The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories

The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories, by Ben Riley-Smith, sets out to explain how the Conservatives have held on to power in the UK since 2010. One reason is simply that the party has an inbuilt sense of entitlement: “The story that emerges is one of a party built to rule. Time and again, the same message was echoed by interviewees: what must be understood is that the Conservatives are not an ‘ideological party’ but a ‘power party’.”

A complete political history of the past thirteen years would be impossible to cover in a single volume, so the book instead focuses on “ten critical moments or parts of the story, the pivotal points that explain the wider whole.” These include David Cameron’s decision to hold the Brexit referendum, Theresa May’s ill-fated 2017 election, Boris Johnson’s resignation (Riley-Smith subscribes to the ‘three Ps’ theory cited in The Fall of Boris Johnson), and the brief Liz Truss premiership.

Riley-Smith interviewed more than 100 sources for the book, including three of the last five prime ministers (Cameron, Johnson, and Truss). He spoke to twenty of Johnson’s cabinet ministers, and obtained the first drafts of Johnson’s resignation speech and Truss’s party conference speech. He also quotes previously unpublished material from his Telegraph interview with Sunak—“people are fed up with politicians talking about things and not actually doing them”—and extracts from a tranche of internal party memos from the 2017 election campaign.

Surprisingly, The Right to Rule has not been widely reviewed, except by The Daily Telegraph, of which Riley-Smith is the political editor. But it deserves wider coverage, particularly for its revealing insights into Conservative party procedures: it explains the process by which letters of no confidence are submitted to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, and it includes the first published photograph of a cabinet reshuffle whiteboard.

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, published last year, is the only book to cover the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency in a single volume. Every day of his four-year term brought another I-can’t-believe-he-did-that moment, so it’s not surprising that The Divider is over 700 pages long.

The Divider—written by Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker—argues that Trump succeeded by stoking the embers of preexisting social polarisation: “He exploited the fissures in American society to gain, wield, and hold on to power.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, which gives the book its title, culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker began their book on Trump’s final year in office by listing a dozen of his personal failings. The Divider, on the other hand, opens by identifying arguably the most pernicious aspect of his presidency—not included in Leonnig and Rucker’s litany—namely his “sustained four-year war on the institutions and traditions of American democracy.”

Most of the major Trump books—by Leonnig, Rucker, Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and Robert Costa—are structured scene-by-scene, with atmospheric accounts of selected meetings recounted by the participants. The Divider is just as well-sourced—Baker and Glasser interviewed more than 300 people, including Trump—but it focuses instead on the bigger picture, giving a uniquely comprehensive overview of Trump’s presidency.

This is the twentieth, and surely the last, Trump book reviewed on Dateline Bangkok (at least until his inevitable ghostwritten memoir is published). The others are: Betrayal, Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, TrumpNation, The Cost, and the audiobook The Trump Tapes.

Cunt

Feminist artist Janice Turner has published two books of her ‘cunt’ paintings: The Cunt Book in 2019, and the significantly expanded The Essential Cunt last year (which also includes an interview with the author). Turner cites Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues as the original inspiration for her quest to reclaim the c-word, and in The Essential Cunt she repeats the word in the same way that Ensler does: “Cunt, practice it cunt cunt cunt cunt love the word and love your CUNT”.

There are also other possible influences. Turner’s phrase “love your CUNT” evokes Germaine Greer’s pioneering essay Lady Love Your Cunt, and The Essential Cunt seems to paraphrase a monologue about the f-word from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Madonna told her audience: “‘Fuck’ is not a bad word... If your mom and dad did not fuck, you would not be here”; Turner writes: “CUNT is not a dirty word!... If not for a CUNT, you would not be here!” Other artists who have painted the c-word include Marlene McCarty, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Alison Carmichael.

The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life

The prime ministerial memoir is a staple of British political literature. Recent PMs Tony Blair (A Journey), Gordon Brown (My Life, Our Times), and David Cameron (For the Record) have all written about their times in office, though Theresa May’s new book isn’t a traditional memoir. May also makes clear that it’s “not an attempt to justify certain decisions I made in office or to provide a detailed retelling of historical events.” Instead, it’s an account of “the abuse of power exhibited so often in the way the institutions of the state, and those who work within them, put themselves first and the people they are there to serve second.”

