preparations for the visit were marred by serious disagreement about US bases in Okinawa and the pomp and circumstance had to be trimmed due to the president’s arriving a day late and the host prime minister departing a day early.

Despite looming tensions and policy disagreements, President Obama’s speech soon had the select audience in Suntory Hall almost drunk with good cheer, so much so that he could tell the star-struck listeners, who, judging from the applause, were more than willing to suspend belief in order to enjoy the show, that “support for human rights and human dignity is ingrained in America,” without a hint of humility.

No need to think about nasty headlines from the reality-based newspaper world detailing US involvement in torture, bombing, renditions, spying, war crimes, Guantanamo and the AfPak aerial bombing campaign, when one instead can soak up, in a sumptuous symphonic hall, a golden voice delivering gilded words about an imagined America filled the to the brim with good will and good ideas and high ideals.

Still, sometimes the word master’s poetic rhetoric leaned too heavily towards euphemism, even for Japanese tastes. When it came to describing America’s war against Japan, the president seemed to be whitewashing history when he summed up the long bloody war’s end with the trite phrase, “After the guns went silent.”

What an evasive way to describe the big bang at the war’s end, when the US dropped two nuclear bombs, killing over one hundred thousand hapless civilians! The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the bad luck to live in cities that had been left untouched by conventional bombing which put them on the short list of as-yet-unbombed cities suitable for testing the effects of the terrible nuclear device under almost clinical conditions.

If Obama knew Japan better, instead of appointing as ambassador a political donor who had not managed to visit the country even once before moving into the embassy where Douglas MacArthur famously welcomed the defeated Emperor with a handshake and stiff photo op, he might have realized that the Japanese public, far from wanting more of the status quo, just resoundingly rejected the so-called "sense of purpose that has guided ties with the Japanese people for nearly fifty years."

Memo to Obama: the LPD, and its long, corrupt symbiotic relationship with Washington is history now.

And if Obama had selected an ambassador who could speak a bit of the language and had experienced daily life in Japan as an ordinary "gaijin," he might not have held Japan's racialist society up as exemplar of human rights. Japan is a land where long-term residents of Korean and Chinese descent as well as native Burakumin still suffer as second-class citizens, where housing discrimination is legal, where age and sex discrimination are rampant and where discrimination against non-Japanese is enshrined in law.

“In Prague,” Obama goes on to say, “I affirmed America's commitment to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” followed by a boastful caveat. “Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent.”

No apparent irony in this Janus-faced announcement by which the commander-in-chief of the only country to have dropped atom bombs on living cities somehow claims the high moral ground when it comes to disarmament.

If nuclear weapons are, as Obama claims, "a strong and effective nuclear deterrent" does it logically follow that "those without them have the responsibility to forsake them?"

He cites Japan as a country that pleases America for not having pursued nuclear capability, when it is an open secret that Japan possesses ample technological means and fissile material, and just needs snap a few pieces into place, to rank as one of the world's top nuclear powers.

But it is pre-modern Japan that offers the most telling insight here. In a realm once ruled by the swagger of steely samurai, ordinary citizens were banned from carrying swords, keeping the peace, albeit in an extremely undemocratic, top-down fashion. Then, as now, those who wield the most destructive weapons get a free pass.

"As I have said before, strengthening the global nonproliferation regime is not about singling out individual nations. It is about all nations living up to their responsibilities. That includes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it includes North Korea."

A mild contradiction here. He says he's not going to single anyone out, and he goes on to single out the two countries most likely to be targeted by US missiles should tensions arise.

"It is all about nations living up to their responsibilities…”

Responsibility? Why is it a “responsibility” for the US to keep its nuclearized deterrent capacity, while for others “responsibility” means not to seek or covet the kind of arsenal that the US possesses in spades?

Hold the ‘freedom fries,’ pass the ‘responsibility fries.’ Need any ketchup?

If others did as the US does instead of doing as the US leader preaches, the planet would be in big trouble. The US hypocrisy of exceptionalism, even under the genial Obama, extends not only to nuclear weapons but to pollution, carbon footprint and the rapacious consumption of oil and other natural resources.

"Already, the United States has taken more steps to combat climate change in ten months than we have in our recent history"

Oh really? Obama’s accomplishments before becoming President were notably modest, so he knows a thing or two about how to pad a thin resume. When you have little to show for ten months in office you can set the bar really low by comparing yourself to a discredited predecessor.

What’s more surprising, and not at all a departure from Bush’s imperial presidency, is Obama’s disconcerting willingness to continue to employ, and even augment, draconian executive powers while using violence, or the threat of violence, to pursue thorny foreign policy objectives, again, not unlike his predecessor.

“The United States expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region, and to participate fully in appropriate organizations”

Here the term “expects” like the term “expeditiously” used in reference to sorting out the Okinawa US base issue, is a veiled warning to Japan. Don't even think of leaving the US out of regional groupings, even though US status as an "Asian" nation is a bit of a stretch.

