Acts of insolence

Re: “Man arrested for defacing temple wall”, (BP, March 30).

I must measure my words and be very clear.

Regardless of if your political message is, “112”, or your political message is “From Mona Lisa to The Scream: Climate change activists protest by defacing art,” Thai army chief Narongpan Jittkaewtae is quite correct in asserting that people should not “want” or (more pointedly) act to intentionally deface or destroy things held sacred by much of any society in order to make a passing political point of the era. However, that leads me to a few questions.

First, why hasn’t the army chief marched into previous high schools and universities, I and numerous foreign teachers have worked at and confronted the administration of those schools for failing to correct the defacement of public portraits of our current King, which has been going on since at least 2019 and were left to hang (as undoubtedly captured on numerous student phone photos) for up to almost an entire school year at a time? Indeed, there were many foreign teachers who complained, but nothing was done.

I condemn Mr Suttawee’s actions, and they are just as wrong as radical European climate activists who destroy historic art. However, these actions are regrettably no longer uncommon, and I fail to understand why “patriotic” Thai educators did nothing to correct similar graffiti at schools.

So, in Mr Suttawee’s defence [and photos exist to prove my claims which I can send to the newspaper, or students can], if these mixed messages are what modern Thai educators are teaching Thai students, and if European “climate activist” teachers do much the same with this impressionable generation, why should the new generation really only be the ones put into jail when those who taught them [in this case their Thai teachers who allowed similar events to unfold for years] walk free of any punishment?

JASON A JELLISON