Laos: Death Threats While Doing Humanitarian Work, etc.
17 March 2019 [link youtube]
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And here's the link to a selection of current news-stories on Laos (largely about politics, the lack of democracy and human rights) over at Radio Free Asia, mentioned in the video: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos
Youtube Automatic Transcription
something I've really barely talked
about on the channel is the fact that my humanitarian work in Laos came to a dramatic conclusion when I was kicked out of the country with death threats from government officials she got into denouncing me face to face you know standing there and screaming me for hours as a thought criminal as someone who was an enemy of the Communist Party which of course I am I mean let's face it you know unless you're only going to recruit people to do humanitarian work in Laos who sincerely believe in and support communism all of us are enemies of the Communist Party she was very defensive in a sense about her her threats to kill me her threats that me put in a gulag and my parents would never see my corpse would never see my remains again and so on but she was also justifying her own threats of violence and the violence against other people that I presumed she'd been implicated in herself she'd been a part of herself in the past in that she she said at one point that she believes the government of Sweden did the same thing to its own citizens all the time too because she had lived in Sweden and she believed that all those Western governments whatever France America they all did the same thing they just get away with it but I was I was targeted with that and frankly a kind of compassionate and detached way because I could see she was really suffering she was really miserable at this very time that she was threatening to have me killed and saying my parents would never get my corpse back for a funeral a lot of details like this details about the gulag I'd be sent to and stuff you know but I really didn't respond to it like a thread I could see how much she was consumed with this sense of shame she had probably for atrocities she's been involved in herself but just more generally her sense of shame for the government she represents something I've really barely talked about on the channel is the fact that my humanitarian work in Laos came to a dramatic conclusion when I was kicked out of the country with death threats from government officials it's a funny story if you tell it in a funny way it's a really funny story and it was alluded to on this channel a bunch of times and then I did a really kind of low-quality video that came out of a podcast spontaneously that's the only telling of the story that's on this channel and it's one of those things where it is my story to tell it's like I lived through but I'm not really motivated to tell it because it's not something that's really that meaningful to me Melissa knows this you know I'm Way more emotionally burdened by for example my negative experience with the University System I'm really messed up with that and just this morning I saw a YouTube channel from another vegan who's over 100,000 US dollars in debt student debt I think one hundred fifty thousand US dollars in debt you know the problems with the university system of education they matter to me they matter to other people I'm still messed up in it you mean I'm still emotionally involved in it and professionally that's the kind of thing where I feel you know I want to make more videos talking about it even now and it impacts the lives everyone around me in this dynamic way by contrast you know the political problems that are peculiar to Laos very few people understand very few people care about and I mean I just said it can be a really funny story I've seen people you know crack up laughing when I tell the story of what happened but I've also seen people get really upset by it it really saddened by it and those tend to be the people who know and understand enough about politics and Laos for politics in Southeast Asia that they see the larger tragedy that it's a part of so the last couple of days really just the last couple of days I have been catching up with the politics of Laos Cambodia and Thailand after several years that being quite a low priority so yeah compared to the average American during the last five years I've I've read quite a lot about the politics of Laos Cambodia and Thailand but you know I've been learning Chinese I was living in Kunming I got divorced I'm spending time in France and speaking French it's been telling my daughter those have been priorities mouth even this even these stuffed animals up here putting on puppet shows or my daughter those have been priorities and not the politics of Laos etc but it matters you know I always feel it's frustration you do sometimes talk to people who really believe that only the politics of Washington DC and Moscow and Beijing matter and you can learn a tremendous amount about politics by studying politics of Haiti by the studying the politics of Jamaica but right now politics of Sudan we talked about that a little bit you know if you think you have nothing to learn from the way political crises and political problems unfold you know really all you're talking about is politics that unfold in a place that don't have consequences for the rich and the famous that's what you're talking about right yeah sure they're um you know there could be a massacre in Laos and it won't affect people in Paris whereas whenever there's a terrorist attack in Paris or New York City it it does it impacts people in Laos and I've been living there when that happens it's bizarre remember talking people in Laos about how did they react 1 September 11th 2001 happened and so on you know I wasn't I wasn't there then but you know I'm just mean later looking back on it because I asked them I said well you know America is this country they bombed every building in some provinces if you're going to be completely destroyed this country and then how did you guys feel when instead you know there was this terror static United States and and then the whole political situation changed so yeah I remember also a comment from from an expert really one of the only experts on Lotion politics who said simply and tragically the Lao people learn a great deal by watching carefully the politics of Thailand as they unfold and the Thai people learn nothing by ignoring Laos and of course for me as a Canadian I could relate to that right away Canadians follow American politics or Canadians who care about politics follow American politics and of course Canadians learn more about their own situation in the world learn a lot about these important issues by following American politics and Americans learn nothing by ignoring Canadian politics even the current Bernie Sanders campaign brings that into focus where nail Canada's becoming a symbol of you know the possibility of a future America having cheap health care and cheap university tuition providing some of the social services Canadians day for in I think for some Americans Canada's also example of a country with not as many guns we I mean in Canada people do own guns but gun violence is very different kind of so but yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna learn from the good and the bad what's gone right and what's going on Canada by ignoring it but any when you scale this up globally yes part of the tragedy of the 21st century is that everyone is paying attention to what happens in Washington DC and everyone is ignoring not just Laos and Thailand and Cambodia seems like everyone's ignoring really the vast majority of the inhabited surface of planet Earth it's shocking to me within the last two years when I've been together with Melissa I've sometimes really been