“We are on the brink of economic recovery…We simply cannot return to the same cycles of boom and bust that led us into a global recession.”

Politicians of all stripes like to claim that things are getting better, nothing unusual here, but it's a stretch to suggest can you avoid boom and bust, intrinsic to capitalism, for all time to come.

And what happened to the free market? Obama may not have shilled for Toys R Us as President H W Bush did during his diplomatically inept visit to Japan, but he is disingenuously suggesting that if we can sell you more of our stuff, even while our people buy less of yours, your workers will be happy.

In place of achievement, --the Obama team hasn’t actually done much despite all the hoopla-- we get from the President policy wonk formulations, he’s forever "taking steps" and "moving forward" and "advancing our goals."

In Obama’s Asia, everyone's a partner (though US is and must remain first among equals) and everyone has "responsibilities."

He calls on his partners to share responsibilities, like “rooting out the extremists who slaughter the innocent." In cold foreign policy parlance, the truly objectionable term here is not “slaughter” but "extremists."

Obama and his Pentagon pals have already slaughtered innocents by aerial bombardment in the “AfPak war,” in addition to the mission-not-yet-accomplished Iraq war bequeathed to him by his predecessor. The US remote bombing of impoverished rural locations, whether due to errant targeting, bad intelligence or perhaps even an unspoken cold-hearted willingness to take out an entire wedding party in order to nail a few suspected criminals, might involve slaughter, but don’t call it extreme.

While the US military has begrudgingly, belatedly acknowledged collateral road kill, it will never, ever see itself as "extremist." In other words, what makes the bad guys bad is not killing per se --the US has killed tens of thousands of people in its most recent righteous wars-- but "extremism" --a useful tag for bad guys since "terror” is suffering from word fatigue. To strengthen the metaphor, Obama rhetorically pairs “extremism” with piracy, trafficking, slavery and infectious disease.

If the speech was understandably a bit easy on host Japan, it was a bit too hard on Burma, the admittedly squalid regime that everyone likes to kick, and North Korea, which everyone likes to hate. One suspects an indirect agenda in which Obama is using two of China’s roguish neighbors as proxy targets for complaints he has about China itself but dare not say too loud for fear of offending the communist country that is bailing out and bankrolling America’s broken capitalist system.

"There must be no doubt, as America’s first Pacific President," Obama boldly declares, "I promise you this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world." By what right does the US rule the Pacific? Why must there be no doubt?

The chameleon-like Obama has gotten great mileage out of identity politics that go beyond the racial complexities artfully described in the books he wrote in prelude to his self-promoting campaign. He wants you to believe he's a died-in-the-wool inner city denizen of Chicago, except when he wants to remind you that he is really a laid back guy from Hawaii, and he talks like a disciple of Jeremiah Wright, except when he's doing the Harvard Law school thing.

And it seems he has a relative for every purpose under the sun, --a spunky white grandmother, a tragic African dad, an Indonesian-born sister, and a Canadian brother-in-law of Chinese descent-- all trotted out for political purposes.

But what does his gnarled family tree have to do with US policy? Is he trying to say the Asia-related factoids about his life, which he tends to brush under the rug when dealing with the black-white dichotomy back home, have some kind of essentialist bearing on US-Asia relations?

Tiger Woods, a man of comparably rich ethnic heritage, doesn't wear ethnicity on his sleeve in the same way, nor would it advance his golf game if he did. Does this tireless posturing, cherry-picking of his own biography and playing to the crowd make Barack Obama a better commander-in-chief? A Pacific leader?

This incessant desire to please has obvious utility during a political campaign, but once power is secured, it can produce deadly results, if, for example, hawks in the Pentagon have his ear, or certain hard-boiled constituencies give him bad advice.

The problem with the silver-tongued superstar storyteller formally known as Barry Obama is that he can spin a great yarn, as good a yarn as any politician in memory, and mesmerize people without actually doing very much.

THAKSIN SHINAWATRA AND CAMBODIA

2009-11-13T22:40:00.006-05:00

In light of tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra's recent political posturing in Cambodia, which he used as a base to deliberately affront and humiliate the Thai government, all the while being accorded VIP treatment by Cambodian strongman Hun Sen, it is interesting to note that Thaksin's family company was already cutting deals and cultivating "friends" over the border back in the days when he was prime minister of Thailand.

The juxtaposition of the two billboards slyly suggests that Shinawatra is, apparently on behalf of the Kingdom of Cambodia, welcoming visitors to Cambodia. Conflict of interest?

This photo was taken in Cambodia near the Poipet border crossing in 2003.

NEWSPAPERS IN THE NEWS

2009-10-29T00:17:00.004-04:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

(published in the China Daily on October 29, 2009 as "Enjoy black-and-white print while you still can")

The latest gloomy news from journalism's battered front lines is that the prestigious New York Times (NYT) is laying off 100 members of its newsroom staff. Paper-and-ink newspapers are in deep trouble, there's no doubt about that. But the NYT, as comprehensive as its news coverage sometimes is, is hardly in a position to offer the real story on its current woes, anymore than a psychoanalyst is able to objectively analyze him or herself.