The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life includes damning assessments of the Hillsborough Stadium and Grenfell Tower tragedies, and the Primodos scandal, amongst other miscarriages of justice (but not the Post Office Horizon case). May rightly condemns the institutional failings that resulted in these horrific episodes, though her book also discusses seemingly unrelated issues, including her government’s Brexit negotiations. May’s reflections on Brexit—and her thoughts on other world leaders, such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—are fascinating, though they would be more suited to a conventional memoir. In fact, there’s something quite offensive about equating the Brexit deadlock with the Hillsborough disaster.

As May recognises, she will be remembered primarily for her protracted Brexit negotiations: “I know in my heart of hearts that the political reality is that my premiership will always be seen in the context of Brexit and my failure to get a deal through the House of Commons.” She also accepts partial blame for the 2017 election campaign car-crash that wiped out her parliamentary majority: “The most obvious, and arguably the defining, mistake was the press conference after the revision of our social care policy where I said nothing had changed. Obviously something had changed.”

The election result greatly weakened May’s ability to pass legislation in parliament, though she blames former parliamentary Speaker John Bercow for the stalemate instead: “I am certain that he scuppered the Brexit deal.” May is surprisingly direct in her condemnation of Bercow: without mincing words, she describes him as “not just a bully but a serial liar.” She also criticises her predecessor as PM for the Downing Street parties held during coronavirus lockdowns: “there were those at the top of politics, including but not limited to Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, who did not think that the laws they made applied to them.”

In contrast, the book presents May as a vicar’s daughter and a dutiful crusader for justice. In her concluding chapter, May considers how to prevent future abuses of power, but rather than increased regulation or transparency, she calls for more public figures who share her belief in “[s]elf-sacrifice rather than selfishness.” But it’s unrealistic to expect such selflessness from those in public life (except perhaps Gordon Brown, who has a similar background to May), and the book’s final lines are overly idealistic: “those in public service, particularly politicians, should cast aside the mantle of selfishness and devote themselves unashamedly to duty and the service of others.”

The Last Politician:Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, by Franklin Foer of The Atlantic magazine, is the third book on President Biden’s administration, after The Fight of His Life (by Chris Whipple) and Peril (by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa). Whipple had higher-level access than Foer, though with some restrictions: he interviewed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but only via email. Foer wasn’t granted on-the-record interviews, though he did speak to almost 300 people in the administration and, unlike Whipple, his account doesn’t seem overreliant on some sources at the expense of others.

Foer writes that he was initially critical of Biden: “I began this project sharing the Washington establishment’s skepticism of the man.” His opinion evolved during the research for the book and, like Whipple’s, his assessment became broadly positive: “as I reported on him at close distance... my respect for him grew.” Also like Whipple, Foer reserves his harshest criticism for Biden’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, describing it as “the decision that scarred his legacy.” (Whereas The Fight for His Life and Peril focus on the decision to withdraw, The Last Politician has more coverage of the evacuation itself.)

After his first year in office, Biden’s reputation seemed tarnished: “his messy presidency looked like it would be best remembered for its failures—a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the humiliating collapse of his Build Back Better legislation, and the rise of inflation.” But the Inflation Reduction Act, and his public support for Volodymyr Zelensky, turned his presidency around: “redemption—and a profound legacy—came unexpectedly, splayed across the second half of his second year, as he orchestrated the most fertile season of legislation in memory and rallied the world to Ukraine’s defense.”

Biden’s personal relationship with Zelenksy was, at least initially, one of mutual suspicion, and he accused the Ukrainian President of irresponsibly seeking to provoke World War III. His feelings about Russian President Vladimir Putin are well documented, and Foer quotes him telling a friend that Putin slouched like an “asshole schoolkid” during bilateral meetings.

Nine Nasty Words —English in the Gutter:Then, Now, and Forever

How many swear words are still considered taboo? Any list of such terms should inevitably start with the seven words—including all the four-letter ones—that comedian George Carlin described on his album Occupation: Foole. That album was broadcast on 30th November 1973 by MBIA, a New York radio station, which ultimately led to a landmark Supreme Court verdict giving the Federal Communications Commission the authority to censor radio and network television.