looking for any news source on China you know it's not a smaller obscure country and like okay there's this one YouTube channel there's this one podcast um there's one magazine that has a couple of pages a month like you know it's amazing what a low priority even China is obviously if we were getting involved with politics of Africa imagine how depressing that might be so yeah it's okay another big theme this comes up when I talk about ecology it came up just a couple days ago talking to Melissa you know the ultimate scarcity in ecology is not energy it's not electricity it's not water it's not sand what's most scarce of all it is the human attention span you know human intelligence is scarce and very often with ecological problems that you have to face up to is well we only have so many people with so many hours to pay attention to these things okay so yeah there are many many ways in which the politics of Laos matters I'm gonna give one link below this video to Radio Free Asia RFA now a Radio Free Asia is a an indirect propaganda arm of the US government but I'll give a link to their page on Laos and you will see it's one of the only english-language sources that really tries to follow what's going on in Laos they'll see this with Cambodia and a few other places and they're doing it because the United States wants to lean on these countries to become more democratic or have higher standards of human rights but yeah it doesn't pretend to be an objective source it's a pro-democracy probe Yuman rights source so it's a bias you may sympathize with but it is a biased source for for sure anyway and but I think honestly if you just sit there and glance at that you'll see yeah politics of Laos matters so look this thing happened to me I was out doing humanitarian work in northern Laos and I knew the rules of the game I I was never one of these ignorant tourists who thought there was no political reality outside my window so I knew I knew examples of other people being excelled from the country I knew examples of people being assassinated and executed I knew examples of people being intimidated by quote/unquote mock executions you know were they they act like they're gonna kill you and then maybe they shoot the gun just over your head and then tell you to get out of the country these kinds of theatrics you know and I knew about examples of intimidation where I sympathized with what the Lao governments do what the Communist Party was doing they were struggling to control Christian missionaries you know again I come from Canada look at what Christian missionaries did to my country look at what they did to the indigenous people of the country and that's exactly what Christian missionaries were trying to do in Laos they were really targeting the poor and the tribal ethnic minorities and the illiterate and you know trying to quote unquote save their souls and in many ways you know culturally assume it's culturally similar at them in to christen them and I could see the Communist Party struggling with that Communist Party was also struggling to control drugs like opium methamphetamine at that time so some of the use of state coercion and violence I could sympathize with and some I could not but Laos was a poor desperate post-war country and yeah I just was never naive about what the rules of the game were and what what the stakes were and you know I'm just not that self pitying about in that sense where it's like well it what was that I used to say to people the time worse things have happened to nicer people I mean I really was at the time I was laughing and smiling about it I was very relaxed I mean really I came hysterically laughing you know and my boss my boss in the humanitarian agency he said well you're laughing now but like you won't be left and I said to him no I'm always gonna find this hilarious this is always gonna be funny to me that's always gonna be ridiculous like you're wrong I remember saying to him and saying in an email afterwards saying you know ultimately you know comedy is a force in the universe like gravity where it doesn't it doesn't change this is always gonna be fun and it is it is funny and it's made even more funny if you kind of know I mean like you know if you were actually performing this as a comedy um it was the one guy doing humanitarian work who never slept with prostitutes I was the one guy who never drank alcohol who never smoked drugs and like my own boss I should want this part the white guy who was in charge of this ultimately Belgian Unitarian Agency my boss he was drinking and carousing and sexual relations with women of various kinds which he was flagrantly exhibiting to me he was much more of the stereotypical permanent vacation humanitarian professional in the back that comes and yeah he would get I wasn't many times I was completely sober with several times he got drunk in front of me and started telling me things about his sex life and then I was amazed when I talked to and he was so bored he didn't work he didn't so anyway I'm surrounded by these kind of more Gritti these these these more corrupt corrupted and corrupting examples of what humanitarian work does to white men and I'm out there completely sober with this very obstinacy discipline life studying the ancient Buddhist scriptures so studying Pali Pali is an ancient language it relates to Buddhism the way that Latin relates to ancient Europe or ancient Greek whatever you want to say but that's an ancient dead language is studying that then trying to cope with the modern language and trying to cope with political reality and stuff and I was really devoted to trying to make the best out of a bad situation allows and actually by the way part of that story was at a long period in Laos where I really wasn't sure if I should commit to humanitarian work in research in Laos answer I'm not even getting into the research side of it there's a lot of research also you know book based research as well as getting out in real life and seeing things and then what research is tough for another video perhaps but I wasn't sure for one time I should commit the Laos or if I should be looking at moving immediately next door to either Cambodia or Myanmar and then I had a kind of turning point I was like no you know what this is really important this is worthwhile and I should really you know take serious and making the best of the situation allow so do humanitarian work and research here make the best of it and then it wasn't it wasn't so many months later then I was exiled from the from the country this way so um you know part of a humanitarian project that was there nominally to feed starving people and I signed up for the project on the basis of their original mission mandate mission statement that described that of literally handing out sacks of rice to starving people and they still were doing some of that but only after I had signed up literally after I had read their mandate and signed the contract was revealed to me that they changed their mission again this shows that my boss was really a very unethical and somewhat stupid guy like you think this wouldn't matter to me they had made a transition into agricultural development and again I was no fool I knew just how serious that's different what this difference was so someone has a bit more might naive might look at that say oh well what's the difference before you went into villages and you handed out sacks of rice to starving people and now instead you're teaching starving people how to farm with better farming methods better meaning white Western European from methods better meaning for export to Europe I'm just saying you know better meaning pesticides better meaning European and American cows beef and cattle better the concept of better agriculture is is debatable and of course better normally meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and