Wassana Nanuam, Lap luang phrang phak phitsadan [Secrets, Trickery, and Camouflage: The Improbable Phenomena]. Bangkok, Post Books, 2009. 303 pp. In Thai.
Soldiers, guns and coups have played a big role in Thailand’s politics for centuries. Historians think that the Front Palace incident in 1874 early in the reign of the fifth Bangkok king was actually a coup attempt backed by nobles and princes who stood to lose out if the young King Chulalongkorn proceeded with his reforms. Many coups, such as the one in September 2006, have succeeded, but there is no guarantee of success as several coup planners in the 1980s discovered. The country’s annals are littered with failed and aborted coups, and false alarms.
Seizing power by coup is a dangerous game. A coup that fails can result in disgrace or demotion, and even jail or death, so the plotters need to plan meticulously. The loyalties of key divisional commanders need to be secured. Inside knowledge of the itineraries of the head of government and his most loyal supporters is invaluable, and the reactions of the palaces need to be anticipated. The leader of the coup group also must assess whether or not he has ‘the right stuff’ to be prime minister. He also needs to identify rivals who might seriously challenge his leadership.
Timing is critical, and luck is a big factor. For advice on bringing off a coup successfully, military officers scrambling for rank and power consult astrologers. The incumbent monarch is the ninth Bangkok king, so the 9s in the date of the latest coup – the nineteenth day of the ninth month of B. E. 2549 – suggest an astrologer’s connivance on timing. The generals’ wives, who have time on their hands, may play a key role by searching out forecasts from lay and monastic astrologers on behalf of their husbands. The astrologers feed the egos and stoke the ambitions of their clients, always useful for retaining the confidence of men who aspire to high office. In the last two successful coups in 1991 and 2006, the astrologer who had advised the chief coup planner became the astrologer for the coup group once it had assumed power. In 1991 it was Kengkat Chongchaiphra, and in 2006 it was the Chiang Mai-based Warin Buawiratloet.
To prepare for national leadership certain steps can be taken to enhance prospects. The astrologer may recommend that his client increase his store of merit with appropriate rituals. Sixteen has been an auspicious number for army chiefs, so the spellings of names are twigged to make up the requisite sixteen characters, including superscript and subscript vowels and tone marks. Sometimes personal and family names are changed to ‘reverse’ bad karma or to designate a martial vocation. Did General Arthit Kamlang-ek’s parents really name him ‘The Sun Deity Preeminent Force’? Fire is cleansing, so soldiers changing their names burn some of their hair and nail clippings along with their old name to ritually dispose of their former selves.
The astrologers acquire confidential information that may be leaked to the media and thus contribute to an atmosphere of public apprehension and uncertainty. Rumours serve strategic ends by testing the reaction of key institutions and power blocs. For an important military player merely to be seen visiting an astrologer can stir rumours. During the turmoil of late 2008 when rumours circulated of a possible coup, General Anuphong Phaochinda, then head of the army, avoided visiting Warin, the astrologer of the 2006 coup group. Anuphong’s unwillingness to quell the violence instigated by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and his refusal to resign after fatalities caused by the use of tear gas in suppressing protests indicated not weakness or conspiracy with the PAD or one of the palaces, but the management of risk. Anuphong stood to lose a great deal if the coup went ahead and ultimately failed. He did not want to risk his career by acting and failing.
Senior military officers are graduates of the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy founded on 5 August 1887 by King Chulalongkorn who is addressed as Royal Father or Grandfather of the school. Within the academy’s grounds is an image of Chulalongkorn before which the cadets daily swear to protect the king’s legacy and defend the throne and the nation with their life’s blood. Whenever graduates of the academy encounter an image of this monarch, such as the equestrian statues located throughout the country, they commune with the image, renew their vows of loyalty, and pray to the deceased king for his blessing and success in their ventures. Throughout their careers, military officers reach out for the sacred and mysterious powers of the academy’s patron saint.
