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This book explores the basics of the defamation law as it applies to private-sphere defamation and looks at the peculiar permutations created by the use of public-sphere defamation laws in Thailand, particularly in terms of creating and protecting a nationalist identity.
Religious truth has always been in dispute, but there are certain times and places in which the debate has been more intense. One such period was the first century CE, when the rapid spread of Christianity with its claims about Jesus produced considerable ferment. The Gospel of John, written late in that century, presents that dispute with greater clarity than any other document of the time. John presents a Jesus who claims not only to tell the truth but also to be the truth. And yet, as the Roman magistrate asks Jesus in John’s gospel, what is truth? Two millennia later in the Western world, pluralism and postmodernism radically challenge traditional notions of truth. Is there any truth beyond the formal logic of merely analytical propositions? And if there is, do humans have any way of knowing it? Many who have a postmodern perspective deny that either rationality or imagination can give us access to the truth. Instead they adopt a throughgoing incredulity toward metanarratives. Truth is again on trial.
Visual evidence is the sine qua non of the modern criminal process—from photographs and video to fingerprints and maps. Siam's New Detectives offers an analytical history of these visual tools as employed by the Thai police when investigating crime. Covering the period between the late nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War, the book provides both an extended overview of the development and evolution of modern police practices in Thailand, and a window into the role of the Thai police within a larger cultural system of knowledge production about crime, violence, and history. Based on a diverse set of primary sources—police reports, detective training manuals, trial records, newspaper stories, memoirs, archival documents, and hard-to-find crime fiction—the book makes two related arguments. First, the factuality of the visual evidence used in the criminal justice system stems as much from formal conventions—proper lighting in a crime scene photo, standardized markings on maps—as from the reality of what is being represented. Second, some images, once created, function as tools, helping the police produce truths about the criminal past. This generative power makes images such as crime scene maps useful as investigative aids but also means that scholars cannot analyze them simply in terms of mimetic accuracy or interpret them in isolation for deeper meaning. Understanding how modern legal systems operate requires an examination of the visual culture of the law, particularly the aesthetic rules that govern the generation and use of documentary evidence. By examining modern policing in terms of visual culture, Siam's New Detectives makes important methodological contributions. The book shows how a historical analysis of form can supplement the way many scholars have traditionally approached visual sources, as symbols requiring a close reading. By acknowledging the productive nature of images in addition to their symbolic functions, the book makes clear that policing is fundamentally an interactive, creative endeavor as much as a disciplinary one.
'Perhaps the best introduction yet to the roots of Thailand's present political impasse. A brilliant book.' Simon Long, The Economist Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. And many Thais fear that the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analysed – until now. Breaking Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, Andrew MacGregor Marshall is one of the only journalists covering contemporary Thailand to tell the whole story. Marshall provides a comprehensive explanation that for the first time makes sense of the crisis, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand.
Based on author's doctoral thesis, Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, 2012.
Being mistaken for someone else, being falsely depicted as an important international heroin importer and trafficker, and being made an unwilling accessory to murder aren’t everyday occurrences. Surely this is not how the police behave to get their man? But...what if they go further? What if, with the aid of a thuggish civil agent, the RCMP implement a buy and bust operation, a Final Solution to get rid of you? And what if a Mountie is killed in the process under very nebulous circumstances? A chilling scenario that becomes even more disconcerting when members of the RCMP commit perjury to insure your conviction and cover up the true circumstances surrounding their colleague’s death. But, what about you being sentenced to death as a result of this and a trial littered with lying witnesses and tainted evidence that sends you on a path meant to shatter your already broken life? And...what if, in the end, Canadian legal institutions and ministries opt to defend the undefendable in order to protect the RCMP’s integrity and the image of Canada? Known as Bang Kwang prison inmate 482/33, my name is Alain Olivier. I learned first-hand what it means to be treated as expendable when the RCMP screws things up during a sketchy buy & bust operation oversea. This was my struggle against all odds to survive in the jungle of Bang Kwang prison, a true story that has something for everyone—drugs, murder, threats, violence, conflict of interest, political corruption, coverups, and my faint hope that the Canadian government would come to its senses and bring me home.
Klong Prem prison, Thailand. The 'Bangkok Hilton', where 600 foreigners among the 12,000 inmates of this walled prison city also wait and rot. Among the tragic, ruthless and forgotten, one man resolves to do what no other has done: escape. Drug smuggler David McMillan's true story of his break out from Asia's notorious prison.
Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.
During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight. After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’ orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957. The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.
It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media figures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly Thailand's relationship with the West is ambivalent. The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates Thailand's long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms "National Humiliation discourse," its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded Thailand's development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative, it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression. Through his insightful analysis of state and media sources, Strate demonstrates how Thai politicians have deployed National Humiliation imagery in support of ethnic chauvinism and military expansion. He shows how the discourse became the ideological foundation of Thailand's irredentist strategy, the state's anti-Catholic campaign, and its acceptance of pan-Asianism during World War II; and how the "state as victim" narrative has been used by politicians to redefine Thai identity and elevate the military into the role of national savior. The Lost Territories will be of particular interest to historians and political scientists for the light it sheds on many episodes of Thai foreign policy, including the contemporary dispute over Preah Vihear. The book's analysis of the manipulation of historical memory will interest academics exploring similar phenomena worldwide.