land ownership is taken away from the poor and given to one landowner or one corporation that's farming the cattle or farming the Western for power there are really deep problems this especially when you're making a transition from communism that had some nominal commitment to giving lots of land to all the poor people you know having well that's part of the failure that's part of the collapse of communism is handing out land ownership to local people so without getting into that history too much so right away I knew whoa this is actually a very morally murky and conflicted situation and it was right and they were a little bit involved also in trying to transition away from opium agriculture to other forms of Agriculture so I had a hint that I was in for a really difficult ride and I knew also that I was going out to an area where they still very much literally had armed rebellion against the government going on so there were guerrilla fighters if you want to put it I get out there there are a million different anecdotes to tell but the other big thumb addict continuity in my life is the concern with ecology so I'm out there I'm getting to really see the the incredibly ethnically diverse and linguistically diverse reality of northern Laos going to see the devastation of the American War even the French war they're still there were relics from the the war with the French or the wars plural with the French whatever you want to say so as war-torn jungle landscape but the other thing I'm seeing is the jungle being erased from the map step by step so when I was up there I was living in complete immersion in the Lao language there wasn't a single other white man in any of those towns where the humanitarian work and I'm speaking and hearing the loud language every day so you really notice more when in your internal wedding your thoughts your internal monologue you switch from lotion into English you know we're thinking in English is supposed to the ocean and I remember in one of the villages I looked at the horizon where there was a stark line between the intact intact forests or forests of some kind jungle on the hillside and then this total deforestation just you know where there's just nothing there not it wasn't being replaced with crops I mean cut down and I thought to myself in English huh a bet you can see day by day week by week how the line moves how you move this this valley this jungle Valley gets turned into a desertified Valley what if you want to say I remember I thought that and a few days later I had the same walk through town with the same view and I actually felt emotionally devastated I didn't I didn't weep but I was really shocked hurt because it was literally true I could see that the line had moved I could see that day by day I was watching the progress of deforestation and I met and talked with people melissa's heard this before I I said to people things like they they had just killed the last Tigers in that province of Laos I was doing humanitarian work there were two tigers left one male one female and then went out and killed them and you know the justification was Tigers eat people so of course after they killed the Tigers they sold the the corpse for money to a Chinese businessman of course and you know I I asked the question this is my motive speaking Lao how many people did Tigers kill this year of course they don't know all theirs the answer is probably zero well it's in any given year the number is either zero or one but you know if there aren't there aren't any Tigers anymore and I pointed the motorcycle and I said how many people did motorcycles kill this year why don't you kill all the motorcycles you know instead of killing all the Tigers so there was this all these different really kind of meaningful thematic elements the indigenous people and the indigenous languages and the jungle disappearing the last of many wild species large wild species being hunted to extinction tigers elephants I didn't see it happening to the elephants myself that I've read about you know what you care about it giant pythons and what-have-you this is all going on and the reality is my own humanitarian agency in reality sorry use reality twice that's in reality a home it had it had been on a downward slippery slope from doing very legit very direct humanitarian work to doin quite a number of things I consider illegitimate immoral and in many ways harmful to the the local people to their short-term and long-term future so there was a lot to learn and I'm out there living for you know kind of 29 days a month 29 or 30 days a month not quite the whole month in these remote villages where you know there very few foreigners ever go ever have been and so on with all this have even said about the context that was indeed meaningful to me um the peculiar anecdote the brains that alter dramatic ending is relatively meaningless I've said before that I was laughing and really quite relaxed and enjoyed that bizarre circumstances of my exile but by contrast what I wept over literally wept over was throwing my dictionary in the garbage was of seeing how many thousands of hours of hard work I'd put into lotion language and poly and Link languages and you know I did literally have to give away my my dictionaries my books I couldn't carry them with me and knowing would that represent it that all that hard work in a very real sense was for nothing and of course all the hard work studying the history and Paula history of Buddhism and stone inscriptions and archaeology as well as modern and ongoing political history world war ii vietnam war there was all this work invested into knowing laos and understanding laos linked to the study of the lao language and that was all symbolically going in the garbage when I threw my dictionary in the garbage so that was that was devastating to me but it's in the context of this very meaningful humanitarian work that we then have this somewhat meaningless and bizarre anecdote at the end of it of how I got kicked out so I'm in one of these remote villages doing humanitarian work and a woman arrives who's a representative of the Lao government and she was out there as part of US funded drug control efforts I'm sorry she had done projects and she was doing projects with the United States government but I think the specific task she was on at that time was linked to UNODC the United Nations Drug Control Agency in any case her whole career this woman she had been to Sweden and studied in got a university degree she'd spent time in Europe various Western countries her whole life was a series of government junkets and her current one at the time I met her was going on to these remote villages to examine and report back on especially methamphetamine use what was going on in in the drug scene so she spoke English that's was the language she'd learned and practiced while she was in Sweden so she spoke English with me and at first for several days she was trying very hard to be my best friend in the world and she was pushing me to help write for her to go straight for her a letter to the American Embassy she was actually writing and trying to get the American Embassy to pay for her to do yet another junket so she could go visit I think was Los Angeles so she's complete waste of taxpayers money but this was her whole life I mean she was a career bureaucrat in communist Laos and I mean I guess could give her credit for saying she was wasting the money of Western countries rather own taxpayers but this is really what her life was devoted to so for several days she and I got along just fine and then her mood twisted and really for no good reason she got into denouncing me face to face you know standing there and screaming me for hours as a thought criminal as someone who was an enemy of the Communist Party which of course I am I mean let's