What's bad for the NYT is not necessarily bad for journalism any more than what is good for the NYT is necessarily good for journalism. In recent years the NYT absorbed the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and several other news properties with dubious results for investors and readers alike; then the organization that Gay Talese dubbed "the Power and the Glory" invested heavily in a showy new architectural citadel designed by Renzo Piano which was completed just as the economy started to go bad.

But with more than 100 newspapers closing down last year, including iconic newsprint papers in vibrant cities such as Boston, Seattle and Denver, not all the troubles at the NYT are idiosyncratic ones, but can be seen in a general perspective as part of a trend.

With advertising revenue plummeting, and real estate losing value by the hour, the NYT is in a free fall accelerated in part by its own greed.

But it is also a victim of more general downward market pressures; American newspaper readership is down 10 percent across the board in just the past year alone. The moribund economy, with no relief in sight, is leaving many a good newspaper exposed like a beached whale, stranded as capital ebbs away with the low tide.

As newspapers flap about trying to breathe another day, perchance return to familiar deep waters, Internet news aggregators soar, circling above like birds of prey for whom the shifting tide is an opportunity waiting to be picked.

Internet delivery of news is infinitely faster and more flexible. It saves millions of trees from the paper pulp mill and cuts down on the need for noisy delivery trucks and back-breaking labor, so what's not to like about it?

For a brief fleeting moment, consumers can have their cake and eat it too. Newspapers do the heavy lifting, while Internet news sites spread the information around for free, "lite" and easy.

But who will write the news when the newspapers are gone? Who are the new news gatekeepers? The Internet makes us rather too dependent on terminals and telephone lines produced and controlled by a handful of big corporations.

Another problem with the Net is its indiscriminate character. Falsehoods are floated as easily as truths, and although conscientious bloggers may help us navigate this terra incognito, there's no business model to sustain the most truthful bloggers, either.

More ominous yet, there's something called the digital divide which means people who don't care to use or can't afford computers are increasingly being left in the dark, reduced to second class citizens in an age awash in information.

Ironically, readers in countries such as Thailand, though hobbled by lower income, are likely to enjoy their treasured national newspapers a bit longer than Americans, because on one hand, salaries and labor costs are lower, and on the other hand, there is the social imperative to reach the large percentage of the population who can't afford the fancy new digital viewing devices and terminals.

Journalism can and must survive even the most calamitous paradigm change if society is ever to right itself and get things right. In times of economic and social stress, reliable information is more important than ever, incisive analysis a necessity. With the diminished brightness of the day, more and more watchdogs are called for. Shining light in dark places is more critical than ever.

But no press anywhere in the world is free, any more than a free lunch is free. Someone, somewhere along the line must bear the not inconsiderable costs of reporting and researching, vetting and editing, not to mention distribution and delivery in its analogue and digital formats.

A healthy society needs reliable news and information accessible to people from all walks of life at nominal cost, a role newspapers have played rather well for more than a century now.

Newspapers will undergo drastic makeovers, but so will the Internet information highway, which will lose some of its egalitarian luster when the pay-per-view toll booths are installed.

The new newspaper, will be, by necessity, a shape shifter.

It doesn't have to look like a newspaper, it doesn't have to be called a newspaper, but it has to deliver reliable news. And whatever it is that will ultimately replace newspapers must be, like newspapers in their prime, economically democratic.

If such a delivery device doesn't exist yet, someone will have to invent it.

As for the archaic but efficacious paper-and-ink information delivery device currently in your hands --for those of you not already reading this on-line; enjoy it while you can.

The author is Professor of Media Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto.

(China Daily 10/29/2009 page9)

BLOWING IN THE WIND

2009-10-20T21:48:00.003-04:00

by Philip J Cunningham

Is Japan changing for real? To get a better sense of how Japan is and isn't changing with the urbane Yukio Hatoyama at the helm, in the wake of the Democratic Party of Japan’s stunning electoral victory over the entrenched Liberal Democratic, consider these news stories from around the Japanese archipelago.

First, zoom in on the half-unfinished Yamba Dam in rural Gunma, to see how a multi-billion dollar boondoggle can be stopped dead in its tracks. The LDP, incumbents of a half-century standing, have made an art of pouring money, largely in the form of cement, to rural constituencies scattered around the archipelago, rewarding electoral loyalty while denuding and desecrating the environment with dams, bridges and highways to nowhere.

Hatoyama, in power for little more than a week, suspended the dam project. If there is truly change in the air, it is in the realm of cutbacks on pork-barrel spending. The controversial supplementary budget, a last-dash effort inked by the LDP as it was sinking into obscurity, has been scrapped and the overall budget has been massively trimmed.