In his book Nine Nasty Words — English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever, John McWhorter slightly expands the classic Carlin list: “I will zero in on not seven but nine of the bedrock swears of modern English, including what we more conventionally term slurs but which qualify as our newest profanity. Or, really, eleven if you count damn and hell.” He gives etymologies for each term, and his citations include literary references and early twentieth century popular culture.

McWhorter has interesting points to make about the c-word, refuting the common interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “queynte” as a euphemism: “Chaucer did not bedeck his Canterbury Tales with casual references to cunts, despite how this gets around among English majors. It is easy to suppose, because Middle English spelling looks so odd to us and was not yet regularized, that his queynte was an eccentric spelling of cunt. However, it was actually what it looked like: the word quaint”.

Rebecca Roache’s For F*ck’s Sake, Philip Gooden’s Bad Words and What They Say about Us, Peter Silverton’s Filthy English, Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul, and David Sosa’s Bad Words cover similar ground to McWhorter. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing, expanded from his earlier Swearing. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative book on linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921:The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism

Alexander Roob’s The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism, published earlier this year by Taschen, is a stunning 600-page survey of illustrations from nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers and magazines. The book features hundreds of images, many of which are full-page and double-page reproductions (such as the John Leech drawing from Punch magazine that first used the word ‘cartoon’ to refer to satirical art), and it includes a comprehensive bibliography.

A prologue outlines the early history of press graphics, from the late sixteenth century onwards, though the book’s starting point is 1819. This was the year of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, England, and William Hone and George Cruikshank’s pamphlet The Political House That Jack Built, published in response to the tragedy, which “established the era of pictorial journalism”.

Roob examines the technical developments in printing over the period, from wood engraving and lithography in the 1870s to photoxylography a century later. There is also extensive coverage of caricature and political satire, including Charles Philipon’s cartoons of the French King Louis-Philippe.

Philipon was arrested for treason after drawing Louis-Philippe as a plasterer in La Caricature on 30th June 1831. At his trial, he mischievously demonstrated that the King’s likeness could be discerned in almost anything, even a pear, and that fruit became a symbol of Louis-Philippe in subsequent illustrations by Philipon and others. On 27th February 1834, Philipon’s magazine Le Charivari (‘hullabaloo’) published a front-page editorial about the King in the form of a calligram, with the text typeset to resemble a pear.

Philipon’s pear sketches, and a caricature of Louis-Philippe as Gargantua by Honoré Daumier, are reproduced in The Art of Controversy. There is a chapter on press graphics in History of Illustration. The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921 is published in a folio format, the same size as Taschen’s Information Graphics, History of Information Graphics, Understanding the World, and Logo Modernism.

Gay Is OK!A Christian Perspective

Malaysia’s Court of Appeal today reinstated a ban on Ngeo Boon Lin’s book Gay Is OK! A Christian Perspective. The book was published in 2013 without incident, though it was banned by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2020. Navin Manogaran’s Tamil-language novel Peichi (பேய்ச்சி), published in 2019, was banned at the same time.

Last year, the High Court overturned the Gay Is OK! ban, though the Court of Appeal’s judgement today means that the book cannot be distributed in the country. Homosexuality remains prohibited in Malaysia, and the book’s title and central thesis are therefore at odds with the law.

Various books have been banned in Malaysia in recent years, including Sapuman and other comics by Zunar. The comic Belt and Road Initiative for Win-Winism was banned in 2019, the novel Perempuan Nan Bercinta (‘a woman in love’) was banned in 2014, and dozens of books were banned in 2017.

The Fall:The End of the Murdoch Empire

Rupert Murdoch—proprietor of The Sun, The Times, and Fox News—ran his media empire for more than seventy years, before finally retiring aged ninety-two. Murdoch was an endling, the last surviving member of an endangered (and now extinct) species: the press baron. He announced his retirement on 21st September, less than a week before the publication of a new book on the twilight of his career, which will be released tomorrow.