face it you know unless you're only going to recruit people to do humanitarian work in Laos who sincerely believed in it support communism all of us are enemies of the Communist Party and none of us are part of their ideology or their their religion however you want to put it I always thought it was significant to what happens in the rest of the story that while she was denouncing me this way the other staff at this remote station it's not worth described and it was a really beautiful and memorable setting really bizarre setting kind of on the edge of civilization on the edge of the jungle but we're in this wicker hut on stilts you know bamboo hut on stilts and the other members of staff who were all kind of ethnic minority born poor or tribal people people who didn't speak loshon as the first language fit for example there was one guy sitting there who was Hmong HM Ong but another guy was Camus these are the ethnic minorities of Thailand Laos so that and there's a real racial divide there between lowland Lotion people and the Highland ethnic minorities these other people were sitting around and laughing at her so I actually wasn't you know laughing at her in that sense I wasn't scorning her I had quite a surreal conversation with her about communism and her career and I was in a kind of detached and relaxed way I was responding to her threats to kill me which she was going on at great length about by really talking to her about mmm communism because my own parents had been communists I grew up with communism and rejected it and her life and how she sees the current government of Laos and how she sees it in contrast to government's in Europe living in places like Sweden so to give an illustration at one point she was very defensive in a sense about her threats to kill me for threats Stephanie put in a gulag and my parents would never see my corpse would never see my remains again and so on but she was also justifying her own threats of violence and the violence against other people that I presumed she'd been implicated in herself she'd been a part of herself in the past in that she she said at one point that she believes the government of Sweden did the same thing to its own citizens all the time too because she had lived in Sweden and she believed that all those Western governments whatever France America they all did the same thing they just get away with it like you don't hear about it something and you can imagine that led to a really interesting conversation between her and I was like no like this is really different look you know this is actually a big difference between countries like whether or not you get a trial whether or not you're innocent between whether or not you're innocent till proven guilty or whether you just disappear when the Communist Party decides to abduct you and so on no no no this is really a difference between Sweden and laughs the quality of law and order and Sweden and so no the you know the quote the Swedish Communist Party is not doing this to people nor the nor the Swedish government that this was really a big difference but I was I was targeted with that and frankly a kind of compassionate and detached way because I could see she was really suffering she was really miserable at this very time that she was threatening to have me killed and saying my parents would never get my corpse back for a funeral a lot of details like this details about the gulag I'd be sent to and stuff you know but I really didn't respond to it like a thread I could see how much she was consumed with this sense of shame she had probably for atrocities she's been involved in herself but just more generally her sense of shame for the government she represents the system of government she represents in contrast to exactly places like like Sweden and the United States we have you so yeah it was it was an interesting and truly bizarre and surreal conversation that went on and on for ages and again these other people and the staff or sitting around laughing at her they just thought she was completely ridiculous sir he'd give one other example really briefly another part of conversation that was strange and memorable and again in the midst of her making these these threats to me she started insisting that Laos was not a communist country that foreigners didn't understand that that Laos was ruled by the People's Revolutionary Party and that they were not technically communist and you know I really responded with kind of Socratic method and you know I asked her you know okay so we you know you have elections here in Laos right right how many political parties are there in the elections one elections look you know but really with Socratic method I was saying to her like okay so in what sense do you think you're not a communist country look what you know what do you mean by this but I really didn't you know I didn't respond to it by with fear and I didn't respond to it by protesting my my innocence or what-have-you but as always the people who really suffer are not the white Western humanitarian aid workers it was my co-workers so the local lotion people again whether the ethnic minority or not Camus akka whatever they were they were taken in and interrogated and had to stand in front of portraits of Lenin and Karl Marx and denounced me as a thought criminal and had to apologize to the Communist Party for the fact that they hadn't you know reported me earlier and you know the punchline to it all is what was the basis for me being denounced and I don't think any of them ended up in prison but probably all them had a black mark next to the name for the rest of their lives and you know they were on the bad list of the Communist Party whatever consequences that had for them in the comment system what was it that led to all of this it was the name that I gave to one of our cats can't say it was my cat we had cats up there to try to keep the rats away and I always asked them I said why don't you give them names and I gave the cats names of people I respect it if people positive I named one of the cats after the Minister of ecology because I really respected him it was the only person I knew in the Lao government at that time who was standing up for standing up against deforestation saying this is a real problem we need to have a zero cutting policy in national parks and this kind of thing it was out of respect for him that I named my my cat after he was one of the only people in the Lao government I really liked and she insisted on interpreting that as an insult to the Communist Party and I said to her you know in the West you know when we name an animal after somebody it's like naming a boat after somebody you know we talked about this at some length and there were other examples and this is another reason what the other people were just laughing at her they just thought her argument was ridiculous like they just thought it was completely ridiculous the idea that this was an insult to the Communist Party it's just in that she was gonna kill me for the name of my cat it would tug to normal allow people even a normal Communist Party apparatchik it just seemed laugh-out-loud funny and you know I guess they were laughing until the day they were taken in and and interrogated and in terms of how bad that interrogation was I mean I never got to meet any of those people face to face again but they were probably pretty cynical well-informed people who knew who knew how to be interrogated I remember when I came back to the town the employees at one of the small hotels I used to stand this is in between villages stay in a small hotel for there too they were terrified they were terrified to see me and of course I soon figured out why that was even they have been taken in and Tara gated by the Communist Party just because they changed the bed sheets on the bed wide slept but I mean that is part of the mania of communism is that the country can never be pure enough it can never be cleansed of those bourgeois impulses because what they call bourgeois what we would call human nature Danton [Music]
