Assassination and/or Democracy: Cambodia & Thailand.

a lot of people don't think through the
consequences of a political assassination they're concerned with the assassination itself they're concerned with the cover-up they're concerned with the people responsible for the crime getting away safely but they don't think through the extent to which the cover-up itself may implicate the government if you find signs of concealment you perhaps cannot prove what is being concealed but you can still demonstrate the fact of the concealment itself and in instances like the assassination of JFK former President United States or his brother RFK the Bobby Kennedy assassination you have evidence incontrovertible pardon me incontrovertible evidence of a cover-up of concealment and that implicates the government even if you cannot prove what is being concealed or why so you know very briefly for example when you look at the details surrounding the medical autopsy after the assassination of JFK you have evidence there of government responsibility not necessarily for the killing but yeah if you look into it pretty obviously it does it doesn't lead you to conclude the government's problem with the killing you have evidence there of concealment that the Mafia could not possibly be responsible for you have evidence of concealment that the Cubans could not be responsible for that the Russian government could not be smoked I mentioned these things because in the past there were people who believed that the assassination of JFK possibly Russia Cuba or the American Mafia response before those people could not possibly be inside the medical and military establishment engaged in the cover-ups of the cover-up itself implicates higher levels responsibilities within the American government now there's been a significant assassination in Cambodia in 2017 by making this video it may actually become unsafe for me to ever visit Cambodia again or at least for the next couple of years I have no plans to return to Cambodia and I wonder actually one of the articles I've read here criticizing the current situation Cambodia I was googling trying to figure out if that journalist is still in Cambodia or if she'd been been kicked out of exile because this is not safe to talk about and just now just recently last couple months in 2018 a Cambodian woman has been imprisoned and fine and put on trial for for making statements on Facebook suggesting or presuming perhaps that the government was responsible for this assassination now I'm gonna read you a short quotation from a New York Times article on topic the defendant so the defendant here being the man who apparently carried out the assassination the defendant insisted in court that chop saw not was his real name he said that he was an unmarried orphan who grew up in a province on Cambodia's western border and that he had earned the money to buy the gun it says to buy the Glock the Glock is a brand of a firearm he earned the money to buy the gun by working on a casts of a plantation in Thailand it's a type of low-level farming employment but nearly every detail of that story was contradicted by his mother and his wife they said that he was neither an orphan Noora migrant worker but a former forest ranger and soldier from an entirely different province they said that they had never heard the name chops on that before that that's not his real name and they even produced a fingerprinted identity card indicating that the man in the dock the man in court who was confessing to this crime was in fact named lethen how who else could arrange for someone using a false name to appear in court and take responsibility for this crime so again the assassination of RFK Robert Kennedy who was then running for president people in McComb Bobby Kennedy people who was then running for president states he wasn't yet president says most people think he would have won the election the assassin his assassination it did have a patsy there was a man who was assigned guilt who was tried and convicted the crime but again there are elements of concealment concealment of evidence cover-up where if you simply look at the concealment you don't need to speculate on what's being concealed who is capable of that concealment who is capable of contriving the situation within the Cambodian court and justice system to have fake identity papers a fake identity a fake conviction who could have arranged us not the Mafia nothing taught spies from Japan no this is the problem and I just have to say this the assassinations of RFK and JFK were amateur the American authorities that engage in that were laughably amateurish in carrying that out it should be impossible for someone like me to figure out an assigned responsibility it should be impossible in Cambodia for the New York Times to have figure this out but I mean perhaps nobody expects such a high level of confidence from the government of Cambodia but any illusions we might have about the omnipotence a very high level of you know competence of repressive state governments these are actually instructive examples of in fact the assassination of JFK was so amateurish that I've often wondered if there wasn't dissent within the US government being intentionally inept that they weren't intentionally leaving bread crumbs or signs of what's wrong because they wanted it to be figured out by the public that some of the people following orders were only reluctantly following orders so I'm going to read you a little bit more about the current situation in Cambodia and you know I've said a long time ago on this channel there's a sense in which I make these videos with a really brokenhearted feeling of of contempt for my audience actual potential it's very sad to come on camera and talk about political issues that you know matter that you feel are tremendously important and you know your audience doesn't care about and you know there really there isn't a sense no potential audience that cares about it that's a very saddening thing whether I'm talking about the Kree and the Egyptian First Nations politics I'm talking about politics in Cambodia there is no audience for this content and there is no government concern and nobody cares and I can only appeal to my audience to examine their own lack of concern and engagement because the vast majority of people watching this video are vegans and vegans go around all the time weeping and wringing their hands and pulling their hair saying why does nobody care here's this terrible travesty this crime this you know animal cruelty the devastation of the environment this terrible even economic waste is even an economic argument about not even treated you know totally kind of a poor argument for it but whether you look at ethanol in terms of health impacts why does nobody care about the millions of heart attacks and cases of cancer that can be avoided etc etc right we have to proceed from the shocking fact that nobody cares right and the shocking fact is that situations like this in Cambodia Thailand and Laos nobody cares nobody cares even enough to respond symbolically the Government of Japan is not even willing to close down its embassy the Government of Japan is not