re: "Point taken, but no" (BP, PostBag, September 21, 2020)
Dear editor,
Attentive Reader is to be thanked for acknowledging that a considered response was needed to the noted errors of reasoning and the mistaken claims in his previous letter. Nonetheless, the new set of specious suggestions of communist tendencies based on false historical parallels shows a questionable intent. There has been nothing remotely communist, certainly not fascist, in the students' considered petitions.
The idea Attentive Reader raises of an ideologically driven Ministry of Truth applies more obviously to the defects in supposedly traditional Thai myth that the students oppose. It was no accident that one of Prayut Chan-o-cha's first acts after unilaterally making himself prime minister in 2014 was to ban the public reading of Orwell's famously Orwellian novel 1984 in public, especially when done in the presence of sandwiches being eaten with political intent. It is precisely such dishonesty protected by morally questionable law that the students correctly identify as a serious failure of many decades, one in urgent need of reform if the Thai nation is to progress intellectually, socially, morally and economically as all Thai people deserve.
Attentive Reader makes a more explicitly false claim: it is not foist on them by oppressive others; rather, it is the LGBT students who proudly take that label for themselves. This error is then compounded. However serious a problem it might be in the US and elsewhere, the claim about cancel culture is fake for the students petitioning for a better Thailand for all Thais: Attentive Reader gave not a single instance of toxic cancel culture for the very simple reason there has been no cancel culture engaged in by the student protestors.
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 September 22, 2020, under the title "Students wronged" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1989491/students-wronged
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