[Thai ‘Red Shirt’ protester arrested over Facebook post | Metro.co.uk www.metro.co.uk A Facebook post has led to a Thai ‘Red Shirt’ protester being arrested by police claiming that Wipas Raksakulthai insulted the kingdom’s royal family on the social networking site.
yesterday.]
Via facebook, Pictures by Howard Monath.
Hunter Word Yo, Howard, Don’t “insult” anyone.
Yesterday at 1:01pm
"Rubber bullets? I was born at night but not yesterday" - Howard Monath
Howard Monath At 6pm, when they play the National Anthem to honor the King, everyone in the Red shirt camp stops and stands at attention; you can see that they love the King and Thailand; that’s not the issue..
Yesterday at 1:31pmHoward Monath The issue is WORD, that these people the Red Shirts, the peasant farmers have seen for the first time the power and potential they have to influence change; and it is intoxicating. These ‘farmers’ were never told they could thru activism, achieve whatever they wanted; the boundaries of their lives were prior to this a given. It is analogous in many respects I think to first generation Hunter (or any college) students, who realize that their potential is far greater than they ever thought.
7 hours agoChantal Ughi [Monath’s kickboxing buddy in Bangkok but not in the compound with Howard] what’s the analogy btw. college students and peasant farmers?
I think none. At least college students were educated and less easily manipulated like Red Shirts are…
6 hours agoHoward Monath That is embarrassingly dense. The similarities are more than you can possibly imagination….many of these first generation students (do you understand what first generation means? They came from families with little or no education. Remember, I taught them, and in some ways at times took on the role of a surrogate parent, because their own …
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4 hours ago
Howard Monath Actually in the 1960’s America became the first society in the history of the world that had more college students than farmers; and of course starting in the decade of the 60’s most political activity took place on college campuses and in the inner cities where many of the most ‘involved’ students came from. Black students who were starting to attend universities in substantial numbers came back to their non air conditioned inner city homes in the summers and did not like what they saw at all…cities started to burn.
Before this believe it or not , the majority of political activism and publications in the US came from the immigrant farm community. Other countries especially in Europe had a strong farm based activist community also. They all often had wealthy patrons that would ‘help’ them for sometimes less than totally altruistic reasons. What we are seeing here in Thailand with the Red Shirts is a continuation of that tradition.
about an hour ago
Tags: crisis in Bangkok, crisis in Thailand, red shirts, Thailand