They were not martyrs, heroes, or Jesuses nailed at the crosses as the crows picked out their eyes. They were just students who wanted to express their disagreement, which was the least anybody could do in a world where disagreement has not yet been outlawed (really?) and at a time when everybody else has been lulled into fake silence. The scene outside Bangkok Art and Culture Centre on May 22 was ugly, not as ugly as Tiananmen Square in 1989, or Gwangju in 1980, or Thammasat in 1976, but ugly enough to let us glimpse the flames beneath the volcano.
About 50 people — a loose gathering of university students from various institutions — planned a “Time and Silence” sit-in to mark the first year after the May 22, 2014 coup d’état. The police set up barricades, then a tussle began. Silence became noise, as 39 students were rounded up, some with injuries and one left unconscious, and an all-night negotiation ensued at Pathumwan station before all students were released without charge. All because of a silent sit-in. All because someone feared symbolism.
You must’ve seen the photos. You must’ve heard the counter-propaganda that the students were paid by, what a surprise, Thaksin Shinawatra and his camp, or that they beat up the police and not the other way round. It’s funny that in our times of great divides — which are still here no matter how much phony happiness is manufactured — anyone who has a different view is paid by your enemy, while the only pure and unpaid thought is yours. Every protest is funded by dirty money except yours. Every belief is tainted by unclean ideologies except yours. Every resentment is contaminated by greed, by politics, by innuendo, except yours. To be narrow-minded is comforting, to be numb is relaxing.
The students are not martyrs or heroes. But in our post-coup year, they have been something simpler and much more necessary: a voice. In a time when silence is preferred, a voice is rare and, in effect, loud. From the three-fingered salute in Khon Kaen to banned seminars in various campuses, and of course the May 22 squabbles in downtown Bangkok, some students have shown that speaking up remains within our rights (what an irony that on Saturday, the students were rounded up because their symbolic activity was a silent sit-in). They have shown, in their small ways, that the tale about the youthful idealism and recalcitrance of the 1970s is still relevant.
Such idealism is often romanticised, so let’s not do that. It also irritates adults who’ve been life-hardened into bourgeois indifference and forgotten that at one time we still believed in the future (now we believe in the past, which takes up the largest portion of memory). Youthful idealism is also tied with radicalism, a linkage fused by a Cold War mentality during which the red scare was rampant. That’s obsolete and small-minded in today’s context, an excuse as ignorant as the paid-protest one. In fact, what the students have shown — I also think of 19-year-old Joshua Wong of Hong Kong, and of the student movements that opposed the Yingluck administration — is that ideas can evolve with the changing times, and that we always need young energy to rattle the chains of complacency and conventionalism.
Among the students rounded up on May 22 was Pakorn Areekul. Many years ago, this southern boy joined anti-Thaksin protests with Sondhi Limthongkul (was he also paid at that time, one might ask?), and marched with the anti-amnesty bill protesters in 2013. In interviews, he said he never agreed with Thaksin’s political cynicism. By the same logic, Pakorn also disagrees with the coup, and as a member of the Young People for Social Democracy movement, he and his friends are hurt by the way the army disparages universities by banning seminars, screenings and discussions.
In a way, Pakorn is proof that it’s possible to push the narrative forward. We don’t have to get stuck in Thaksin-bashing (though he persists with his dreadful stunts) and we can look beyond the absurd dichotomy of either-with-them-or-with-us. Actually, the situation is becoming dangerous, a radioactive sort of danger whose historical examples are abundant (Oct 6, 1976, for instance). What we take for ideology is often just prejudice, and what we argue are principles are often self-serving excuses.
A few dozen students can never bring down an armed government — not even an unarmed school council, I believe. Thai students today can’t mobilise mass protests like they did in the past, because they, too, have enrolled in the school of bourgeois indifference. Those few who manage to let their voices out should be heard, otherwise we’re all complicit in the making of a deaf-mute nation.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.