Patrick Winn's Notebook:

Bangkok's Nazi chic

I remember the first time I brushed past a Thai teenager wearing a blood-red swastika on his T-shirt on the streets of Bangkok. I cringed with pity. Some creepy foreigner probably sold it to a second-hand shop, I thought, and now this Thai kid is unknowingly walking around sporting the brand of evil incarnate.

Then a saw a second swastika T-shirt, this one royal blue, worn by a different teenager riding the sky train. And then another. And then another. And now that I know to look, I see one of these T-shirts at least once a week. The T-shirt wearer is always male, always young and he's typically a little punky or scruffy looking.

The shirt designs range from your classic Third Reich rally backdrops — as you see in this photo snapped in Bangkok's popular Union Mall — to artsy renderings of Hitler's face awash in acid-trip pinks and glittery greens. (They sell that one in Chatuchak market.)

So what's the deal with teenage Nazi fashion in Thailand?

Well, I'm not willing to compose a (potentially career-destroying) defense of swastika T-shirts. To state the obvious, they're tasteless, ugly and low-rent.

But I can offer an explanation. To some Thai kids, especially kids who aren't terribly well-educated or well-off, swastikas just look bad-ass. They're sinister and tough in a comic book sort of way. Like the Jolly Roger. Like Darth Vader's helmet. Like the logo for the evil Transformers crew, the Decepticons.

And that's pretty much it. Dubbed copies of Indiana Jones and Inglorious Basterds have lent the impression that Nazis are just Hollywood villains — and, when you're 16, it's fun to dress up like the villain.

This Thai nonchalance towards Nazi kitsch has caused several uproars. Several years back, a school headmaster apologized for allowing students to perform a silly Nazi dance routine. More recently, a wax museum in Pattaya apologized for advertising their Hitler statue with a huge billboard claiming, in Thai, "Hitler is not dead!"

In the airport last year, I picked up a children's Thai-language comic book (translated from Korean, actually) in which adventurous school kids embark on a zany quest to find Nazi treasure.

Translation: "Even though most of the gold has been found, those who knew the hiding spots have already died ... so I shall search for Hitler's gold!"

Essentially, if you never went to college with someone whose grandmother didn't survive Dachau, and if your grandfather never woke up screaming from images burned into his head in North Africa, then you're left to construct your concept of Nazis from B-movies and comic books.

We're no different, of course. In the mid-1980s, after Karate Kid came out on VHS, my friend and I would tie on bandanas printed with the imperial flag of Japan, scream "Hai!" and practice crane kicking each other in the face in my grandmother's basement.

I'm assuming that if my grandmother was from mainland China instead of Hyde County, N.C., I might know to avoid donning the same flag Japanese invaders flew over Nanjing.

But I can say for sure that, if we drew swastikas on our foreheads and ran around squealing "Sieg Heil!", then we probably would have suffered much worse than a few poorly placed crane kicks.

Fear not the Bangkok scams

When my cousin inquired over Christmas whether she'd be held hostage by police-sanctioned bandits for shopping in the Bangkok airport's duty-free plaza, I knew another salacious Bangkok scam warning had become legend.

Turns out she's been reading Travel + Leisure, which just compiled the "World's Worst Travel Scams." Surprise! Bangkok makes the list twice.

In addition to potentially scaring my cousin from ever visiting, these panicky travel warning lists build an impression that Bangkok is a nest of pick-pockets, hustlers and conmen.

Maybe I'm a Bangkok apologist. Maybe I've just been lucky. Maybe the hubris of tackling this chaotic city’s ins and outs has caused me to forget my first day here, when I was enamored and intimidated all at once.

But I'm insisting that Bangkok is quite safe for tourists. The predators here seem gentle compared to Rome’s aggressive street kids and Rio's stick-up gangs. (I've yet to hear of a stick-up here, ever.) Moreover, I often feel these scam warnings are overblown.

First, let's dissect what Travel + Leisure calls ...

THE AIRPORT ZIG-ZAG!

Travelers in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport duty-free shops browse then leave. Police falsely accuse them of shoplifting, then request a hefty fee — or else the traveler is bound for prison.

This stems from an incident last year, first made famous by the BBC. A British couple was reportedly falsely accused of lifting a Givenchy wallet, stripped of their passports and holed up in a pink hotel near the airport until fines were paid. This was, at one point, the top-read story on the BBC’s web page.

Guess what received far less attention? The duty-free operator's surveillance footage which appears to show this lady stealing the wallet.

Sadly, the couple's wacky account of their police treatment — involving extortion and a Sri Lankan middleman — is plausible. I have no doubts that, if tourists fall into police custody here, life will get very weird very fast. But, hey, the cops let them stay in a run-down hotel instead of prison. I wonder if every Thai suspect is given the option of hotel or cell.

