There will be a total eclipse of the sun on Wednesday, which is due to be the longest of the twenty-first century so far. The eclipse will last the longest in Chiang Mai (in Thailand, that is), at two hours and twelve minutes. However, we will not be able to see the whole thing here, although efforts are being made to get people interested and informed.
Eclipses were previously unpredictable and, consequently, believed to represent all kinds of world-ending disastrousness. In times without good communications, rumours spread rapidly about what was going on and what was about to happen. Well, things do not change very much because Thai society is still in the grip of a flood of rumours about who is doing what to whom at the top of the political pyramid. Repeating at least some of these rumours would be illegal or at least highly dangerous. Yet in the absence of credible explanations of events such as the supposed assassination attempt of Sondhi Limthongkul, the mysteriously disappearing containers on the ocean floor and a number of other occurrences I am not going to name, conspiracy theories are the best guesses people think they have about the truth. This is, of course, a problem – it reduces even further the level of confidence in the institutions of the law (at justifiably low levels anyway) and in all public institutions. It promotes suspicion and hostility and it reduces the willingness of people to act to change things because, as we are regularly informed by the media, ‘they are all the same’ and ‘all politicians are corrupt.’ This last point is the crucial one – the establishment will be happy to allow conspiracy theories to flourish if it means they are less willing to take the democratic route to political change. Much better, from their point of view, to let people say what they like (quietly) and use the law to prosecute anyone who is judged to have gone too far and to intimidate the others. Political impotence and the willingness of the state to use violence against dissidents is a recipe for stagnation and frustration.