The UK edition of Michael Wolff’s book is titled The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, and little did the author know how prescient that subtitle would be. (In the US, the subtitle is The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.) This is Wolff’s second book on Murdoch: he previously wrote The Man Who Owns the News, an excellent biography that benefited from rare access to Murdoch himself and his immediate family.

As Wolff writes in his introduction to The Fall, “Murdoch hated my book about him,” so this second volume is an unauthorised account. But Wolff still has contacts close to Murdoch, explaining that this makes him “the journalist not in his employ who knows him best.” (This is actually rather modest for Wolff, who boasted in a November 2011 GQ article about Murdoch: “I know what he is thinking; I know how he is thinking it; I know the rhythms of the way he talks about what he thinks; I know what he remembers and I know what he forgets.”)

After that first Murdoch biography, Wolff wrote a series of books on Donald Trump’s presidency, starting with Fire and Fury, which relied for many of its revelations on Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist. Wolff similarly uses former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes as a major source in The Fall. The problem this time, though, is that Ailes resigned in disgrace in 2016, and died a year later. Despite this, The Fall is padded out with a prologue on Ailes, who Wolff still seems to admire.

The Man Who Owns the News contained extensive notes on its sources, but The Fall has no notes whatsoever. And while it’s become standard practice for writers of contemporary history to cite unidentified sources, Wolff goes a step further: often, he doesn’t even refer to individual sources, whether anonymous or otherwise. Also, Wolff didn’t approach Fox News to verify what he had written, breaking a basic rule of journalism. Then again, as he explains in his introduction, he sees himself as “a writer, perhaps more so than as strictly a journalist”.

This results in a book with plenty of colour but little evidence. Wolff adds novelistic details to his dialogue, telling us not only what the participants said, but also how they said it, how they felt, and even their body language at the time. He quotes Murdoch’s concerns about the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, for instance: “quietly, but clearly” Murdoch said that the lawsuit “could cost us fifty million dollars”. Later in the same conversation—on Murdoch’s yacht—the tycoon banged a table, grumbled, scowled, and felt affronted. How Wolff knows all this is anyone’s guess.

Murdoch’s prediction of the Dominion payout was a gross underestimate, as Fox ended up paying almost $800 million for broadcasting Trump’s lies about election fraud. Wolff was in the courtroom when the judge announced that Fox had settled the case, and he reveals that Murdoch originally proposed firing host Sean Hannity as part of the settlement. (Ultimately, Tucker Carlson was sacked instead.)

Another of Wolff’s stylistic devices is to distance himself from the narrative, to an extent that sometimes misleads the reader. In Fire and Fury, he wrote that Trump telephoned an “acquaintance” without revealing that the acquaintance was Wolff himself. Likewise, in The Fall, he describes Ailes speaking to an “interlocutor” without disclosing that he was almost certainly the interlocutor in question. (He has also done this in recent interviews, with an anecdote about Murdoch, Trump, and a “guest” in a lift. In some interviews, he has identified himself as the guest, though in others he leaves the guest unnamed.)

When Murdoch retired last week—an event that Wolff did not foresee—he confirmed that his son Lachlan would take over as executive chairman. (As in the HBO series Succession, the long-term heir will only be determined once Murdoch dies.) In light of that announcement, Wolff’s reading of their relationship now seems off beam: “he seemed to wholly disregard whatever Lachlan might say. Could it be that the father had had it with the son?” It’s a rhetorical question, but the answer is apparently ‘no’.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s novel The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth was originally published in Thai (ไส้เดือนตาบอดในเขาวงกต) in 2015, and was translated into English by Kong Rithdee in 2019. Veeraporn describes the shroud that descended over Bangkok following the events of May 2010: “After the fire was doused and the terrible incidents ended days later, the city would still find itself cloaked in an impenetrable haze that prevented it from knowing the truth of what had actually happened. That darkness would remain in place for many years.”

In an interview with the Electric Literature website, Veeraporn explained how the novel had been directly inspired by Ratchaprasong: “I was overcome with a deep, painful bitterness seeing the fashionable, well-educated, well-paid people of the city feeling content about the injuries inflicted upon the poorer, less educated people who were mostly from the upcountry. And it was important to write about that bitterness.” This situates the novel within a movement that Sayan Daenklom called “Post-Ratchaprasong art” (in the journal Read/อ่าน, vol. 3, no. 2).