willing to lower the Cambodian flag to half-mast the United Nations is not willing even symbolically oppose a situation of what can frankly be called tyranny and as I described again I have no inside information I make no claim that the government of Cambodia is responsible for this political assassination III I can't say that it would be unjust of me to say that was certainly with certainty what I can say is that Cambodia today does not meet the minimum standards of democracy that it is a tyranny and that the whole world ought to stand up and close ranks and cut off Cambodia from the Society of Nations there are ways to bring a political change through engagement through intervention but there's there's also political change you can bring about simply through disentanglement the Canadian government could very easily ban tourism - can the Canadian government wouldn't cost the Canadian government a dime to close down the Cambodian embassy here or put the Cambodian flag at half-mast and say no when you cross certain ethical lines when you fail to meet certain ethical standards we don't regard you as a legitimate democracy anymore and to have one standard that applies to the whole world in the year 2018 this would not be this would not be too much to ask and indeed this is not even a situation like Saudi Arabia where there would be economic consequences to opposing or questioning the legitimacy of the Saudi government it would not cost Western powers now it wouldn't cost Japan a dime to do the right thing for the right reason so I read this article titled states of repression by Miranda Johnson googling I couldn't find any trace of her I wonder if the journalist is using a false name for that reason subtitle elections in Cambodia and Thailand will be shams roaming the streets near the independence monument in phenom famines this is downtown in the capital city the Phnom Penh can prove to be a grim tour critics of the government have met mysterious ends in the area one Ken Lay was assassinated over his morning coffee in a Caltex petrol station in July of 2016 this is now known as chemist Caltex a local relates with dark humor so I just pause when I lived in Cambodia it was prior to this assassination but in the same way that were different sites you saw around downtown campus oh yeah that magazine stand was a magazine a newspaper stand were an important politician was actually a labor union leader who dared to criticize the government was was gunned down where different people were killed for daring to criticize the government and in the various coup d'etats that established the power of the Hongshan regime you know sorry but there was one of the embassies too where members of parliament from the opposition party had been murdered and so on so there are different sites I mean the more reading you did the more you learned about the ghosts of downtown phenomena and none of this is Khmer Rouge none of this is Hall the Democratic modern current history of Cambodia's we're basically talking about the 1990s to present and this news I'm talking about today this is 2016-17 2018 and current and ongoing news in Cambodia this is not ancient history this is not for the communist period I continue those worried about Cambodia's elections in July find such events hard to laugh at Hun Sen the Prime Minister seized power in 1985 after the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and the intervention of Vietnamese forces he says he will rule for another decade the election will do little to disturb his plans period now this is a news article but the summary thereof Cambodian history and House and Senate came to power this is doing a bit of an injustice to history okay there were elections the elections were staged managed by the United Nations the you know I'm gonna get upset if I start at that time um there's a really dark history here and there's blood on a lot of people's hands including the United Nations for what happened there were elections and those elections probably were illegitimate to begin with in terms of the role the United Nations played and then the United Nations allowed those elections to be subverted and overturned and for the loser of the election to take over government by armed force what you could call a coup d'etat or what-have-you but that was not a bloodless coup d'etat it's true relatively few people died compared to the Khmer Rouge regime it's not on the list of of great mass murder events but it was not a bloodless coup d'etat right so I just mentioned that's very briefly alluding to the the violence that established the Hun Sen regime in the first place okay I continue the head of the opposition so this is the head of the Opposition electoral party this isn't some kind of underground resistant resistance movement this would be like the head of the Democrat Party in the Republican a Republican dominate United States this is the head of the mainstream Democratic Party that runs against the the ruling party in in elections in as much as there are elections you'll get the sense that the elections barely exist the head of the opposition Kem Sokha was arrested on trumped-up treason charges in September of 2017 cambodian law forbids convicted criminals from running in political parties the opposition could implode after the government launched legal action to dissolve it in October 2017 for supposedly plotting to topple the regime voices likely to criticize the crackdown have been silenced several American funded funded radio broadcasters were taken off the air in the weeks after Kem Sokha is arrest and the country's best independent newspaper was forced to closed organizations promoting democracy and campaigning for Green causes have been targeted - so we didn't get any sense of the background to the assassination of Ken Lay my understanding is that he was assassinated because he made some casual comments mean at that time he had been a critic of the government for a relatively long time but he made some sarcastic comments about a report that was published by a group called Global Witness they're a non-profit foundation and that report was estimating how much money Hun Sen's family had amassed through corrupts illegal and illicit practices while they'd been in power so they came up with a very round figure of 200 million dollars but apparently he made some some glib remarks about the level of corruption and government he was already a known known and respected critic of the hunson regime and then he was not so mysteriously gunned down intolerance is growing elsewhere in Southeast Asia in neighboring Thailand the ruling hunter in charge since a coup more than three years ago is squeezing civic society ahead of a promised election in November 2018 you can check this on Wikipedia there's a Wikipedia article which i think is just titled the next elections in Thailand and they update that Wikipedia article on the latest excuses for why these elections never seem to happen given the polling has already been delayed three times some doubt that the vote will occur at all but even if it were to go ahead and democracy will be suppressed activities that undermine the quote-unquote public peace and order or