Consider these numbers. August was the birth month of four prime ministers of Thailand who came from the army: Field Marshal Thanom Kitikhachorn (11th); General Sujinda Kraprayoon (6th); General Prem Tinsulanond (26th); and General Surayut Chulanon (28th). Other high-ranking generals who have played key roles in the nation’s politics recently and who were born in August include Sunthorn Khongsompong (1st), Mongkol Amphornphisit (10th), Chettha Thanajaro (23rd), and Arthit Kamlang-ek (31st). Banharn Silpa-archa, who was prime minister from 1995-1996 , was ‘officially’ born on 19 August (real birth date, 20 July), and Abhisit Vejjajiva, the present prime minister, was born on 3 August. Anan Panyarachun, who was a cooperative choice for prime minister when the army needed a quick fix to restore its tattered reputation after the disastrous May 1992 killings in the streets of Bangkok, was born on 9 August. Some astrology manuals stretch the August sign into late July, in which case Chuan Leekpai and Thaksin Shinawatra, born on 28 and 26 July respectively, join the group.
The statistic is striking. The tempting conclusion is that birth in August is auspicious for Thai army officers who thus have an advantage over competitors for promotion. Their celestial sign is linked to the August founding of the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy, and for this reason they receive favourable treatment in appointment to rank. Three civilian prime ministers – or five, if we include the late July births – may also have benefited from this convergence by reassuring key power blocs that the country would prosper during their stewardship.
Another bulwark of the military establishment is the Ministry of Defence, the Kalahom, whose offices were constructed more than 120 years ago by General Surasakmontri (Joem Saeng Xuto, 1851-1931). The building is located near the city pillar across the road from the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the spiritual heart of the kingdom. Within the ministry are several shrines, including a timber post that has been weeping resin since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. A female tree spirit dwells in the post, which the soldiers dress with green cloth and where they make offerings and vows. The minister of defence and his deputy who occupy the Kalahom offices go about their work amidst these sacred sites with grave responsibilities weighing on them. If they should err or act dishonestly, their lives will be in danger.
Between the Kalahom building and the road are 42 cannons, a kind of open-air museum of Thai military prowess. Iconic maps on bronze plates allow passers-by to identify the name and location of each cannon on display. One of the more famous cannons, Phya Tani, has been a bone of contention with the people of Pattani who want it returned to their province (illustration). Because Phya Tani is an emblem of the national government’s sometimes precarious sovereignty in the south, this request is unlikely to be granted in the near future. All the cannons belong to the national patrimony and enjoy heritage listing, as a former minister of defence discovered when he proposed moving the cannons elsewhere and the Department of Fine Arts objected.
Until 2004, the 42 cannons pointed toward the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. In June of that year General Chettha Thanajaro, then the minister of defence, ordered the cannons swung around to face in the opposite direction. The order was said to have originated from ‘on high’, possibly to counter the symbolic threat to the sacred precincts across the road. It was ominous that the big Phya Tani cannon pointed towards the palace and royal temple in light of the troubles in the south such as the theft of weapons there early in 2004 and the violent suppression of young Muslim activists in April who had occupied the Krue Sae mosque in Pattani. One rumour held that former Prime Minister Thaksin had given the order to reverse the cannons. Another rumour was that the deputy minister of defence, a protégé of General Prem, was responsible. In any case, once repositioned, the cannon muzzles now pointed directly at the Kalahom, not very auspicious for the defence personnel working there! So the cannons were repositioned yet again to point sideways as they are today, parallel to the road and away from the sacred precincts and the Kalahom.
In Thailand the past haunts the present in many ways. A remarkable number of bureaucrats, soldiers, politicians, and business people believe themselves to be reincarnations of historical persons. King Naresuan, who restored Siamese sovereignty by defeating the Burmese in the late sixteenth century, and the military personnel around him are particular favourites in the contemporary moment. King Taksin’s achievement of restoring Siamese sovereignty (ku chat) in the late eighteenth century has also made his reign popular in this respect. General Sonthi Bunyaratkalin was said to be a reincarnation of one of King Taksin’s stalwart soldiers. Thus Sonthi’s role in leading the 2006 coup was ordained by his past life, because he was redressing the harm done to the kingdom by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra who had disposed of the country’s wealth by selling his family company, Shin Corporation, to foreign interests without paying tax. Thaksin needed to be removed from office in order to redeem the country.