So now the "Airport Zig Zag" has inherited a cute name and it's accepted as an entrenched scam. Even though the most notable victim appears to have shoplifted on tape. (A similar case, against a Malaysian man, was also refuted by the duty-free operator with surveillance video.)

I say that if you're not a shoplifter, fear not the Gucci outlet and browse freely the racks of discount Marlboros. Besides, they're selling twin bottles of Jack Daniel's for $33 over there. What a steal!

Next up, the gray lady of Bangkok cons ...

THE GEM SCAM!

Friendly stranger or tuk-tuk driver insists that a popular attraction is closed for the day. Instead, they offer a tour of local gem shops hosting sales. Buy as many as you can here, they say, so you can sell them for a profit back home!

Somehow, this one has been around for decades. Really, gem scam victims, how gullible are you? Perhaps you've got a sweet payday coming from that estranged prince you've met via Hotmail? And you thought you'd splurge early on a Thai holiday? If that's the case, I'd love to interest you in this new property I've just inherited. It's simply grand. Cash only, please.

I won't argue that the gem scam isn't widespread, because it is. I won't argue that it's easy on the wallet, because it probably isn't. I'll just argue that it's 100 percent avoidable. Besides, what do you need a bunch of loose gems for? To festoon your scepter?

THE TAXI DRIVER'S METER IS RIGGED SCAM!

A favorite of paranoid expats. Maybe I have meek powers of perception. Maybe I’m not smart enough to calculate velocity-per-Thai baht algorithms in real time. But I just don’t believe rigged meters are rampant. And anyone who wants to use their engineering savvy to squeeze me for 70 cents might as well have it.

And lastly, a travel warning rather than a scam ...

DON'T WEAR RED OR YELLOW ON THE STREET!

Adopted by Thai political factions, these colors invite harassment or beatdowns from Thais who support the opposing camp.

No one will ever mistake a tourist for a Thai politics diehard.

In fact, after the yellow-clad People's Alliance for Democracy seized the premier's compound in 2008, I toured two college friends through the occupied grounds. And I watched with embarrassment as they bought "NEW POLITICS!" T-shirts as souvenirs. The vendor was equal parts confused and amused.

Even if you're Thai in appearance, please note that Bangkok is not a Grand Theft Auto-style nightmare where partisans regularly accost political rivals on the street. Thais of all stripes wear both colors without thinking much of it. You'll be fine.

Dog Meat Morality

About this time last year, I was sitting in a musty hotel room in Northeast Thailand, a coil of dried dog meat resting on my lap.

Photojournalist Pailin Wedel and I had traveled from Bangkok to Sakhon Nakhon province, a known hub for dog meat traffickers (and agriculture, gorgeous vistas and, strangely, Catholicism.) It would end up being one of two week-long reporting jaunts for “The Dog Meat Mafia,” a three-part series that would take another year to complete.

We’d arrived without knowing much, but managed to locate a rather obvious butchery selling dog meat the first day. We were gently shooed away for taking photos, but not before buying a $3 bundle of jerky. That night at the hotel, we’d brought it inside to avoid stinking up the car.

I was bored. And curious. So even though that jerky was stiff as electrical wire, I grabbed one rope of jerky, stuck it between my teeth and pulled. Hard.

I won’t dramatize my decision to eat dog meat as some passage through a moral crossroads. Hardly. But, like most Americans, I have been socially wired to feel that eating a dog is somehow wrong. Beyond my curiosity about how the dog jerky would taste (beyond terrible) I wanted to see how my moral compass would react.

I came away from the whole experience wondering if, morally speaking, eating stray dogs is  more humane than eating a industrially farmed sow.

Let me back up a bit. If you’ve read the “Dog Meat Mafia” series, you know that it spends little time dwelling on actually eating dogs. I realize a lot of readers were probably attracted to the “weirdness” of eating dog meat, but if I succeeded as a journalist, the piece is much more than an excuse to gawk at what a small group of Asians seek out for dinner. It’s really a story about entrepreneurship, the mechanics of low-level corruption and a little-explored corner of the food chain.

Back to the morality issue. A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer suggests reinterpreting stray dogs as a eco-friendly, local-food alternative to other meats.

He imagines a place where stray dogs are allowed to breed before being killed – all to supply people with a cheap, sustainable lunch. We're comfortable shoving them in the euthanasia chamber, he argues, so why not just eat them? In fairness, the guy is vegetarian, so this is mostly intended to provoke thought.

But I wonder if Foer knows that, in a corner of Southeast Asia, this world already exists.

Besides the bribes and smuggling, which involves a low-grade criminality roughly on par with pot dealing, the knock on the Southeast Asian dog meat trade is the cruelty. The wrongness of cramming dogs into cages and shipping them – unfed – on a long route from Thailand to Vietnam.