about on the channel is the fact that my humanitarian work in Laos came to a dramatic conclusion when I was kicked out of the country with death threats from government officials she got into denouncing me face to face you know standing there and screaming me for hours as a thought criminal as someone who was an enemy of the Communist Party which of course I am I mean let's face it you know unless you're only going to recruit people to do humanitarian work in Laos who sincerely believe in and support communism all of us are enemies of the Communist Party she was very defensive in a sense about her her threats to kill me her threats that me put in a gulag and my parents would never see my corpse would never see my remains again and so on but she was also justifying her own threats of violence and the violence against other people that I presumed she'd been implicated in herself she'd been a part of herself in the past in that she she said at one point that she believes the government of Sweden did the same thing to its own citizens all the time too because she had lived in Sweden and she believed that all those Western governments whatever France America they all did the same thing they just get away with it but I was I was targeted with that and frankly a kind of compassionate and detached way because I could see she was really suffering she was really miserable at this very time that she was threatening to have me killed and saying my parents would never get my corpse back for a funeral a lot of details like this details about the gulag I'd be sent to and stuff you know but I really didn't respond to it like a thread I could see how much she was consumed with this sense of shame she had probably for atrocities she's been involved in herself but just more generally her sense of shame for the government she represents something I've really barely talked about on the channel is the fact that my humanitarian work in Laos came to a dramatic conclusion when I was kicked out of the country with death threats from government officials it's a funny story if you tell it in a funny way it's a really funny story and it was alluded to on this channel a bunch of times and then I did a really kind of low-quality video that came out of a podcast spontaneously that's the only telling of the story that's on this channel and it's one of those things where it is my story to tell it's like I lived through but I'm not really motivated to tell it because it's not something that's really that meaningful to me Melissa knows this you know I'm Way more emotionally burdened by for example my negative experience with the University System I'm really messed up with that and just this morning I saw a YouTube channel from another vegan who's over 100,000 US dollars in debt student debt I think one hundred fifty thousand US dollars in debt you know the problems with the university system of education they matter to me they matter to other people I'm still messed up in it you mean I'm still emotionally involved in it and professionally that's the kind of thing where I feel you know I want to make more videos talking about it even now and it impacts the lives everyone around me in this dynamic way by contrast you know the political problems that are peculiar to Laos very few people understand very few people care about and I mean I just said it can be a really funny story I've seen people you know crack up laughing when I tell the story of what happened but I've also seen people get really upset by it it really saddened by it and those tend to be the people who know and understand enough about politics and Laos for politics in Southeast Asia that they see the larger tragedy that it's a part of so the last couple of days really just the last couple of days I have been catching up with the politics of Laos Cambodia and Thailand after several years that being quite a low priority so yeah compared to the average American during the last five years I've I've read quite a lot about the politics of Laos Cambodia and Thailand but you know I've been learning Chinese I was living in Kunming I got divorced I'm spending time in France and speaking French it's been telling my daughter those have been priorities mouth even this even these stuffed animals up here putting on puppet shows or my daughter those have been priorities and not the politics of Laos etc but it matters you know I always feel it's frustration you do sometimes talk to people who really believe that only the politics of Washington DC and Moscow and Beijing matter and you can learn a tremendous amount about politics by studying politics of Haiti by the studying the politics of Jamaica but right now politics of Sudan we talked about that a little bit you know if you think you have nothing to learn from the way political crises and political problems unfold you know really all you're talking about is politics that unfold in a place that don't have consequences for the rich and the famous that's what you're talking about right yeah sure they're um you know there could be a massacre in Laos and it won't affect people in Paris whereas whenever there's a terrorist attack in Paris or New York City it it does it impacts people in Laos and I've been living there when that happens it's bizarre remember talking people in Laos about how did they react 1 September 11th 2001 happened and so on you know I wasn't I wasn't there then but you know I'm just mean later looking back on it because I asked them I said well you know America is this country they bombed every building in some provinces if you're going to be completely destroyed this country and then how did you guys feel when instead you know there was this terror static United States and and then the whole political situation changed so yeah I remember also a comment from from an expert really one of the only experts on Lotion politics who said simply and tragically the Lao people learn a great deal by watching carefully the politics of Thailand as they unfold and the Thai people learn nothing by ignoring Laos and of course for me as a Canadian I could relate to that right away Canadians follow American politics or Canadians who care about politics follow American politics and of course Canadians learn more about their own situation in the world learn a lot about these important issues by following American politics and Americans learn nothing by ignoring Canadian politics even the current Bernie Sanders campaign brings that into focus where nail Canada's becoming a symbol of you know the possibility of a future America having cheap health care and cheap university tuition providing some of the social services Canadians day for in I think for some Americans Canada's also example of a country with not as many guns we I mean in Canada people do own guns but gun violence is very different kind of so but yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna learn from the good and the bad what's gone right and what's going on Canada by ignoring it but any when you scale this up globally yes part of the tragedy of the 21st century is that everyone is paying attention to what happens in Washington DC and everyone is ignoring not just Laos and Thailand and Cambodia seems like everyone's ignoring really the vast majority of the inhabited surface of planet Earth it's shocking to me within the last two years when I've been together with Melissa I've sometimes really been looking for any news source on China you know it's not a smaller obscure country and like okay there's this one YouTube channel there's this one podcast um there's one magazine that has a couple of pages a month like you know