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Thailand: Women Protesters Leading a Struggle Against Patriarchy

Writer's picture: Protest2020Protest2020

Updated: Nov 19, 2021



ProtestBlog.org: Bangkok, Thailand, September 24, 2020. Protest waves sweeping the world in 2020 are just now beginning to receive widespread attention in terms of women´s liberation. Lebanon can hardly at this point be cited as any kind of success story, but women have played unprecedented roles in protests in Beirut and elsewhere. Many women, especially young ones, have also been learning to stretch their wings and assume important leadership responsibilities in a rapidly changing, dynamic political landscape as fraught with opportunity as it is danger.


For weeks, tens of thousands of protesters have gathered and some sources even speak of an overrepresentation in these crowds of young women making up more than half of the group.

In years past, women were a distinct minority in protests. But something new is afoot these days, and the protest is not directed just at the traditional patriarchal pillars of society, monarchy, military, and monkhood, but at patriarchy itself.

Many of the earliest and most vocal organizers of protests in 2020 have been female students and now they appear a majority at the most recent protests. Young women in Thailand have much to gain from rebelling against traditional patriarchal authority, hence the enthusiasm. Issues that have been debated for decades in other countries, are only now being aired, such as abortion, and even taxes on menstrual products. School rules that force girls to conform to an outdated version of femininity are also receiving a lot of criticism and resistance.

In their own words going viral across the world, these young women protesters seek to destroy ¨the male superiority structure¨ especially insofar as it is perpetuated ¨under the monarchy¨, revolutionary words indeed.

Of course, this is happening not just in Thailand but something very similar is also going on in Belarus, where hundreds of women were arrested last week while marching in Minsk to protest the return to power of the country’s strongman, President Lukashenko.


Women have taken part in previous protest movements in Thailand and there have been several over the past couple of decades. A core of so-called aunties, many from rural areas ignored by Bangkok’s ruling elite, were integral to an opposition force called the Red Shirts, who occupied downtown Bangkok for weeks before a bloody crackdown in 2010. In terms of protest leadership, however, women had been mostly absent, until now.




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All of us are vulnerable, and awareness is growing that we are all in this together. Nevertheless, the struggle, if it is to prove ultimately successful, is only just now beginning. While in many places, protests have turned violent and thousands of arrests have been made, there have not yet been large numbers of fatalities among climate change protestorss.

Score of protesters have died and continue to die, however, throughout 2021. Myanmar and Colombia come to mind. We at protestblog.org extend a special invitation to protesters from Myanmar, Colombian, and many other places where levels of social unrest accompanied by protest are very high. Become a blogger, write your own blog!

 

In other parts of the world, most notably the Middle East – home to warfare for decades – particularly in Iraq and its neighbor and former enemy Iran, hundreds of protestors have been killed with live, military-grade ammunition, over the course of the last couple of years. After several years of civil war in Syria, protest gradually gave way to military action, death and destruction. The numbers of people murdered by the governments of the region are not fully known, and especially hard to verify in Iran, where a brutal religious dictatorship maintains a thick cloak of secrecy over such information. It would be a special honor to host guest bloggers from this part of the world in particular.

ProtestBlog.org: 2021

 

The Taliban are now whipping women in public, in the streets, as they deem necessary. While women continue to protest, they do so at their utmost, explicit peril. Iran retains a perilous hostility to the West that consumes its resources at the expense of its people. The hostility between China and the USA, in particular, bodes ill for the global economy, already hamstrung by COV-19. Those parts of the world most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change are already suffering; places like the Philippines are experiencing devastating and lethal storms, one after the other, breaking all historical records. At this writing, one heat wave after another is scorching North America with unprecedented temperatures, nurturing year after year of record-breaking fires.

Much of Australia, for example, was on fire at the beginning of 2020 - with the hottest temperatures on record - and few anticipate Australia to fare better in 2021. This is changing Australian lives, politics, and the consciousness of the ordinary Australian who is now getting involved in the struggle to save their island, and coming to a better understanding of how their survival is linked to the rest of the world. In Japan, forces are growing in protest to push the Japanese government towards support for the Hong Kong protestors, confronting mainland China; also supporting the struggles of minority groups in mainland China, reporting on government abuses, etc. The US government has expressed its full support for the Hong Kong protestors, further escalating tensions between these two superpowers along with ally Russia. These tensions were already at their most aggravated moments as a result of the US/China trade war. By early n2021, however, it was simply made clear that dissent from Communist authority in Hong Kong would simply not be tolerated in any form. For some time, increasing numbers have fled to the UK.

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Our world in 2021 is a tinderbox as never before. The rapid pace of climate change is especially alarming. I fear that my 9-year-old may never become an old man. Rather than do nothing, myself and many others prefer to protest, hence this site. Join with us, let us at the very least complain, even if we are nearly sure to die anyway. We here at protestblog.org await your contribution, just paste your email into the form on the left and we weill send you an invitation!

At ProtestBlog.org, we invite you to protest, share your vision, and help us all to march towards a more sustainable and peaceful world that will not totally implode, at least within our lifetimes, leaving hope for life to continue in more intelligent forms, through greater appreciating our planetary home. We ultimately seek harmony with nature so as to preserve life as we know it, as we dream it could be, our best-case scenario, at least giving our children and their children a fighting chance of survival. Everything depends on how hard we are willing to fight to make it so.

 

Let’s get arrested, the more of us there are the better chance that our children will live into old age!

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