Now pull back from the rice fields and hills of Gunma and zoom in on the shimmering Tokyo megalopolis, the largest concentration of human beings on earth, with some 40 million people clustered within a 40 kilometer radius. Not too much green here, but not too many roads to nowhere either; instead a vast, vibrant, complex inter-connected living, breathing super-organism with an arterial system of asphalt and iron; electricity and light, a steady flow of trains and automobiles, but what, no international airport?

Only far-away Narita.

The LDP during the height of its power operated much as an authoritarian communist party might have done in the same era. A swath of isolated rice farms in Chiba was decreed to be the new Tokyo International Airport, even though the project was bitterly opposed by Narita locals from the start, and has been inconveniencing travelers ever since. Situated an incomprehensible 60 kilometers outside of city center, it's an airport only big-time investors in infrastructure and social engineers hoping to discourage the hoi polloi from traveling, could love. in effect banishing the gateway of Tokyo to Chiba.

It was the sort of inconvenience to which one could only sigh "shoganai" as it could not be helped, at least not while the LDP remained in power. Long after violent clashes ceased, Narita remained an armed, barb-wired camp, subjecting visitors to intimidating, but largely theatrical, Star War trooper controls.

Then the LDP loses power and within weeks the DPJ’s Land and Transport Minister, Seiji Maehara, makes a bold proposal, suggesting that homely Haneda Airport, located on Tokyo Bay, snugly close to downtown, be the new hub. What? Move the gateway of Tokyo to Tokyo itself? What an idea! And why not?

Narita, like its patron party the LDP, has too long enjoyed a monopoly at the expense of others. But it has been failing on its own terms as well; it's inconvenience has not discouraged Japan's stoic traveling set from spending yen overseas, but it has stemmed the inflow of tourists and their cash. Foreigners, especially those in need of connecting flights, or on urgent business, bridle at the thought of over-nighting in Narita or detouring through the rice paddies of Chiba on bus and on over-priced trains.

One only need to consider the new airports in Inchon, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to see how Japan isolates itself, with Narita looking more and more a relic of the 1970's sorry domestic politics.

Maehara's bold bid did not go unopposed, however, and he back-tracked the next day after Chiba governor Kensaku Morita (a former actor, he goes by his stage name) made veiled threats during a sputtering televised performance full of innuendo, suggesting the old guard won't give up without a fight.

Zoom away from the troubled waters of Tokyo Bay and zoom in on distant Okinawa, which bears the brunt of the US military footprint in Japan, not just because it is an excellent staging ground for Pacific Ocean policing, but because the better-connected politicians of Japan proper never really took to the sight of uniformed gaijin walking the streets of their prefectures. The result? Outlying Okinawa long ago got stuck with rather more than its share of US bases, partly a legacy of LDP politicking.

The DPJ owes it to the under-represented voices of dissent in Okinawa to re-examine decades of back-room deals, but here, again, Hatoyama, soon to meet Obama, must tread gingerly, lest the game of base allocation become a bitter contest of musical chairs with the US military.

A quick leap the length of Japan up to its northernmost extremity followed by a zoom in on some windswept islets suggests that the new government, like the LDP, is haunted by the past, despite its intelligent core leadership and early moves to improve relations with China and Korea.

Land and Transport Minister Maehara, still reeling from the backlash from his Haneda air hub comments, escaped the heat by flying north to the chilly Southern Kuriles, where he staged a nationalistic photo op courtesy of the brashly patriotic Coast Guard, publicly pining for the return of the Russian-held islands. Gazing at the hazy outline of the distant isles, Maehara, born in 1962, said he was "nostalgic" for the old days before the Kuriles were "illegally occupied" by Russia.

Nostalgic for what? The 1940's? The good old days when these desolate, rocky isles were used to stage a brilliant sneak attack on Pearl Harbor? If a bunch of rocks can evoke such passion, imagine the bouts of nostalgia a Japanese nationalist might experience at the sight of former territories such as Korea and Taiwan?

Yet another indication that the sweeping change of power in Japan has failed to sweep away all the cobwebs of the political realm comes from the Wakayama coastal town of Taiji, famous for its unnecessary and unnecessarily brutal whaling and dolphin kills.

No less a luminary than the new foreign minister Katsuya Okada has unwisely chosen to defend Taiji's defenseless slaughter of marine mammals by using the "culture" argument, which is to say, anything Japanese do that the international community disapproves of is okay, if it can be trumped up as a facet of Japanese culture.

This evokes the ghosts of the LDP past and hints of a Thermidor to come. "Culture" has been used by old school politicians to defend everything from keeping out Thai rice to refusing Russians entry to public baths, from creating structural impediments to foreign products and services, to refusing the full palette of human rights to Japanese of Chinese and Korean descent and resident foreigners.

