เรื่องสมมติ รัฐมนตรีให้เลขานุการรัฐมนตรี ไปติดต่อหน่วยงานที่กำลังจะได้รับงบประมาณซื้อที่ดิน ว่าทางกระทรวงจะจัดการเรื่องจัดซื้อให้ทั้งหมด ทางหน่วยงานไม่ต้องยากลำบากในการจัดซื้อเลย เพียงแต่บอกว่าต้องการที่ดินตรงไหน แล้วรอรับที่ดินที่ต้องการเท่านั้น
ท่านคิดอย่างไร
วิจารณ์ พานิช
๑๙ ก.ย. ๕๑
เตรียมกินเมืองหน่ะสิครับ...กระทรวงหมายถึง รมต รมช หมายถึง นักการเมือง
การรวบอำนาจการจัดซื้อ แทนที่จะดูแลเรื่องนโยบาย เป็นสิ่งปกติ แต่เป็นปกติของการเมืองเก่าครับ
คิดเหมือน "คนโรงงาน" หน้าหน่วยงานคงต้องรับผิดและรัฐมนตรีรับชอบ(และทรัพย์)
มองได้สามมุมครับ
มุมแรก มองในแง่ร้ายแก่รัฐมนตรี แต่เป็นแง่ดีแก่ผู้บริหารหน่วยงาน ก็จะเป็นอย่างที่ทุกท่านคิดกัน คือรัฐมนตรีเตรียมกินเมือง
มุมที่สอง มองในแง่ดีแก่รัฐมนตรี แต่เป็นแง่ร้ายแก่ผู้บริหารหน่วยงาน รัฐมนตรีพยายามป้องกันคนในหน่วยงานกินเมืองครับ
มุมที่สาม มองในแง่ดีแก่รัฐมนตรีและหน่วยงาน ทั้งหมดนี้อาจเป็นความพยายามในการบริหารราชการให้เกิดประโยชน์สูงสุดแก่ประชาชน โดยเป็นการลองผิดลองถูกธรรมดาก็ได้
ยุคสมัยปัจจุบันไม่ใช่เป็นสมัยของการตัดสินใจด้วยเหตุผล แต่เป็นยุคของความเชื่อ เรื่องนี้ขึ้นอยู่กับว่าเราเลือกที่จะ "เชื่อ" อย่างไรครับ มองในแง่ร้ายจิตใจก็หดหู่ มองในแง่ดีจิตใจก็สดชื่นครับ
ด้วยความเคารพครับ
Looking into the Thai political context from the West through an occidental, yet narrow mindset, would always confuse not only "amateur" observers, but also those who profess to be "professors" of political science, albeit their lack of a small prefix of 'con' before the word "Science".
Below is my coomunication with an American who works for the Taiwan Democracy Foundation.
Chamnong Watanagase, ABD
(in Political conScience)
The University of Moral and Political conScience (UMPcS)
Director, The Open Forum for Democracy Foundation ("PollWatch")
_______________________________
Dear Bo:
1. "the clashes yesterday were started by the PAD."
That is not true. Though PAD core leaders mobilized their supporters to block the entrance to the parliament, none carried weapon. Armed only with the Chinese-made plastic handclap tools, now a symbol of civil defiance against corrupt government, they booed the ruling party members who tried to get inside the parliament building for the PM to deliver his policies and officiate the government projects and budgets despite that all three coalition parties are on the verge of being dissolved of vote buying! Of course, there were groups of young men carrying clubs to safeguard the demonstrators, but none with guns. These are the people whose parents join the demonstration, including some in my "tent" inside the government house.
The police showed in the aftermath all the empty shells of tear gas they fired at the demonstrators, but failed to produced the deadly ones they used. Fortunately, TV cameras caught them in action and I happen to secure one big plastic teargas shell with 2" in diameter and 7" long that could have killed some demonstrators if shot directly at vulnerable part of the body.
The first female victim was pronounce dead by examiner of having her chest cut open to waist by "hot and sharp object". Does anyone of the right mind would say that she died of tear gas? Even more absurd is the police's claim that, "she might have carried a bomb to the demonstration site". Many unexploded hand grenades were found outside the wall of the parliament where demonstrators were. Would anyone say that the demonstrators dropped the grenades on their toes and blew off their hands and legs? A PAD vehicle that tried to take the body of the female victim away was destroyed by the police and the driver had to flee the scene. Her mom, who lost fingers, clung to her daughter's dead body until more PAD volunteers in an ambulance took her to hospital.
Another victim, a former police colonel who led the PAD in the northeast, was blown off his Jeep, fueled by LPG, by a rocket.
PAD guards held one police colonel for questioning at the besieged government house when found that he carried a .38 calibre. Two of his digital cameras captured the faces of hundreds of PAD supporters and his cell phones showed records of recent calls to his superiors. His gun is just one of the suspicious weapons that "fired on the police", according to the official claims.