Foreigners tend to think of astrology, numerology, necromancy, and reincarnation as exotic beliefs that liven up the Thai scene. Political observers tend to think of these matters as an entertaining sideshow designed to divert a credulous public from the real game being played in the barracks and the safe houses of the capital. Wassana Nanuam, who covers military affairs for the Bangkok Post, thinks otherwise. She believes that the struggles in Thailand since 2006 have been not just about political power, money, or the muzzle of the gun, but about the supernatural. In the course of her reporting, Wassana has interviewed many high-ranking generals and other national leaders as well as the astrologers who advise them. Her interpretation of the evidence is sufficiently canny for some big-shot soldiers – or bik thahan, as the journalists refer to the army’s heavy hitters – to be wary of contact with her lest she discover too much about the way they go about their business. Many of her conversations with the bik thahan must be off the record, but she has earned the respect of her military informants because of her discretion and even-handed treatment of sensitive matters.
From early in 2006 Thai leaders have been engaged in a ‘war of magic’ (saiyasat), and in the second half of the book, Wassana narrows the focus to the increasingly personal conflict between former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and Sondhi Limthongkul, leader of the PAD. Thaksin’s audacious use of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in April 2005 sent jitters through elite circles and the defence forces. The founding of Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party on Bastille Day, commemorating the French revolution, augured an even grander design. As Thaksin’s star faded, Myanmar astrologers were made famous when a small Burmese woman with shortened limbs known as ET, reputedly the astrologer of Senior General Than Shwe, became popular with the Shinawatra family, especially Thaksin’s wife, Photjaman. These actions of Thaksin spooked the opposition, and Sonthi responded in kind, for example, in the wanton destruction of the Brahma shrine at government house when it was occupied by his supporters in late 2008.
Such is the trickery and camouflage reported in Wassana’s book. She has pieced together a jigsaw puzzle of rivalries and relationships, networks and alliances, and power blocs in the army and the political parties to make a compelling case for how the sciences of prognostication, divination and the dark arts of spells and curses motivate the behaviour of civilian and military leaders. For help in hedging risk, dealing with uncertainty, and nudging history in a favourable direction, civilians and soldiers alike consult custodians of this knowledge. As the Thai saying goes, ‘if you don’t believe in it, don’t disparage it’. Just to play it safe.
Reviewed by Craig J. Reynolds
Published originally on New Mandala, 6 November 2009
Revised 10 November 2009
Just a small point. I’d suggest that a more accurate English translation of the book’s sub-title should perhaps be : A Special Episode or, even closer to the Thai one, A Fantastic Episode. (I wouldn’t go for “an improbable episode”, ‘improbable” is a bit too strong for rendering “phitsadan” in this context, I think).
It’s a reference to the fact that earlier Wassana published a best-selling book with the same title Lap luang phrang and this one is supposed to be a kind of ‘sequel’ to that book (phak or thon means “episode” or “chapter”), dealing with the same military intrigue/ involvement in politics (the earlier one is specifically about the September coup). Of course it’s probably for commercial reason that the publisher or the author chose to have the same title.
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Thank you so much, Craig Reynolds, for this illuminating review. I suppose it’s too much to hope that the book will be translated, although it points to extremely important considerations which, despite the light they shed on motives & the way decisions are made in every sphere of life here, are usually overlooked or at least only mentioned as exotic trivia in analyses by academia & the media.
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It’s a very debatable point whether Anand was the “quick fix” the military needed. But yes – otherwise : an excellent review, much appreciated.
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michael :
I suppose it’s too much to hope that the book will be translated..