Hiding behind the culture curtain is a willful act of obfuscation. It is a slippery slope of an argument, popular with tyrants and Taliban alike, and not a promising start for the leading diplomat of the new, reform-minded ruling party.

pc

CITY OF THE WORLD

2009-10-02T20:09:00.005-04:00

SINO-US RELATIONS
(from the Bangkok Post, October 3, 2009)

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

As a native New Yorker far from home, I felt a surge of pride to see photos of the Empire State Building lit up in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Casting the upper floors of New York's pride and joy in coloured spotlights is nothing new; it's been done in honour of everything from St Patrick's Day and India Day to Columbus Day and July Fourth. As a New Yorker, one gets used to that.

Some people made a fuss about it and New Yorkers are used to that, too.

Of course, turning on the lights and shifting the colour wheel for American traditions is one thing; doing the same in the name of friendship with a foreign power is another, especially a powerful foreign power.

It comes as no surprise that a coterie of anti-China activists registered their dismay with a little protest at the main entrance to the towering edifice. Nor does it surprise anyone that a handful of politicians jumped on the bandwagon; feigning shock that "communist" China, of all countries, should be so celebrated, or simply channelling a generalised indignation against things not American.

Sadly, there's precedent enough for casting rivals as enemies and regarding anything foreign as suspect in America's long, convoluted history. But there have also been many shining moments when the clumsy, myopic God-favours-my-country-over-yours mentality has given way to a more gracious and congenial cosmopolitanism.

The French-made Statue of Liberty was controversial on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1870s; some French thought Americans too ungrateful to merit such a grand gesture, while The New York Times was the mouthpiece for Americans who termed it a folly not worth paying for.

Bartholdi's soaring statue, huge and patently foreign, was donated by a fledgling regime in Paris, still suffering the throes of political violence, to a wobbly US, still in shock from its own unusually brutal Civil War.

Luckily the artistic symbolism trumped politics in the end. Although the peculiar politics of its original conception as a Roman goddess-styled lighthouse for Ottoman Egypt during the early days of the French Third Republic have become obscure, its ultimate incarnation as a gift to the United States from the people of France has done much good.

Lady Liberty was a bold and provocative symbol of one country reaching out to another, a gesture duly reciprocated, a gesture of such power that it continues to inspire. It has helped Americans to better understand themselves and their better angels; a proud symbol of America's open door, of America embracing the world.

Of course, changing the colour of the spotlights on a tall building for a single evening hardly compares to the permanent installation of a soaring icon, most especially a timeless masterpiece of wrought iron and copper sheathing, majestically installed in the estuary harbour where America meets the sea.

But both gestures share an outward-looking cosmopolitan spirit. Americans in general, New Yorkers more particularly, have a proud history of embracing the world, even when it comes as a burden. It is no accident of geography that the United Nations is located in New York, it is an earned honour for a city that has been entrepot, middle ground and refuge for the world ever since its founding by relatively liberal Dutch settlers and laissez-faire Englishmen.

So a tip of the hat to China on the eve of its national day is not at all out of character for America's greatest city.

New York City is loved and hated to a degree hard to find elsewhere, because it is a city with backbone and the courage of its convictions, a port city so different from inland citadels that some conservative Americans see it as a foreign city, an un-American city, an unforgivably liberal city when in fact it is more radically American in political tradition than many of its detractors.

But a grand gesture can help people to rise above the fray, as was the case with the Statue of Liberty. One can deplore the horrible human rights record of both America and France in the mid-nineteenth century and still value the fraternal gesture represented by the Statue of Liberty.

Coming less than three weeks after yet another anguished anniversary of the devastating Sept 11 attacks, the Sept 30, 2009 light display carries special symbolic value.

The Statue of Liberty itself was closed to the public from the time of the attacks until this past July, and its re-opening is a symbolic lighting of a candle, a sign of re-discovered confidence, a fresh eagerness to look out and reach outward, after the dark miasma of the hate-stained post-9/11 period.

New York is reasserting itself as a world city, a city of the world.

For New York to reach out to China and offer a friendly high-five at a time like this, so soon after the world economy was nearly brought to a halt by the foolish, greedy machinations of Wall Street elitists, is good form; a kind of working-class gesture of humility congruent with New York's distinguished history as a big-hearted, cosmopolitan port.

China and America have, despite inevitable ups and downs, found themselves on the same side of history more often than not, whether it be parallel struggles against the predations of the British Empire at its peak, or the common war against Japanese imperialism.

From the days of the China Clippers to the Flying Tigers, from the efforts of missionaries and philanthropists to the fruition of Nixon and Mao's cunning and counter-intuitive alliance, America and China have found common cause. Illuminating the top of the Empire State Building in the red and yellow hues of China's flag for an evening is a fleeting but memorable wink of acknowledgement from one to another, as friends, if not equals.

Perhaps when the US reaches an important milestone China will offer a reciprocal wink back at the US, illuminating the beautiful Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in red, white and blue.

