• OPINION

  'Bob' Halliday gone, but his light lives on

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/06/2017

  » Bob told me many stories from a time when I hadn't even been born: During the Oct 14, 1973 student uprising, the authorities suspected he was a spy. When the Oct 6, 1976 massacre took place and the stench of blood was still fresh at Thammasat University, he surveyed the wreckage and bemoaned the state of the country he had adopted as his new home. Some evenings he reminisced on how he had lived through several dictators and prime ministers, hijacked or elected, overthrown or incapacitated -- he talked about Richard Nixon, Thanom Kittikachorn, Tanin Kraivixien, Thaksin Shinawatra, Prayut Chan-o-cha, etc. It didn't matter what happened, he'd say, as long as he could prowl produce markets in search of the perfect durian -- the caramelised Holy Grail of the fruit he adored above all else, the fruit that, as he'd say, made him "slobber like a mastiff".

• OPINION

  Sucking the wind out of the elections

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/05/2018

  » The verb of the week is "to dood".

• OPINION

  A nation of millions can't hold them back

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/10/2018

  » Rhymes and misdemeanours. Yo, yo. Rappers are threatened to be thrown in a slammer.

• OPINION

  It's really best when you say nothing at all

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/09/2014

  » Dear diary, it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, as Mark Twain said. How charming my mouth has been in the past week. If it had been Yingluck Shinawatra saying those things, I'm sure a riot would've broken out and the sound of a million whistles would've shattered your eardrums. But it's me, so it's different. It's not the action but the man. How could those pettifogging critics interpret my speech as avuncular nonsense, when in fact they're pieces of wisdom worthy of being chronicled in the national archives and inscribed onto monuments?

• OPINION

  Regime trawl for small fry no joke at all

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2018

  » The big fish hardly ever gets caught, not here. Only the small, the trivial, the nonsensical fish, the clownfish especially. As in school, or in prison, the bullies never bully the big kid. They only confirm their sense of power when they go after the small guys, the nerds, even the girls.

• OPINION

  A comedy likely to end only in horror

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/02/2018

  » The junta can read the stars and history and they must know this isn't going to end well. As frustration grows, as protests form, as their support ebbs even their idol Gen Prem Tinsulanonda flat-out said so they amp up censorship and tighten the squeeze, not with gusto but with desperation. With Deputy Prime Minister Gen Prawit Wongsuwon looking increasingly like a plump Chinese deity on the verge of losing his worshippers, the regime reacts with force, gagging tactics and plain old bullying.

• OPINION

  It's always sunset in our land of exiles

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2017

  » Either to Dubai or London, Yingluck Shinawatra has gone West and will likely live the rest of her life in exile. Either in an Emirati villa overlooking the Persian Gulf or a London penthouse by the Thames, she may be contemplating the difference between exile and banishment, or between exile and a holiday, but in the end it doesn't matter: She has fled, and her flight means the old power of Thailand has seen off the element regarded as threat. The ghost has been exorcised, the devil purged -- not once but twice, since there are two Shinawatras -- and now the military will charge ahead on their black horses as they gather us up and gallop us off into sunset (not sunrise).

• OPINION

  In our special situation, hail the metaphors

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/07/2017

  » We can still speak, preferably in English, or even better in metaphors. The dilemma is painful: We speak in coded words and we risk being irrelevant, obscure, snobbish; but if we say it too directly, we risk something else, such as a summons, a slap on the wrist, or a mark on the forehead as the Biblical executioners arrive at the gates of Jerusalem. For those to whom Thailand remains home, both paths are strewn with barbed wire.

• OPINION

  Hear youthful outrage amid a silent sit-in

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/05/2015

  » 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.

• OPINION

  The fifty shades of censorship

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/02/2015

  » So, in the past week, what has got through the censors? What, in art and in academia, has slipped past the iron curtain of our saintly, this-is-not-dictatorship authorities?

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