it's amazing what a low priority even China is obviously if we were getting involved with politics of Africa imagine how depressing that might be so yeah it's okay another big theme this comes up when I talk about ecology it came up just a couple days ago talking to Melissa you know the ultimate scarcity in ecology is not energy it's not electricity it's not water it's not sand what's most scarce of all it is the human attention span you know human intelligence is scarce and very often with ecological problems that you have to face up to is well we only have so many people with so many hours to pay attention to these things okay so yeah there are many many ways in which the politics of Laos matters I'm gonna give one link below this video to Radio Free Asia RFA now a Radio Free Asia is a an indirect propaganda arm of the US government but I'll give a link to their page on Laos and you will see it's one of the only english-language sources that really tries to follow what's going on in Laos they'll see this with Cambodia and a few other places and they're doing it because the United States wants to lean on these countries to become more democratic or have higher standards of human rights but yeah it doesn't pretend to be an objective source it's a pro-democracy probe Yuman rights source so it's a bias you may sympathize with but it is a biased source for for sure anyway and but I think honestly if you just sit there and glance at that you'll see yeah politics of Laos matters so look this thing happened to me I was out doing humanitarian work in northern Laos and I knew the rules of the game I I was never one of these ignorant tourists who thought there was no political reality outside my window so I knew I knew examples of other people being excelled from the country I knew examples of people being assassinated and executed I knew examples of people being intimidated by quote/unquote mock executions you know were they they act like they're gonna kill you and then maybe they shoot the gun just over your head and then tell you to get out of the country these kinds of theatrics you know and I knew about examples of intimidation where I sympathized with what the Lao governments do what the Communist Party was doing they were struggling to control Christian missionaries you know again I come from Canada look at what Christian missionaries did to my country look at what they did to the indigenous people of the country and that's exactly what Christian missionaries were trying to do in Laos they were really targeting the poor and the tribal ethnic minorities and the illiterate and you know trying to quote unquote save their souls and in many ways you know culturally assume it's culturally similar at them in to christen them and I could see the Communist Party struggling with that Communist Party was also struggling to control drugs like opium methamphetamine at that time so some of the use of state coercion and violence I could sympathize with and some I could not but Laos was a poor desperate post-war country and yeah I just was never naive about what the rules of the game were and what what the stakes were and you know I'm just not that self pitying about in that sense where it's like well it what was that I used to say to people the time worse things have happened to nicer people I mean I really was at the time I was laughing and smiling about it I was very relaxed I mean really I came hysterically laughing you know and my boss my boss in the humanitarian agency he said well you're laughing now but like you won't be left and I said to him no I'm always gonna find this hilarious this is always gonna be funny to me that's always gonna be ridiculous like you're wrong I remember saying to him and saying in an email afterwards saying you know ultimately you know comedy is a force in the universe like gravity where it doesn't it doesn't change this is always gonna be fun and it is it is funny and it's made even more funny if you kind of know I mean like you know if you were actually performing this as a comedy um it was the one guy doing humanitarian work who never slept with prostitutes I was the one guy who never drank alcohol who never smoked drugs and like my own boss I should want this part the white guy who was in charge of this ultimately Belgian Unitarian Agency my boss he was drinking and carousing and sexual relations with women of various kinds which he was flagrantly exhibiting to me he was much more of the stereotypical permanent vacation humanitarian professional in the back that comes and yeah he would get I wasn't many times I was completely sober with several times he got drunk in front of me and started telling me things about his sex life and then I was amazed when I talked to and he was so bored he didn't work he didn't so anyway I'm surrounded by these kind of more Gritti these these these more corrupt corrupted and corrupting examples of what humanitarian work does to white men and I'm out there completely sober with this very obstinacy discipline life studying the ancient Buddhist scriptures so studying Pali Pali is an ancient language it relates to Buddhism the way that Latin relates to ancient Europe or ancient Greek whatever you want to say but that's an ancient dead language is studying that then trying to cope with the modern language and trying to cope with political reality and stuff and I was really devoted to trying to make the best out of a bad situation allows and actually by the way part of that story was at a long period in Laos where I really wasn't sure if I should commit to humanitarian work in research in Laos answer I'm not even getting into the research side of it there's a lot of research also you know book based research as well as getting out in real life and seeing things and then what research is tough for another video perhaps but I wasn't sure for one time I should commit the Laos or if I should be looking at moving immediately next door to either Cambodia or Myanmar and then I had a kind of turning point I was like no you know what this is really important this is worthwhile and I should really you know take serious and making the best of the situation allow so do humanitarian work and research here make the best of it and then it wasn't it wasn't so many months later then I was exiled from the from the country this way so um you know part of a humanitarian project that was there nominally to feed starving people and I signed up for the project on the basis of their original mission mandate mission statement that described that of literally handing out sacks of rice to starving people and they still were doing some of that but only after I had signed up literally after I had read their mandate and signed the contract was revealed to me that they changed their mission again this shows that my boss was really a very unethical and somewhat stupid guy like you think this wouldn't matter to me they had made a transition into agricultural development and again I was no fool I knew just how serious that's different what this difference was so someone has a bit more might naive might look at that say oh well what's the difference before you went into villages and you handed out sacks of rice to starving people and now instead you're teaching starving people how to farm with better farming methods better meaning white Western European from methods better meaning for export to Europe I'm just saying you know better meaning pesticides better meaning European and American cows beef and cattle better the concept of better agriculture is is debatable and of course better normally meaning the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and land ownership is taken away from the poor and given to one landowner or one corporation that's farming the cattle or farming the Western for power there are really deep problems this especially