The perils of insulting King Bhumibol

Wednesday, 11th February 2009

Eric Ellis ponders the Thai monarch’s political role as an Australian writer is prosecuted for lèse majesté

Before George W. Bush and the flying Baghdad shoe, my favourite story about rulers being insulted came from Poland.

In 2006, a Pole called Hubert Hoffman was minding his own business, waiting on a platform at Warsaw’s train station, when he was approached by two policemen. Hoffman didn’t like the way he was addressed, remarking to the cops that the Kaczynski twins — Lech the president and Jaroslav the prime minister — ran the country like the brutal Stalinist dictators of old. The police told him to show more respect for Poland’s rulers, at which point Hoffman promptly broke wind. His admirably controllable flatulence got him arrested and charged for ‘contempt for the office of the head of state’. Hoffman was bailed, but when he didn’t show up in court, the judge — presumably the Kaczynski triplet separated at birth from Lech and Jaroslav — ordered police to mount a nationwide manhunt for the hapless Hubert. The whole farce was an own goal for the Kaczynskis, making them a laughing stock at home and abroad.

I was reminded of Hubert last week when I saw Melbourne writer Harry Nicolaides’s sad and mystified face peering from the front page of the Bangkok Post. Sweating in chains, gormless Harry had been sentenced to three years in a putrid Thai jail for lèse majesté, the archaic crime of offending a monarch’s dignity, which he supposedly did in a self-published book no Thai had ever read. Where the Polish media gleefully reported the details of Hoffman’s malodorous discharge, Thais instead had to imagine what precisely Harry had done. To publish details of the matter could also be an offence, as could reading it. And so it circularly goes in Kafka’s Thailand.

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