I definitely hope not. Wassana’s Thai prose is atrociously bad. Believe me, it’s far better to read the review!
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Followers of Foucault will, I suppose, be happy to learn that the Enlightenment has made no headway among Thai movers and shakers. But in reading this fascinating and astonishing review, I find myself wondering whether it matters to what actually happens in Thai politics that so much energy is devoted to these “improbable” and “fantastic” but at the same time widely accepted phenomena. Do they make up a sideshow, a distraction, a drain on everyone’s time, a serious obstacle to rational planning–or just one more idiom with which to compete, which I take it is the heart of the game? Well, no doubt there’s no single answer. But it’s great to have this short account of Craig’s of what matters so much in a lot of Southeast Asian political jockeying, and in everyone’s conversations (whether said full voice or whispered) about such affairs.
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Using this article “ลับลวงพราง ภาคพิศดาร (Secrets, Deception, and Trap: The Strange Exotic Episode)” as implicit methodological explanation of the success of the 1991 and 2006 coups in Thailand will simply reflect two serious shortcomings among academics in the studies of Thai politics.
1. Historian:
It reflects that historians had not been writing facts about Thai political history.
2. Political Scientist:
It shows that political scientists lack scientific approach to the analysis of Thai politics.
As a news reporter, Wassana Nanuam provided a lovely flavor about those coups. The article simply described the icing of the cake but unable to explain the rational choice of the coup makers.
Among various reasons, the major reason that General Suchinda Kraprayoon and his team as well as General Sondhi Boonyaratkalin and his team staged the coups against former PM Chartchai Choonhawan and former PM Thaksin Shinwatra because the Thai military establishment perceived that the two prime ministers had tied the Thai security affairs toward Japan.
In my opinion, it is beneficial if academics analyze Thailand with in-depth endeavor and rigor methodology so that we can have a factual analysis. Thailand is Chinese ethnic dominant country, ignoring this fact we simply miss the main point of Thai political history and politics.
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“I definitely hope not. Wassana’s Thai prose is atrociously bad. Believe me, it’s far better to read the review!”
Moreover, her books are journalistic in nature, meaning that there is a lot of air in them. Reading English summaries is indeed sufficient.
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Thanks, Acharn Somsak & Srithanonchai; point taken. Perhaps you could point me to some higher quality works on similar topics?
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I’d like to…
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Like Craig Reynolds, I greatly enjoyed reading Wassana’s book on politics and magic. His review was informative and tempered. It also revealed one of the flaws of the books approach. While the method of gathering information through interviews and observations shows the strength of a journalist’s training, it also reflects a lack of reflection on the nature of the very terms studied — magic, religion, superstition, etc. Speaking about “magic” specifically, a notoriously difficult word to translate as Jacob Neusner said “one man’s magic is another man’s relgion.” The journalistic approach has the tendency to reduce the practice of magic to the “economic,” the functional, and the cultural. Wassana’s is a book about magic and politics, but we actually learn very little about the details of magical practice. As a ritual technology the practice of saiyasat is not taken seriously as a legitimate object of study. Instead it is simply a function of political rivalries. Moreover, magical practices are generally depicted as only performative exercises, not as practices with sophisticated histories. There are Thai terms which try to separate protective and sinister magic. These Thai terms are drawn creatively from Sanskrit and Pali. Itthirit (protective power) or wetmon (the use of magical words), as well as local terms for magically “blessing” something (bao sek and pluk sek) are more commonly used by monks than saiyasat. However, Pali terms like “iddhipāṭihāriya” (wondrous psychic powers like clairvoyance, levitation, psycho-kinesis) or abhiñña (super-cognitive powers like the ability to see the future, see past lives, read minds, and the like) are generally not used when discussing the protective practices more broadly. What is generally referred to as normative Thai Buddhist ritual and liturgy employs the same logic, implements, aesthetics, lexicon, and personal as saiyasat. However, some practices are considered legitimate (white magic?) and some nefarious (black magic?). These divisions are not rarely clear though. Magic is in the eye of the beholder.