The novel has an intentionally melodramatic narrative, in a parody of Thai lakorn (soap operas), particularly Club Friday (คลับฟรายเดย์เดอะซีรีส์). In the Electric Literature interview, Veeraporn linked the repetitive nature of soap plotlines to the vicious cycle of Thai politics: “they have the same old toxic storylines that keep repeating themselves, which is also very similar to how the general public keeps becoming involved with politics in the streets of Thailand.” (The short film The Love Cycle makes the same point, comparing lakorn remakes to the cycle of Thai coups.)

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth also describes the whitewashing of another notorious episode from the collective memory: “6 October was twelve years past and its memory had begun to fade. People were no longer even sure if it had actually happened.” (Similarly, all reminders of Ratchaprasong’s violent past have long since been removed.) The short films We Will Forget It Again (แล้วเราจะลืมมันอีกครั้ง) and Delete Our History, Now! (อำนาจ/การลบทิ้ง), and the exhibitions Amnesia and Unforgetting History, also address this social amnesia, which is a central theme in Thongchai Winichakul’s book Moments of Silence.

For F*ck’s Sake:Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun

Rebecca Roache covers a lot of ground in For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun, her study of the power that swear words possess. The most interesting chapters are those that deal with an often overlooked aspect of swearing: the use of distancing devices such as quotation marks and asterisks to mitigate offence.

The book also discusses broader issues such as the regulation and reappropriation of swear words, including the destigmatisation of the c-word. Roache argues that reclaiming sexist language would not necessarily reduce misogynistic social attitudes: “If all we do is start using cunt in polite company, we’re going to achieve little more than upsetting people. Cunt alone can’t cure misogyny.”

Philip Gooden’s Bad Words and What They Say about Us, Peter Silverton’s Filthy English, Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul, and David Sosa’s Bad Words cover similar ground to Roache. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing, expanded from his earlier book Swearing. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative guide to linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

The Fight of His Life:Inside Joe Biden’s White House

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s Peril included coverage of the first few months of the Biden presidency, but Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House is the first book to focus entirely on President Biden. Whipple covers the Biden administration from the election in November 2020 to last year’s midterms. Although he was granted an interview with Biden, it was conducted via email—preventing follow-up questions—presumably because White House staff were conscious of the President’s propensity for gaffes.

Whipple relies heavily on his more extensive access to Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff until earlier this year. He also interviewed numerous other senior figures in the administration, including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, CIA director William Burns, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Whipple reveals Biden’s uneasy relationship with the Secret Service: “Wary of his own Secret Service agents, the president no longer spoke freely in their presence.”

Whipple’s strongest criticism of Biden relates to the US troop pullout from Afghanistan and the subsequent Taliban takeover of the country: “Both the decision to withdraw and its flawed execution belonged to him.” He presents conflicting accounts of the intelligence shown to the President prior to the withdrawal, which the White House regarded as flawed. Klain maintains: “Biden was being told by the military commanders [that] there would be a valiant defense of Kabul. That defense never showed up.” Blinken also blames “an intelligence assessment that proved to be wrong”.

This notion of an intelligence failure is rejected by the CIA: “President Biden, they insisted, was under no illusions. He understood the fragility of the Afghan military forces and had a clear-eyed view of the weaknesses of the Afghan political leadership.” Burns claims that the President was made fully aware of the risks, describing “a prescription for things unravelling pretty quickly... All of this, he said, was communicated to Joe Biden.” Similarly, Milley says that an imminent Taliban takeover had been foreseen: “The intelligence I saw predicted months”.

On the other hand, Whipple gives Biden considerable credit for his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even describing him in Churchillian terms: “Biden had a few things in common with Churchill”. Biden’s view of Russian President Vladimir Putin—that he has no soul—is well documented, though Whipple adds that Biden regards Putin as a dictator in the same mould as Adolf Hitler: “He thought the Russian tyrant personified the evil he’d seen memorialized at Dachau”.