If both sides work for peace and prosperity, it is not inconceivable that China's own home-grown version of Lady Liberty will stand again, a symbol of shared values and friendship.

Philip J Cunningham is a free-lance writer and political commentator.

IDLING AWAY THE DAY IN KYOTO

2009-09-25T09:06:00.007-04:00

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

One of the wonderful things about Kyoto is how well the environment has been preserved, thanks in part to savvy citizens, ample public transportation and the popularity of bicycle use. On the other hand, what at first glance might seem a pristine environment is quickly being eroded by the boom of automotive culture.

Riding my bike past abundant but shrinking rice fields to the historic site where the Kyoto Protocol was signed I always find it surprising to see how many motorists chose this otherwise pristine symbolic setting to idle away. Cars, taxis, trucks alike park with engines on, whiling away the hours on a tree-lined roadside, in violation not only of parking laws but also violating Kyoto's mild and generally ineffective ordinances against idling.

Similar scenes of drivers with their vehicles left running, idling noisily away while napping, smoking, watching DVDs or just killing time can be seen everywhere in Kyoto, winter, spring, summer and fall.

But it is especially odd to note that some of the most scenic, quiet spots with the cleanest air, such as the street in front of Kyoto's International Conference Hall, where the famous anti-global warming protocol was signed, attract droves of needlessly polluting vehicles like a magnet.

More disconcertingly, since after all, the Kyoto International Conference Hall and accompanying hotel, despite the symbolic significance, are primarily designed for out-of-town VIP visitors, is the way idling drivers lurk in front of local children's playgrounds and public parks, historic streets and temple grounds that are part and parcel of daily life in this proud ancient capital city.

The accompanying amateur video was filmed on an IPhone, mostly from the vantage point of a bicycle in motion.

TIME FOR CHANGE

2009-09-19T22:32:00.005-04:00

(from the Bangkok Post)

Time for change the Japanese can really believe in
Writer: PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
Published: 15/09/2009 at 12:00 AM

Japan has a new prime minister and a new ruling party. Prime ministers come and go in Tokyo on almost an annual basis, 50 of them in the post-war period alone, so the change of guard at the top of a huge, humming, well-oiled bureaucratic machine might not seem like news. But Hatoyama's ascension to power might be significant, if the long impotent opposition, now crystalised as the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), takes the helm long enough to steer Japan, Inc in a new direction.

Yukio Hatoyama, who was born on Sept 11, 1947, is nicknamed "The Alien" by his fellow party members for his quirky appearance and different way of thinking.

The DPJ's Hatoyama Yukio - like his predecessors at the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso - is a political blueblood and financially secure. He is a member of the elite, which as Japanese like to see it, puts him a cut above the average man.

Like his elite predecessors, the new prime minister has strong personal links to America, not so much in terms of old-time family links with the Bushes or through party hacks on the CIA payroll or through verbal compliance with US fundamentalisms, but rather in meritocratic terms; he earned an advanced graduate degree at Stanford. He knows America but it's not the old boy network all over again. Much has been made of Mr Hatoyama's stated position that Japan needs to adjust its relationship with the US, setting off alarm bells in the corridors of entrenched power in Washington and Tokyo.

But that's just the old guard reasserting itself. What's wrong with some adjustments in a critical bilateral relationship that has been shaped by heavy-handed demands on one side and sneaky non-compliance on the other? Isn't it time to change, time to rejuvenate and re-define the bilateral relationship rather than relying on anachronistic and ossified patron-client links?

It is not as if the US-Japan security treaty is up for grabs, though it can and should be discussed and improved where necessary. After half a century of one-party rule in Japan, a fresh approach to foreign policy and collective security is not really an option, it's a necessity.

The Liberal Democratic Party, born of the ashes of WWII, branded with the imprint of US Occupation, has always been an odd hybrid, neither particularly liberal nor democratic, but an opportunistic mish-mash that was fine-tuned into a winning political machine.

Even if the US was uniformly enlightened in its Japan policy, which is hardly the case, being forced to rely on the Godzilla-like LDP as the main conduit for the conduct of bilateral relations has led to mutations and destructive distortions over the years.

One need only look at recent headlines to see how the LDP's past has continued to haunt the present, whether it be glorifying the lost cause of the last war at Yasukuni Shrine, or the vestiges of anti-communism in foreign policy and anti-labour practices, or the not-so-subtle intimidation of progressives by organised crime and rightwing groups for hire that are themselves relics of US occupation days.

More recently, a bungling obsession with North Korea continues to invoke unfinished business of Japan's historic annexation of its neighbour and what later became America's Korean war.

Then there's the LDP's almost military mindset when it comes to promoting big business and coddling modern-day zaibatsu, all the while building bridges to nowhere and churning out endless pork-barrel spending to nourish a rural elite/big business electoral juggernaut.