Related to this, another problem I have with Wassana’s book is that magic is spoken about too generally. Can we even speak generally about Thai magic at all? The term magic, like the terms “culture,” “religion,” “secular,” must be qualified when speaking of everyday protective practices in Thailand. Neuroscientists and psychologists associate magic with trickery and mentalism. Instead of defining magic in comparison to the metacategories of science and religion, they define it by methods, stratagems, performance, and effects (i.e. “conjuring,” “misdirection,” “biasing recall,” and “reducing suspicion,” and “slight of hand”). These slight of hand tricks are generally not associated with practices connected to yantras, Pali and vernacular incantations, holy water and amulets.
Recently I gave a talk on magic at the AAR conference in Montreal. In that talk, drawn from a book I recently wrote on Thai ritual, I was trying to trace the way magic has been discussed in the field of Religious Studies. According to the work of Randall Styers, Magic has been described in the field of Religious Studies along two general lines, one linguistic and the other sociological. Ernst Cassirer, Max Weber, Leonard Zusne, Warren Jones, Annette Werner, and Frits Staal have associated magic (East and West) as an “inordinate belief in the efficacy of mere words,” or “thinking that fails to recognize the essential differences between representation and reality,” or “a basic confusion of linguistic and physical relationships…[it] disregards the distinction between physical and psychological causes, the difference between energy and information.” Tambiah, following J.L. Austen and John Searle see magicians as employing “performative utterances.” These utterances inherently confuse the relationship between metonymic and metaphoric language. In short, magicians wrongly assume that words can “do things” in the physical world. Sociologically, magic has been described as a tool of the powerless. In this way, magic has been associated with the oppressed, the non-industrial, “configured as the province of women, children, foreigners, primitives, and other deviants.” Magic is not central to ecclesiastical religion and it is not quite science. It is the tool of those who do not have access to real laboratories or state sanctioned theological colleges, churches, and vestments. Wassana’s book shows that magic can’t be talked about in just that way. It is also a tool of the elite fighting other elites. However, magic is still reduced to a product of social forces.
Randall Styers criticizes both of these approaches to the study of magic. He argues that the scholarly association of magic with a false belief in the kinetic efficacy of language repeatedly affirms that “language is inert and powerless.” It also, more broadly “configures a sharp and impermeable boundary between nature and culture, a natural world subject to nonhuman causality and the artificial, transitory world of human language, meaning, desire, and value.” Therefore, magicians are always seen as premodern leftovers, as quaint cultural asides, because “to be modern is to recognize this essential binary” between nature and culture. Language, as part of culture, functions only as “a medium of passive representation,” and therefore “the construction of meaning and assertion of desire are portrayed as lacking all causal efficacy.” According to most scholars then “any sense that human desire or behavior can influence other human beings or the natural world [through various magical techniques, especially the use of verbal or written incantations]…that human techniques can exert control over other persons, powers, or events—any such sense falls into magic.” Scholars, like Cassirer, Stark, Weber, Keller, Sumner, and others then see magic as separate from religion. This limits proper religion to the seeking objectives that are “transcendent or supraempirical,” without any “attention to materiality or pragmatic worldly ends.” Magicians are thus not quite religious. They are base, selfish, emotional, and concerned only with power in this “world.”
There is a reason that Thai politicians use magic to combat each other versus using only opinion polls, photo ops, exaggeration, slander, and the like. Unless, we study magic as magic and take it seriously (not necessary believe in its efficacy, but study it in historical and technical detail) then we cannot hope to understand its enduring power and see it as more than a base political and economic tool. This will also allow us to see the practitioners and those who believe in magical efficacy as more than hapless tools of the political elite.
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An alert reader brought to my notice Banharn’s real birth date, 20 July, versus the ‘official’ date of 19 August given in Wassana’s book. The list of August birth dates was too good to be true, wasn’t it? Details about when and why Banharn conjured up the 19 August date would be interesting to know.