2. Hasn't the PAD more or less completely renounced democratic values?
Democracy is not symbolized simply by winning elections, a rhetoric constantly claimed by the ruling parties and echoed by foreign observers (you included?), but none bothers to look at the genesis of their election victories (see the part highlighted in red above). Moreover, the present PM is entangled in a few corruption cases, less to mention many more against his wife and daughter, or least to say his bother-in-law Thaksin and his wife.
I'm sure Taiwanese were equally dismayed with this type rhetoric when compared to Chen Shui-bian and his family and cronies.
3. Mussolini's brown shirts?
We have "red shirt hooligans" attacking the peaceful demonstrators in Bangkok! They were the rural poor from the northeast, the stronghold of the ruling party, hired and bused to Bangkok (identified by the vehicles' license plates). On the other hand, one can tell that the demonstrators are educated, at least well-informed, middle and upper class urban people who are fed up with the corrupted politicians who are no Robin Hood. The money looted from the state coffer were spread throughout the rural villages under the Keynesian economics and "trickled down" from cronies of ministers to vote buyers. The rural poor have always remained poor and are eager to grab whatever being offered, including free trips and pocket money to Bangkok. At the end of the "Icicle economics", they are always ended up licking an empty icicle stick trying to seek some sweetness that might be left after going through numerous thirsty tongues along the "trickering" ladder.
The root cause of the misinformation is that all TV stations in Thailand are under government control. PAD has to turn to satellite broadcast www.astv-tv.com that is accessible only by urbanized and educated people. Compared to the mass, no wonder that when the killing in Bangkok was on-going, all stations broadcast game shows and soap operas.
Now I'm in Washington to discuss the situations at home with friends of the PAD and show them the artifact that I retrieved from the "Killing Field".
Best regards,
Chamnong
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Bo Tedards <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Chamnong,
Thanks for your updates. It is always sad when people are hurt or killed.
However, I have 2 questions:
1) The news reports I read said that the clashes yesterday were started by the PAD. Is that not correct? If it is, are these people not then to some extent responsible for their suffering? Of course, if innocent bystanders were caught up in the clashes, that would be another thing. Police overreaction is also to be condemned, but again, some reports describe the PAD as armed at least with sticks and clubs, and aggressively attacking the parliament, what should the police do in such a case?
2) Then, a braoder issue: Hasn't the PAD more or less completely renounced democratic values? The public program of its leadership is certainly anti-democratic. Frankly speaking, they are overtly trying to use illegal means to force the country down a path of anti-democracy, isn't that just like Mussolini's brown shirts? This is the impression I have, please enlighten me if it is not correct! But if it is correct, have you and our other Thai friends publicly condemned their program? If not, why not?
Best regards,
Bo
__________________________
"Clash not between religion and secularism"
-Bangkok Post: Sunday, July 15, 2007
Now that the draft Thai constitution has put the issue of Buddhism as the national religion to rest, at least for now, let's explore beyond the confinement our nation-state where the clerics had ended their unholy rites in front of the Parliament.
In last week's Sunday Perspective ("Clash not between religion and secularism, July 8, 2007), Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels drew many intellectual shots from Amartya Sen. The questions on the multicultural, multi-faith Turkey that Nobel Laureate Sen was asked apparently were salvaged from the disputed 1993 article, The Clash of Civilisations? by Samuel P. Huntington. Even his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order, without the question mark, still adamantly argues that the key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilisations. Isn't it like looking at the Orient from too far a distance, wearing fixed, yet out-of-focus occidental eyeglasses?
Sen's straightforward answers, particularly those invoking the ancient Indian philosophy about the fate of the "kupamanduka", the well-frog in ancient Sanskrit books, reminds me of an old Thai saying of an even narrower-minded worldview about a coconut-shell-frog that perceives the shell it resides in as the universe. The "boxes of civilisations" in which some self-proclaimed "thinkers" love to categorise others were predicated on their mental frame of containers that is so parochial, ethnocentric, and possibly xenophobic. Such a "worldview" within a captive sphere is not much different from a frog that fears to venture beyond the body of water in which they complacently find it comfortable, no matter how gradually the water heats up.
The Lord Buddha's analogy of the enlightenment he had attained to a bunch of leaves in his hand, vis-a-vis countless leaves that are omnipresent on earth, guides us to learn and appreciate diversity in order to seek a peaceful co-existence in "a hybrid world" where some might feel insecure. While "boxes of civilisation" may be maintained, and even treated with some respect, the universalism can transcend the cultural walls and thus a clash between religion and secularism is unnecessary, not to mention Gardels' comment that "some have suggested that we learn from the Middle Ages, where different values applied in different jurisdictions".
CHAMNONG WATANAGASE
Bangkok