Rama X: The Thai Monarchy under King Vajiralongkorn

As the proverb says, don’t judge a book by its cover. But a forthcoming academic book, Rama X: The Thai Monarchy under King Vajiralongkorn, has been banned from distribution in Thailand on the basis of its cover. It will be published in the US later this year, and anyone importing it into Thailand faces up to three years in jail and/or a ฿60,000 fine. Police are authorised to confiscate and destroy any imported copies of the book, as it may contravene the lèse-majesté law.

The announcement of the ban was published in the Royal Gazette (ราชกิจจานุเบกษา) yesterday (vol. 140, no. 163, p. 45). It misidentified the book—the word ‘under’ is missing from the subtitle—though anyone charged with distributing it would presumably be unwise to rely on that technicality for their defence.

Rama X has not yet been published, thus the ban is based on its cover and the reputation of its editor, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academic who left the country to avoid being detained by the junta after the 2014 coup. (Similarly, Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s book A Kingdom in Crisis was banned based on newspaper reviews.)

Official bans on books and print media are rare, as their announcement in the Royal Gazette draws attention to the publications in question (the so-called ‘Streisand effect’). Harry Nicolaides, for example, sold only a handful of copies of his self-published novel Verisimilitude, though it became an international headline once it was banned. An issue of the French magazine Marie Claire was banned seven years ago. Two books by Giles Ji Ungpakorn, A Coup for the Rich and Thailand’s Crisis, are also on the banned list. An issue of the Thai journal Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน; vol. 3, no. 4) was banned due to its interview with scholar Sulak Sivaraksa. The most notorious title on the list, Paul M. Handley’s The King Never Smiles, was published, like Rama X, by Yale University Press.

Pavin’s previous books, such as Coup, King, Crisis and “Good Coup” Gone Bad, were not banned, though they are not available within Thailand. Sarakadee (สำรคดี) magazine (vol. 22, no. 260) published an extensive article on the history of book censorship, and Underground Buleteen (no. 8) printed a list of books banned between 1932 and 1985.

Apocalypse Now:The Lost Photo Archive

Photojournalist Chas Gerretsen’s picture of Augusto Pinochet, posing in sunglasses after launching a coup in Chile, is one of the most iconic political portraits. Gerretsen is also known for his work as a stills photographer on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and his images of that film appear in Apocalypse Now: The Lost Photo Archive. (The book’s subtitle is a publisher’s embellishment, as Gerretsen’s archive is held at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, as seen in the documentary short Dutch Angle: Chas Gerretsen and Apocalypse Now.)

Peter Cowie’s Apocalypse Now: The Book is the definitive guide to the making of the film, though its illustrations look no better than photocopies. The Lost Photo Archive, with its full-page, colour images, is an excellent visual companion to Cowie’s book. Coppola provided a rather ambivalent blurb for The Lost Photo Archive, disputing some of Gerretsen’s recollections—“I don’t remember many of the things talked about in this text quite in the same way”—but he also praised “Chas’s stunning photos”.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, one of the greatest behind-the-scenes films ever made, documents the making of Coppola’s masterpiece. The work of another stills photographer, Steve Schapiro, appears in two books published by Taschen: Taxi Driver and The Godfather Family Album. Hollywood Movie Stills, by Joel W. Finler, is a history of stills photography.

Who? สุเทพ เทือกสุบรรณ(‘who is Suthep Thaugsuban?’)

Who? สุเทพ เทือกสุบรรณ (‘who is Suthep Thaugsuban?’) was published in 2014, at the height of the People’s Democratic Reform Committee protests led by Suthep Thaugsuban. Suthep, a veteran MP, attempted to bring Bangkok to a standstill, laying the groundwork for a military coup. His PDRC also blocked candidates from registering for the 2014 election, and sabotaged the election itself.

The comic book Who? สุเทพ เทือกสุบรรณ is an idealised biography of Suthep, presenting him as a role model for children. If he seems a completely unsuitable subject for such a comic, remember that his anti-democratic protest movement was supported by many middle-class Bangkokians, and their children were presumably the book’s target audience. (Of course, the comic whitewashes Suthep’s reputation for corruption, such as the 1995 land-reform scandal, portraying him as a victim of false accusations.)

