re: "Decree risks overreach" (BP, Editorial, April 7, 2020)
Dear editor,
"Causing panic in society" was exactly the dishonest excuse used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to suppress early warnings about Covid-19. The entire world now knows how that legalized suppression of the free speech of honest people has worked out.
The whole notion of "causing panic in society" as a criminal offence is deeply flawed. If the truth causes panic, that normally means the population needs to be better educated to handle reality. The mere claim that the people cannot handle the truth, typically a fake claim by the state officials abusing it, cannot justify criminal sanctions against those seeking to keep people accurately informed.
With very narrowly defined exceptions, such as obtain in war time, the state has an obligation to prove it false before taking criminal action against the person making a claim in good faith. That such poorly defined laws exist is itself symptomatic of a gravely sick government infected by pestilential corruption.
Why would law makers anywhere, even in Thailand, seek to deliberately infect their nation with the foreign contagion symptomatic of the communist and other repressive ideologies?
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on April 8, 2020, under the title "Handling the truth" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1895225/handling-the-truth
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