when you're making a transition from communism that had some nominal commitment to giving lots of land to all the poor people you know having well that's part of the failure that's part of the collapse of communism is handing out land ownership to local people so without getting into that history too much so right away I knew whoa this is actually a very morally murky and conflicted situation and it was right and they were a little bit involved also in trying to transition away from opium agriculture to other forms of Agriculture so I had a hint that I was in for a really difficult ride and I knew also that I was going out to an area where they still very much literally had armed rebellion against the government going on so there were guerrilla fighters if you want to put it I get out there there are a million different anecdotes to tell but the other big thumb addict continuity in my life is the concern with ecology so I'm out there I'm getting to really see the the incredibly ethnically diverse and linguistically diverse reality of northern Laos going to see the devastation of the American War even the French war they're still there were relics from the the war with the French or the wars plural with the French whatever you want to say so as war-torn jungle landscape but the other thing I'm seeing is the jungle being erased from the map step by step so when I was up there I was living in complete immersion in the Lao language there wasn't a single other white man in any of those towns where the humanitarian work and I'm speaking and hearing the loud language every day so you really notice more when in your internal wedding your thoughts your internal monologue you switch from lotion into English you know we're thinking in English is supposed to the ocean and I remember in one of the villages I looked at the horizon where there was a stark line between the intact intact forests or forests of some kind jungle on the hillside and then this total deforestation just you know where there's just nothing there not it wasn't being replaced with crops I mean cut down and I thought to myself in English huh a bet you can see day by day week by week how the line moves how you move this this valley this jungle Valley gets turned into a desertified Valley what if you want to say I remember I thought that and a few days later I had the same walk through town with the same view and I actually felt emotionally devastated I didn't I didn't weep but I was really shocked hurt because it was literally true I could see that the line had moved I could see that day by day I was watching the progress of deforestation and I met and talked with people melissa's heard this before I I said to people things like they they had just killed the last Tigers in that province of Laos I was doing humanitarian work there were two tigers left one male one female and then went out and killed them and you know the justification was Tigers eat people so of course after they killed the Tigers they sold the the corpse for money to a Chinese businessman of course and you know I I asked the question this is my motive speaking Lao how many people did Tigers kill this year of course they don't know all theirs the answer is probably zero well it's in any given year the number is either zero or one but you know if there aren't there aren't any Tigers anymore and I pointed the motorcycle and I said how many people did motorcycles kill this year why don't you kill all the motorcycles you know instead of killing all the Tigers so there was this all these different really kind of meaningful thematic elements the indigenous people and the indigenous languages and the jungle disappearing the last of many wild species large wild species being hunted to extinction tigers elephants I didn't see it happening to the elephants myself that I've read about you know what you care about it giant pythons and what-have-you this is all going on and the reality is my own humanitarian agency in reality sorry use reality twice that's in reality a home it had it had been on a downward slippery slope from doing very legit very direct humanitarian work to doin quite a number of things I consider illegitimate immoral and in many ways harmful to the the local people to their short-term and long-term future so there was a lot to learn and I'm out there living for you know kind of 29 days a month 29 or 30 days a month not quite the whole month in these remote villages where you know there very few foreigners ever go ever have been and so on with all this have even said about the context that was indeed meaningful to me um the peculiar anecdote the brains that alter dramatic ending is relatively meaningless I've said before that I was laughing and really quite relaxed and enjoyed that bizarre circumstances of my exile but by contrast what I wept over literally wept over was throwing my dictionary in the garbage was of seeing how many thousands of hours of hard work I'd put into lotion language and poly and Link languages and you know I did literally have to give away my my dictionaries my books I couldn't carry them with me and knowing would that represent it that all that hard work in a very real sense was for nothing and of course all the hard work studying the history and Paula history of Buddhism and stone inscriptions and archaeology as well as modern and ongoing political history world war ii vietnam war there was all this work invested into knowing laos and understanding laos linked to the study of the lao language and that was all symbolically going in the garbage when I threw my dictionary in the garbage so that was that was devastating to me but it's in the context of this very meaningful humanitarian work that we then have this somewhat meaningless and bizarre anecdote at the end of it of how I got kicked out so I'm in one of these remote villages doing humanitarian work and a woman arrives who's a representative of the Lao government and she was out there as part of US funded drug control efforts I'm sorry she had done projects and she was doing projects with the United States government but I think the specific task she was on at that time was linked to UNODC the United Nations Drug Control Agency in any case her whole career this woman she had been to Sweden and studied in got a university degree she'd spent time in Europe various Western countries her whole life was a series of government junkets and her current one at the time I met her was going on to these remote villages to examine and report back on especially methamphetamine use what was going on in in the drug scene so she spoke English that's was the language she'd learned and practiced while she was in Sweden so she spoke English with me and at first for several days she was trying very hard to be my best friend in the world and she was pushing me to help write for her to go straight for her a letter to the American Embassy she was actually writing and trying to get the American Embassy to pay for her to do yet another junket so she could go visit I think was Los Angeles so she's complete waste of taxpayers money but this was her whole life I mean she was a career bureaucrat in communist Laos and I mean I guess could give her credit for saying she was wasting the money of Western countries rather own taxpayers but this is really what her life was devoted to so for several days she and I got along just fine and then her mood twisted and really for no good reason she got into denouncing me face to face you know standing there and screaming me for hours as a thought criminal as someone who was an enemy of the Communist Party which of course I am I mean let's face it you know unless you're only going to recruit people to do humanitarian work in Laos who sincerely believed in it support communism all of us are enemies of the Communist Party and none of us are part of their