It's time for a change, all right, and the DPJ has seized the mantle of electoral legitimacy. The only question is whether the much-needed change will come about or will it be stalled, co-opted and buried by attack campaigns from the right, in concert with passive-aggressive non-compliance from powerful vested interests.

Prime Minister Hatoyama would be wise to take note of how US President Obama, who started out with so much promise, and such a huge mandate for change, only to end up tacking to the right and frittering much of his mandate away, betraying his own reform-minded base in the hopes of placating Wall Street, the Pentagon and America's implacable right wing. Mr Hatoyama and the DPJ face a comparable test, and early indications suggest they too will compromise and bend and revive existing patronage patterns, perhaps until the day that they are not recognisably different from the "fat cats" and the complacent ruling party that they have ostensibly replaced.

For change to have any real meaning, it has to exit the realm of rhetoric and enter the realm of action.

If the DPJ, with Mr Hatoyama at the helm, and former LDP stalwart Ozawa Ichiro navigating at his side, keep their promise to help Japan become a more normal nation - less dependent on the whims of US foreign policy, less beholden to Japan's own elite with its malignant, murky roots in the last world war, and more responsive to ordinary citizens and taxpayers, then Japan is indeed entering a period of change that people can believe in.

If, instead, however, the new government avoids friction by continuing along the beaten-down path created by the LDP, and in doing so sustains the unholy marriage between big business and an entrenched bureaucracy and concommitantly inflates its own military reach while hiding in the shade of the US security umbrella, then the demise of the LDP has been greatly exaggerated.

Even if they stick to their professed ideals, the new ruling team may still succumb to the inertia and stagnation that characterise Japan's body politic today, failing not only to fulfil the promises they made while not in power, but putting themselves out of power again.

In which case DPJ rule will prove not only brief, but may be one day understood not so much as a change in the power structure, but as a short-lived victory for some frustrated, veteran pols of the LDP reform wing, who will give Japan the illusion of change before deftly steering things back to the status quo of big business, big-bureaucracy as usual.

IS THE EAST RED?

2009-09-14T06:18:00.008-04:00

I recently visited CCTV studios in Beijing to participate in a series of National Day-themed discussions hosted by public affairs talk show host Yang Rui. In between taping sessions, I took the liberty to visit the big stage in the CCTV building where a dress rehearsal for the National Day program was underway.

THE EAST IS STILL RED, SORT OF...

2009-09-14T04:23:00.028-04:00

Walking through cramped studios and cacophonous corridors filled with actors and extras singing, chatting, rehearsing their lines and doing last-minute checks of costumes and make-up brought back memories of working on epic China themed films such as the Last Emperor and Empire of the Sun. It always amazes me to see how relaxed and informal show business people are immediately before and after stepping on stage where they then get into character, momentarily transforming themselves into living works of art.

Here, then, a sneak preview of CCTV's National Day extravaganza, with clips taken on my Iphone. The photos illustrate various stages of China's development, while the video clips are taken from a choral tribute to the "The East is Red," along with some behind-the-scenes moments.

The limited light range of the Iphone created an interesting effect as the actors rushed off stage.

Once offstage, the performers share a crowded hallway with a cleaning lady --the sort of working class hero being extrolled in song on the stage-- yet one who is clearly underwhelmed by the beautiful voices and even less impressed with my attempt to get a picture, to which her curt response is "hurry it up!"

Even if working class heroes aren't quite what the used to be, the East is Red, a folk song turned Maoist anthem, has a staying power that defies the decidedly non-Maoist individualistic rush to riches characteristic of today's China. In its current incarnation the anthem summons nostalgia for a far simpler, if not entirely happy time of forced equality and collective living. The song's folksy appeal suggests that the melody will live on, one way or another, with or without the controversial lyrics.

CCTV-9 Dialogue, Afghan Elections

2009-09-08T03:01:00.004-04:00

Below a link to a September 2, 2009 Beijing television studio discussion about the recent Afghan elections, with reference to the foreign policy quandary facing America, Pakistan and India. Hosted by Yang Rui with guests Aykut Tavsel and Philip Cunningham.

http://english.cctv.com/program/e_dialogue/20090903/106145.shtml

Mr Nice Guy is not good enough

2009-08-16T01:33:00.001-04:00

THE POLITICAL MAN

by PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

Published in the Bangkok Post: 15/08/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: News

What is it about politics that makes it so hard to find a leader both decent and effective? Why is it so hard to find both qualities in one individual? If an electorate facing urgent problems must choose between a mild-mannered politician in service of the status quo, and an unpredictable Machiavellian manipulator, who offers the greater hope and who the greater liability?

A recent Thai Rath editorial compared current Thai PM Abhisit with fugitive former premier Thaksin, suggesting one man was clearly more decent, but the other more capable. The comparison ended with the lament about the difficulty of finding a leader who was both keng and dee (clever and good). Both terms are praiseworthy attributes, but the former is a kind of efficacious talent or power, the latter a rather more static moral quality.