Former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, against whom Suthep campaigned relentlessly, was also involved in a vanity project similar to Who? สุเทพ เทือกสุบรรณ. Thaksin commissioned a series of seven animated cartoons, ตาดูดาวเท้าติดดิน (‘looking at the stars, feet on the ground’), which gave an equally hagiographic account of his life story.

ภาพประวัติศาสตร์ การต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง ที่คนไทยต้องไม่ลืม(‘historic pictures of the red-shirt fight that Thai people must not forget’)

ภาพประวัติศาสตร์ การต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง ที่คนไทยต้องไม่ลืม (‘historic pictures of the red-shirt fight that Thai people must not forget’), published in 2011, covers the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (red-shirt) protests and ensuing military crackdown from a decidedly red-shirt perspective. The book was published by PTV, the satellite television station set up by former Thai Rak Thai party members to compete with yellow-shirt leader Sondhi Limthongkul’s ASTV channel.

Despite its glossy paper, the book feels cheaply made: many of the photographs are printed at a low resolution, and the binding is of poor quality. Also, there are some especially gruesome photos, with one page in particular (p. 17) lingering on the most horrific imagery. (There are brief sections on the 14th October 1973, 6th October 1976, and May 1992 massacres, for historical context.)

Links between PTV and former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were always denied, though he was widely assumed to be the station’s main financial backer. The book is essentially a Thaksin hagiography: it’s almost as fawning as ทักษิณ Where Are You? (‘Thaksin where are you?’). ราษฏร์ประสงค์ ๒๕๕๓ (‘Ratchaprasong 2010’) and ความจริงวันนั้น (‘the truth about that day’) are also pro-Thaksin accounts of the red-shirt protests.

If Thaksin is the hero of this narrative then Abhisit Vejjajiva is very much the villain. The book directly blames Abhisit for the crackdown, as he was prime minister during the 2010 protests. The documentaries The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย) and Democracy After Death (ประชาธิปไตยหลังความตาย) also point the finger at Abhisit personally, though he denied any culpability in his memoir The Simple Truth (ความจริงไม่มีสี).

Two books published by liberal journals, 19-19 ภาพ ชีวิต และการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง จาก 19 กันยา 2549 ถึง 19 พฤษภา 2553 (‘pictures of the life and struggle of the red-shirts from 19th September 2006 to 19th May 2010’) and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง (‘Bangkok (no) red shirts’), cover the red-shirt protests with more objectivity. Bangkok, May 2010 provides analysis of the period from both sides of the red/yellow political divide.

ราษฏร์ประสงค์ ๒๕๕๓(‘Ratchaprasong 2010’)

ราษฏร์ประสงค์ ๒๕๕๓ (‘Ratchaprasong 2010’), published in 2011, is a coffee-table book documenting the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (red-shirt) protest movement, and its violent suppression by the military in May 2010. (Names of the dead and injured are listed in an appendix.) Many of the UDD protesters were also supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and Thaksin wrote a foreword to the book.

Clearly, with its contribution by Thaksin, this is a one-sided history of the red-shirt demonstrations. But it’s a necessary one, as history is usually written by the victors. The book contradicts the accusations of violence and arson levelled at the red-shirts by Thailand’s right-wing media. For example, พฤษภาอำมหิต (‘savage May’), published by Kom Chad Luek (คมชัดลึก), focused almost entirely on the arson committed after the military massacre.

In his foreword, Thaksin writes that he is saddened by the violence captured in photographs of the military crackdown, and indeed the publisher’s introduction warns the reader that “THERE ARE PHOTOS OF THOSE WHO WERE INJURED AND DIED.” Again, this challenges the narrative that the protesters were perpetrators, rather than victims, of violence. All photographs of red-shirt casualties were removed from the Rupture (หมายเหตุ ๕/๒๕๕๓) exhibition at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, leaving only images of damaged buildings.