ideology or their their religion however you want to put it I always thought it was significant to what happens in the rest of the story that while she was denouncing me this way the other staff at this remote station it's not worth described and it was a really beautiful and memorable setting really bizarre setting kind of on the edge of civilization on the edge of the jungle but we're in this wicker hut on stilts you know bamboo hut on stilts and the other members of staff who were all kind of ethnic minority born poor or tribal people people who didn't speak loshon as the first language fit for example there was one guy sitting there who was Hmong HM Ong but another guy was Camus these are the ethnic minorities of Thailand Laos so that and there's a real racial divide there between lowland Lotion people and the Highland ethnic minorities these other people were sitting around and laughing at her so I actually wasn't you know laughing at her in that sense I wasn't scorning her I had quite a surreal conversation with her about communism and her career and I was in a kind of detached and relaxed way I was responding to her threats to kill me which she was going on at great length about by really talking to her about mmm communism because my own parents had been communists I grew up with communism and rejected it and her life and how she sees the current government of Laos and how she sees it in contrast to government's in Europe living in places like Sweden so to give an illustration at one point she was very defensive in a sense about her threats to kill me for threats Stephanie put in a gulag and my parents would never see my corpse would never see my remains again and so on but she was also justifying her own threats of violence and the violence against other people that I presumed she'd been implicated in herself she'd been a part of herself in the past in that she she said at one point that she believes the government of Sweden did the same thing to its own citizens all the time too because she had lived in Sweden and she believed that all those Western governments whatever France America they all did the same thing they just get away with it like you don't hear about it something and you can imagine that led to a really interesting conversation between her and I was like no like this is really different look you know this is actually a big difference between countries like whether or not you get a trial whether or not you're innocent between whether or not you're innocent till proven guilty or whether you just disappear when the Communist Party decides to abduct you and so on no no no this is really a difference between Sweden and laughs the quality of law and order and Sweden and so no the you know the quote the Swedish Communist Party is not doing this to people nor the nor the Swedish government that this was really a big difference but I was I was targeted with that and frankly a kind of compassionate and detached way because I could see she was really suffering she was really miserable at this very time that she was threatening to have me killed and saying my parents would never get my corpse back for a funeral a lot of details like this details about the gulag I'd be sent to and stuff you know but I really didn't respond to it like a thread I could see how much she was consumed with this sense of shame she had probably for atrocities she's been involved in herself but just more generally her sense of shame for the government she represents the system of government she represents in contrast to exactly places like like Sweden and the United States we have you so yeah it was it was an interesting and truly bizarre and surreal conversation that went on and on for ages and again these other people and the staff or sitting around laughing at her they just thought she was completely ridiculous sir he'd give one other example really briefly another part of conversation that was strange and memorable and again in the midst of her making these these threats to me she started insisting that Laos was not a communist country that foreigners didn't understand that that Laos was ruled by the People's Revolutionary Party and that they were not technically communist and you know I really responded with kind of Socratic method and you know I asked her you know okay so we you know you have elections here in Laos right right how many political parties are there in the elections one elections look you know but really with Socratic method I was saying to her like okay so in what sense do you think you're not a communist country look what you know what do you mean by this but I really didn't you know I didn't respond to it by with fear and I didn't respond to it by protesting my my innocence or what-have-you but as always the people who really suffer are not the white Western humanitarian aid workers it was my co-workers so the local lotion people again whether the ethnic minority or not Camus akka whatever they were they were taken in and interrogated and had to stand in front of portraits of Lenin and Karl Marx and denounced me as a thought criminal and had to apologize to the Communist Party for the fact that they hadn't you know reported me earlier and you know the punchline to it all is what was the basis for me being denounced and I don't think any of them ended up in prison but probably all them had a black mark next to the name for the rest of their lives and you know they were on the bad list of the Communist Party whatever consequences that had for them in the comment system what was it that led to all of this it was the name that I gave to one of our cats can't say it was my cat we had cats up there to try to keep the rats away and I always asked them I said why don't you give them names and I gave the cats names of people I respect it if people positive I named one of the cats after the Minister of ecology because I really respected him it was the only person I knew in the Lao government at that time who was standing up for standing up against deforestation saying this is a real problem we need to have a zero cutting policy in national parks and this kind of thing it was out of respect for him that I named my my cat after he was one of the only people in the Lao government I really liked and she insisted on interpreting that as an insult to the Communist Party and I said to her you know in the West you know when we name an animal after somebody it's like naming a boat after somebody you know we talked about this at some length and there were other examples and this is another reason what the other people were just laughing at her they just thought her argument was ridiculous like they just thought it was completely ridiculous the idea that this was an insult to the Communist Party it's just in that she was gonna kill me for the name of my cat it would tug to normal allow people even a normal Communist Party apparatchik it just seemed laugh-out-loud funny and you know I guess they were laughing until the day they were taken in and and interrogated and in terms of how bad that interrogation was I mean I never got to meet any of those people face to face again but they were probably pretty cynical well-informed people who knew who knew how to be interrogated I remember when I came back to the town the employees at one of the small hotels I used to stand this is in between villages stay in a small hotel for there too they were terrified they were terrified to see me and of course I soon figured out why that was even they have been taken in and Tara gated by the Communist Party just because they changed the bed sheets on the bed wide slept but I mean that is part of the mania of communism is that the country can never be pure enough it can never be cleansed of those bourgeois impulses because what they call bourgeois what we would call human nature Danton [Music]