To reduce complex, internally conflicted adult individuals to simple stereotypes of "clever" and "good" is to employ the language of the schoolyard to over-simplify things a bit. But it's a catchy media angle and it raises interesting questions.

Is the current prime minister being damned with faint praise when he is described as being good but essentially ineffective? Or is it a withering critique of Thaksin to portray him as rather more clever than good? What's better, what's worse?

The editorial gives both pols a slap in the face, suggesting that one is likable but lacking as a politician, the other not particularly likable but perhaps fit for politics. Is there something about the rough and rumble world of politics that makes the concept of a "good politician" an oxymoron? Is it really so hard to combine the two? The Thai dilemma has interesting parallels to the situation in America at the moment. What kind of man is President Obama, if not a nice man? He rode into office on a wave of niceness, he exuded a basic civility lacking in his opponents. And yet he increasingly is showing himself to be far more complex than nice.

Mr Obama is still a crowd-pleaser in personal terms - decent, well-mannered, soft-spoken - and he is revered by his followers with something close to devotion, but a dispassionate review of his accomplishments to date suggests he is something of a phony and flip-flopper when it comes to policy.

Worse yet, there are growing indications that good guy Obama was never quite the good guy that he was widely assumed to be, or if he was, once upon a time, a man both endearing and decent, he has long since shed his high-minded moral standards to get ahead in a treacherous political world where nice guys often finish last.

As is said in China, the higher you go, the more treacherous it gets, with the implication that it takes more than a bit of treachery to get to the top and stay there. Given such a forbidding political terrain, with all the dragons, real and imagined that need to be slain, is it any surprise that being decent and good is not only not good enough, but perhaps even a liability?

On the surface, there would appear to be little worth comparing in Mr Obama and Mr Abhisit, as their differences stand out. One man, who had to overcome the stigma of being a mixed race candidate in a racially polarised society, is the son of a deadbeat dad and had a pointedly less-than-aristocratic upbringing. The other, born with the silver spoon, hails from a nationally respected, well-to-do clan. One is a natural orator and almost obsessively charismatic, the other well-spoken but quiet and retiring.

Both men were educated at elite institutions at the secondary and tertiary level, where prestige of association counts for almost as much as brainpower. Both men are physically attractive. More importantly, both men are widely perceived to be good, decent individuals.

Though relatively young and relatively inexperienced, both enjoyed support from powerful patrons who helped pave the way and set the ground for a launch to national prominence. Key introductions and necessary initiations into the political world were handled by political elders, imparting each candidate with deep personal and political debts even before assuming office. Both were long-shot candidates, propelled to the heights of national power in a way that couldn't have been easily predicted even a year ago. Both maintain a clean image despite surrounding themselves with political operators with less-than-clean credentials. Indeed, both men have gotten good mileage out of their kindly personalities, wearing good manners and decency on their sleeves, and each has helped calm their respectively troubled nation. Each has been reasonably effective in reducing political temperatures that were near the boiling point due to the gross indiscretions of their predecessors. And each, after about half a year in office with little accomplishment to point to, is increasingly being seen, and being seen through, as decent but lacking in the ability to get things done.

That's not to say they haven't tried to make things better. They both follow in a wake of destruction left behind by forceful leaders who were self-styled "deciders". The initial popularity of both Mr Obama and Mr Abhisit can be understood in part as a thirst for change in terms of leadership style; much of their initial success was rooted in the ability to appear as un-Bush and un-Thaksin as possible. The public has lost its taste for imperious leaders who come off as rash, rude and divisive.

Like him or hate him as you may, Bush Jr put plans into action, including things the nation neither wanted or needed, like an unnecessary war. Ditto for Thaksin, who correctly recognised that Thailand needed a thorough makeover, but went about it in the most clumsy, self-serving and callous way as possible, intimidating the media and releasing the gratuitous violence of an ill-conducted anti-drug campaign. With politicians like that, bringing each nation close to the brink, it is no surprise that the electorate could so crave untested candidates who were all talk and no track record. A necessary salve, perhaps, but how long can smiling Taoist non-action be relied upon to lead societies riddled with pressing concrete problems ranging from mass unemployment, environmental degradation, civic turmoil and looming epidemiological disaster?

The jury's still out on both Mr Obama and Mr Abhisit, but each and every passing day, each and every policy delay, fritters away what precious political capital they may still possess as soft successors to hard men. That they inherited a broken, dysfunctional government apparatus is not their fault, but to the extent they follow in the footsteps of their controversial predecessors, attending to the elite while inadvertently condemning the poor to even more poverty, is a betrayal of the promise that catapulted them to power in the first place.

Discontent will mount as fundamental social problems go unattended. Merely playing the role of Mr Nice Guy is not good enough; goodness to have any meaning at all must manifest itself in good works with good results. Given a complex, unforgiving political landscape, the challenge remains; can good men find a timely and effective way to do good works without betraying their basic decency? Can a politician be both clever and good?