With its bilingual text, and an expensive ฿1,000 price tag, ราษฏร์ประสงค์ ๒๕๕๓ was presumably aimed at a wider audience, and not merely intended as a souvenir for UDD members. On the other hand, ความจริงวันนั้น (‘the truth about that day’) and, especially, ภาพประวัติศาสตร์ การต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง ที่คนไทยต้องไม่ลืม (‘historic pictures of the red-shirt fight that Thai people must not forget’) are so pro-Thaksin that they would surely appeal only to the protesters themselves.

Two books published by liberal journals, 19-19 ภาพ ชีวิต และการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง จาก 19 กันยา 2549 ถึง 19 พฤษภา 2553 (‘pictures of the life and struggle of the red-shirts from 19th September 2006 to 19th May 2010’) and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง (‘Bangkok (no) red shirts’), cover the protests with more objectivity. Bangkok, May 2010 provides analysis of the period from both sides of the political divide.

ไทยถลอก (ปอกเปิก)(‘Thailand is badly bruised’)

Yingluck Shinawatra became prime minister after winning the 2011 Thai general election, and was removed from office by the Constitutional Court in 2014. The events of her premiership were fodder for veteran political cartoonist Chai Rachawat (the pen name of Somchai Katanyutanan), whose work appears in the country’s most popular newspaper, Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ). (Chai also illustrated The Story of Tongdaeng/เรื่อง ทองแดง, King Rama IX’s biography of his pet dog.) Chai’s cartoons from 2011 to 2014 are collected in ไทยถลอก (ปอกเปิก) (‘Thailand is badly bruised’), published in 2014.

Yingluck sued Chai for defamation in 2013, after he called her a “อีโง่” in a Facebook post. (The term roughly translates as ‘stupid bitch’.) A book from the same period by cartoonists Buncha/Kamin describes Yingluck using equally offensive language, though it was the viral nature of Chai’s Facebook comment that prompted the lawsuit. Chai occupies the opposite end of the political spectrum to his fellow Thai Rath cartoonist, Sia, who has also published books of his cartoons.

อรุณตวัดการเมือง(‘political Arun’)

อรุณตวัดการเมือง (‘political Arun’), a collection of political cartoons by Arun Watcharasawad, was published in 2012. Arun is a cartoonist for the liberal Matichon (มติชน) newspaper and Matichon Weekly (มติชนสุดสัปดาห์) magazine, and the book features his work from 2010 to 2012. It also includes การ์ตูน-การเมือง-ไทย (‘cartoons-politics-Thailand’), a fascinating chapter on the history of Thai political cartoons by Parnbua Boonparn.

Typically, Matichon Weekly devotes almost a full page to each of Arun’s cartoons, and it’s easy to see why: these are impressive works of satirical art. Like most political cartoonists, Arun employs recurring visual metaphors—shark-infested waters seem to be one of his favourites—though his work also references classical mythology and artists such as Hokusai.

รวมการ์ตูนการเมือง แหลเพื่อพี่ (‘cartoon collection for everyone’)

Buncha and Kamin are political cartoonists for the right-wing Manager (ผู้จัดการรายวัน) newspaper. Their book รวมการ์ตูนการเมือง แหลเพื่อพี่ (‘cartoon collection for everyone’), released in 2013, is an anthology of cartoons satirising former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government. Manager is published by Sondhi Limthongkul, who has friends and enemies in high places: he narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2009, and he received a royal pardon in 2019 after being sentenced to a twenty-year jail term for bank fraud.

Sondhi co-founded the People’s Alliance for Democracy movement against Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin. So it comes as no surprise that Buncha and Kamin’s cartoons are scathing in their criticism. In their commentary for the book, they don’t mince words, describing Yingluck as stupid and her administration as evil. Their cartoons also stray beyond satire into downright insult, such as a macabre fantasy sketch showing Thaksin being murdered.

The cartoons mocking Yingluck’s supporters are even more problematic: they are portrayed as a herd of buffalo. Kwai (‘buffalo’) was a term of abuse adopted by the PAD, who dismissed the red-shirts as an uneducated mob undeserving of the right to vote. (Research in After the Coup confirms the prevalence of this patronising attitude.) Tepwut Buatoom’s picture book Buffaloes Dream of Being Human (ควายอยากเป็นคน) subverts the ‘buffalo’ stereotype, and the term has been reappropriated in a t-shirt design.