Read the full article here.
Announcing: Walsh, John, “Mangelhaft: Die fehlende Solidarität in Südostasien,” Südostasien, Jg.26, Nr.3 (3/2010), pp.55-6.
I have only a PDF of the article at the moment – I hope I can obtain a copy of the full magazine in due course. If anyone desperately wants a copy of the text, in German or English, I might see what I can do.
Five people have already been confirmed dead in Korat as a result of the floods and much of Isan is a disaster zone – many of the poor people there will have lost everything and their children terrified by the rising water. Cyclone Megi is about to strike more of the Philippines or China, depending on which way it turns and 32 people have been drowned in Vietnam in extensive flooding there. This seems to be a particularly bad year for natural disasters and the monsoon season is far from over (the rain goes on and on even here in the sheltered central part of the country).
Here in Bangkok we are waiting to see if the river banks will burst ad inundate us too – the level of the Chao Phraya is rising and floods have been reported as close as Ayutthaya. We are unlikely to be as badly affected as in the north but She Who Must Be Obeyed has ordered buying of dry food in advance in case we are stranded – of course, she has experience in the past of having been badly affected and on the verge of personal disaster. We should be in better shape by now – at the worst, we can at least go upstairs.
The long-term trends, of course, re for Bangkok to be under a metre of water by the time I finish paying the mortgage. This is because of a combination of rising sea levels and sinking city as the underlying levels are being extracted. For this baleful future to e avoided, action would have had to begin several years ago. Instead, we got a military coup and now a corrupt and incompetent regime. There would seem to be nowhere safe in Thailand after another couple of decades where there is currently sufficient infrastructure to have a decent quality of life.
The poem ‘1 September, 1939’ is one of Auden’s most well-known and celebrated. In an apparently simple form, the poet ranges over a wide range of subject matter, casting his eye over the totality of human existence at the outbreak of the Second World War. The poem consists of nine 11-line stanzas written approximately in iambic trimeter – that is, with the occasional reversed initial foot or extra initial syllable.
Read the full article here.
The forces of globalization – industrial capitalism, consumerism and so forth – came to rural Thailand in earnest in the late 1960s and then the 1970s. This occurred in the period of anti-communist frenzy that gripped the aristocratic elite of the Kingdom as revolutions were unfolding in different ways in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Anyone who challenged the processes of change, which of course brought enormous monetary gains to that very same aristocratic elite, was subsequently labeled a Communist and a terrorist and treated as an enemy of the state – the aristocracy is doing the same thing today in 2010.
Read the full review here.