national security close quote are forbidden according to the country's interim Constitution other statutes prevent groups of more than five people from gathering sorry I just repeat that this has come up when I was talking to vegans about vegan activism in town groups of more than five people are illegal and this is a problem for politicians who wish to run rallies you'd have to have a rally with only four people and punish the authors of social media posts critical of the government so yeah again you couldn't even have a meeting with four people and then put it on Facebook it is very common sorry in Thailand if you read the newspapers that you're always reading about people going to prison or at least being going to court having court cases about things they've said on Facebook English in Alachua the opposition figurehead and the democratically elected prime minister fled Thailand in August 2017 she jumped ship before she received the verdict on a trial of her alleged incompetence in a rice subsidy scheme which cost the government around sixteen billion dollars unlike the military coup that seized power from mrs. Inga Lux brother in 2006 this Hunta seems set on sticking around that is particularly depressing given that the country was one of Asia's freest just two decades ago although both Thailand and Cambodia are monarchies their respective kings are not expected to meddle directly in the upcoming electoral matters sorry I mean it'd be misleading to say like historically in the past they haven't been involved this is really just saying they're not expected to get involved in the next year in the events coming up the Thai kanto will glory in the forthcoming coronation sorry this this article obviously from a few months ago the Taiwan Doble glory in the forthcoming coronation of the country's new king maja mahavidya long horn for kau to voters in thailand and cambodia meanwhile the year ahead promises to be anything but glorious of course this doesn't mention the other country that's that must be mentioned there which is Laos Thailand Laos and Cambodia next door um look thailand alone is a population of over 70 million people these things matter and they don't matter less now that we moved into the era of social media the death of conventional journalism etc etc they matter whether or not you care about them whether or not anyone in the West pays attention to them and I would have been happy to devote my life to these political issues why because I could make a positive difference I went and pursued a combination of research and humanitarian work in Southeast Asia for many years I learned a great deal I came back to Canada why is it impossible for me to get a PhD in this field I'm not gonna answer that question in this video I just put it out there the real ultimate problem here isn't personal and difference or media and difference it's actually institutional and educational indifference obviously I do not believe that every grade six school child in America or Canada can learn about Cambodian democracy Thai democracy lotion democracy or lack thereof frankly be a wonderful lesson to share with this crêpes it would be you could talk through with them a bunch of case studies like this about countries that Teeter on the brink of absolute Tyranny the problem with having just a little bit of democracy as opposed to a real democracy and these kinds of things how delicate and difficult it is to maintain democracy you'll do wonderful things to talk through with people in grade six however it is a problem that even at elite levels of education even in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria and I've spent time you guys watch the gym though I've spent time in the elite departments of Cambridge England Oxford England I've spent time in universities great and small or around at all it is a problem that all elite levels of education nobody cares about this there is no effort to engage the public in this or it indeed even within government you can look up the records of debates in the Canadian Senate that we have nobody at every at any level who cares about these things and is gauge of these things and try to make a positive difference and it has been impossible for someone like myself who independently as an autodidact self-learn thot want to and gain this kind of confidence it's impossible for me to take that competence and turn it into a credential and thus do something positive with it make some kind of difference in the world even if it is just as a critic and commentator because you have to be outside of Thailand you have to be outside of Cambodia you have to be outside of Laos to be engaged of these things as a critic and a commentator this falls in an interesting ethical category veganism is something everybody can do it's not just grass roots it's more grass roots the grass roots it's grass dirt what could I tell you anybody can do it anybody can make a positive difference there are some ethical problems where your personal conduct can't make an ethical difference um this is the difference between veganism you can just change your diet make a difference make a difference ecologically ethically and for your own health if I want to reduce the number of accidents on the road it's not enough for me personally to drive more slowly I actually need to create speed limits that everyone will obey how could I do that it's not gonna be a mass movement they're not gonna be you know they're not gonna be demonstrations in the streets they're not going to be revolutions asking for speed limits to be imposed we all know there's an elite level of government that deals these things partly because main theme of this video nobody cares you're not gonna get broad-based engagement and support we all resign ourselves of the fact there's a small number of people with expert opinion and engagement these issues who are gonna sit down and research it and negotiate and discuss well should the speed limit be 60 or 40 on this street or that Street we're gonna look at the statistics for different types of accidents in different contexts we're going to come to that but we feel some comfort in imagining that there is sufficient expertise in our government that there are spits there's sufficient engagement from some small elite of highly educated people to make those to make those tactical decisions and with these kinds of issues that are of tremendous moral significance and tremendous political significance I can guarantee you today in 2018 there is no such a lead there is no there is no course of opinion no matter how small there isn't the bare minimum of a few dozen intellectuals who are engaged with these issues who have the expertise who have the confidence to sit down and discuss these things that really matter so I've said this about First Nations politics my claim is not that everyone should learn Cree or that everyone should learn a Jib way my claim is not that everyone should learn Mohawk or any way not even one of them nor all of them my claim is somebody has to and if not you then who I can't claim that everyone should care about the disaster that is Cambodia my claim is somebody asked you if not you if not me then who