I cannot comment on Wassana’s prose except to point out that the book I read was in its third printing, and her other books on the 2006 coup and military intrigue mentioned by Somsak have sold well, so she must be doing something right for Thai readers. I recently acquired another book on magic practices among the political elite by ‘Mor Noi’ that looks suspiciously like a rip-off of Wassana’s book, a sure sign that her approach has captured the attention of readers interested in these matters.
As Justin points out, ‘magic’ is an inadequate translation of saiysasat and various other Thai traditions that have parallels with so-called normative Thai Buddhist practices. Actually, I thought Wassana’s discussion showed that Thai Buddhism and these other traditions were interdependent, and she resisted bringing in the more sinister type of magic. The astrologers often advise their clients to improve their store of merit with sometimes extravagant Buddhist merit-making rituals, sometimes to ‘reverse’ karma, or kae kam. This latter term appears to be a very recent coinage – I don’t think it is possible to ‘reverse’ karma – and indicates how Thai Buddhism might be changing.
People who have specialised knowledge of these practices are valuable political assets. Wassana discusses the role of Newin Chidchob, who comes from Buriram, speaks Khmer, and famously switched sides to put the Democrats in power in late 2008. Newin has knowledge of Khmer magic (saiysasat), which is very strong stuff, and the journalists dubbed him ‘the Khmer shaman’, or ‘the Khmer spirit doctor’ (mor phi khamen). He had advised Thaksin on ritual practices that were perceived to be an attempt to extend his term as prime minister. In the September 2006 coup Newin was detained by the army and held in an air force safe house. After his release he told how he had been searched, very thoroughly. His military captors wanted to be certain he did not have any powerful amulets, tattoos, or magic diagrams on his person. In the 2008 occupation of government house Sonthi brought in a Cambodian astrologer to perform a rite on the Brahma image and spirit shrine there, which desecrated the premises. The demonising of Cambodia being pursued by the PAD has a strong spiritual undercurrent, another reason to think that Thaksin did not help his cause when he recently became an adviser to the Cambodian government.
Finally, it occurs to me to wonder if some of this ritual activity, interest in the occult, and the prevalence of belief in reincarnation of specific historical types, which also seems very recent, might be traced to this particular historical conjuncture marked by the longest Thai reign in history. It is a very worrying time for Thai people.
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Currently I have seen for books by Wassana in Thai bookstores. Matichon has “Lap Luang Prang Phak Phitsadan” and “Lap Luang Prang Phak 2″. And Post has two volumes: “Lap Luang Prang Phak Phitsadan” and “Lap Luang Prang Chabab Mahakap”. Couldn’t tell if the Matichon and Post books of the same name are the same books, as no bookstore had both at the same time to compare the table of contents, and I failed to jot down some chapter titles for comparison. Any chance there will be book reviews of these other volumes, sometime in the future.
I’m not convinced that anthropologists (or social scientists in general) would be surprised to find elites using “magic”, as it is a general purpose cosmological order producing charter and performative praxis for individuals all along the class spectrum, and this is well documented in the academic literature. It would be interesting though, empirically however, to examine to just what degree the idioms, frames, semantics, grammar and lexicon of “saiysasat” differs among different groups, classes, practitioners, etc.
No doubt the current moment of uncertainty raises the appeal of “saiysasat”, but measuring that appeal comparatively would be very difficult, i suspect, except in a very general sense. But one could gather interesting qualitative data by talking to practitioners of it about where preferences for certain types of ritual practices or ends have altered over the short or medium term, I suppose.
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Surely gentlemen Wassana should essentially be judged on how accurate her information – i.e. her reporting – is, rather than whether or not she has precisely grasped the finer details of Thai prose, academic precision and fine tuning, etc.
There’s a famous saying : “journalism is history’s first draft”.
As far as I can see, she writes this superbly – full of insights, often accurate, rather than the endless whirligig of gossip which plagues and hampers so many attempts by us outsiders to understand this perplexing culture.
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