Review appreciated

re: "On the naughty Stephff" (BP, Life, April 7, 2023) 

Dear editor,

Thank you Dave Kendall for the review of "Farang Affairs 2" by Stephff, aka Stephane Peray. As a long time fan, Stephff's healthy poking of fun at farangs is rich humour, but the political satire skewering sacred Thai cows is way better. It always brightens the day to see his latest on Prachatai or wherever.

But all was not such wholesome good cheer. Mr Kendall's impertinent phrase "the new woke dictatorship" is sadly all too often right. Once upon a time, instead of attending to his lesson, which must have been history or English from the teacher I remember chastising me for being mightily diverted by what he conceded was indeed highly diverting, I was caught reading a novel by Agatha Christie that has subsequently been rechristened as "And Then There Were None", the original title, "Ten Little N*****s", being unpublishable these days. And this last week we read in world news that along with other great all-brow classics, Ms. Christie's entire corpus is being reviewed to "correct" the language that accurately reflects the sexism, racism and other offensiveness that she had absorbed and reflected as normal in her day.

This sort of nonsense run rampant is what we expect of book-banning American Trumpists and like conservative snowflakes terrified that their delicate children will be forever corrupted by exposure to intelligent, honest, challenging literature. And yet it is now those who pretend to be liberal who are intent on destroying the record of the sexism, racism, totalitarianism and other unpleasantness that abounds in the work of Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, and pretty much everyone before the 1970s simply because they accurately reflected the less developed moral awareness of their times.  As a reminder of how much worse humans were so very short a time ago,  it is much better not to equate being woke with the snowflake illiberalism of authoritarians intent on opposing the threat of more honest history or improved respect for others. It is much better to keep intact, for example, the black and white record of Winston Churchill's ugly racism, and even Aristotle's certainty of the inferiority of women, the naturalness of slavery, and, albeit nowhere near as bad as Plato, the conviction that farmers and labourers were unfit to be allowed a say in politics. (Aristotle's "Politics" and Plato's Republic" are not for the faint of heart.)

If the latest fulminations of the self-esteeming big wigs of the United Thai Nation (UTN) Party ("UTN leader vows to drive out ‘nation haters’" BP, April 8) now grossly misrepresenting what it is to be a Thai patriot are anything to go by, those who colluded in or cheered on the latest coup against the Thai people's nation have a mindset solidly back before 500 BC, apparently having learned nothing of worth even from the Buddha, whose "Kalama Sutta" they presumably want cast into the flames due to its blunt dismissal of tradition and status as authority to be revered regarding any alleged truth. 

But I'm sure that Stephff can do the UTN authoritarians more justice than me. I look forward to his take on them. 

 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 15, 2023, under the title "Review appreciated" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2550094/unnecessary-directive