That’s bad. But so too is the life of a U.S.-born farm animal that spends its entire life in a cage. The stray dog at least gets to freely prowl rice paddies and scarf field rats until it’s caught. Catching these stray dogs and knocking them silly is an ugly job, sure. But so is manning the bolt gun at a cattle farm.

All in all, I’m glad eating that dog jerky trigger a moral crisis, because it was about as palatable as a spiced Nike. I might have lost a bicuspid if I bit down any harder.

But what I decided was this: anyone who’s willing to overlook industrial farming practices for a pork chop – as I am – should find it hard to judge someone who wants to munch on some char-grilled stray dog ribs.

As always, feel free to weigh in with a comment.

French Culture Minister scandal: The sex workers' perspective

As I posted recently, Bangkok's red-light nightlife is often depicted by writers with  lurid imaginations.

For the gullible high school boys, there's a cartoonishly inaccurate Maxim article that tells readers of a "child bride" who'll titilate and strangle you for $300. For the moralizers, a story from The Oklahoman imagines that every woman in the trade is a "sex slave" waiting to be rescued and "freed" by a Christian missionary. Both perspectives are as condescending as they are absurd.

But seldom do readers hear from the women and men who actually work in this imagined, neon-soaked, pulp fiction netherworld.

That's why I was surprised to find this statement from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers. It's their response to the firestorm started by French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, whose autobiography details his lusty fixations on "young boys" working in the prostitution "slave market" in Bangkok.

"All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market, excite me enormously," he wrote.

Now, I don't have his book around the house, so I'm pulling these excerpts from U.K. news outlets. And in fairness, the book is a bit of a confessional. Still, I'm struggling to imagine a context that would redeem that particular line of prose.

In his defense, Mitterrand, who is 62, later insisted that "boy" is a euphemism that can apply even to men in their 60s — and possibly even jowelly culture ministers.

Back to the sex workers' association. I'm going to post their take on the scandal in full. It reads like a group statement, though it's signed by "Khun Chutchai," who is likely Chutchai Kongmont, one of the group's leaders.

Read until the end for the surprise dig at French colonials.

It has come to our attention that [there] is still continuing debate around the issue of the French Culture Minister, Frederic Mitterrand, and his admission that he paid for sex with male sex workers in Thailand. We have seen attacks on him from both the left and the right of French politics — attacks which we see as both homophobic and anti-sex worker.

Worse we see the racist, orientalist views of the elites on both sides of French politics who construct Thai sex workers as somehow “backward” and unable to choose what we do. In Thailand all male sex workers are referred to by the term “Nong” which means boy. We are not duped under age boys forced into “sexual slavery.” We are people in a poor country exercising our choices to live and earn money to support ourselves, our family and our country.

The money we earn and send home to the rural areas of Thailand is far larger than any international development programme and supports far more people.

Tourism to Thailand is our country’s second biggest industry — and people have sex on holidays. Are they meant to be celibate? Is it now unacceptable for Europeans to have sex with Asians in case they are exploiting us? If French politicians are so concerned about our exploitation they would do better to support labour laws for sex workers and to push the ILO to recognise sex work as work.

When and until the parties of the Left and the Right of French politics agree to substantially increase development aid to redistribute the wealth that France and other former colonial countries stole from the developing world, we would appreciate it if you keep sending us your tourists so that we can show them a good time and get some of your hard won cash.

(BTW: Thanks to SE Asian politics site New Mandala, where I originally spotted this statement.)

Burma and the D-Word

Most journalists I know hate the word "dialogue." Mostly because it's a favorite of uncooperative or boring interviewees.

You ask a question seeking the specifics of a political conflict. And they start talking about "dialogue." How they want to establish it, spark it or foster it. It's a lame dodge that rarely  imparts anything revelatory to reporter, or more importantly, the reader.

But sometimes, in a place as reclusive as Burma, "dialogue" itself is news.

I've just returned from a briefing by Obama administration diplomats, who recently arranged a sit-down with Burma's autocratic junta and Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's imprisoned democracy icon. The talks were led by an assistant secretary of state, the highest-ranking U.S. official to negotiate with the junta in well over a decade.

Back in Bangkok, a packed room full of reporters wanted to know all the details of the trip: the results, the next steps, even the Burmese generals' body language.

So did I. But the diplomat behind the microphones wouldn't go much further than to say the U.S. wants "dialogue." Between the U.S. and Burma. And between the Burmese people and the junta, whose state-sponsored killing and force labor violations are well-documented.

The junta is planning a 2010 election that most observers assume will be rigged. But America's hope is that all this dialogue will set the stage for a little less oppression and a little more freedom.

"We're going into this with our eyes wide open,"  said Scot Marciel, U.S. ambassador for the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations. "We've not been under any illusions that this would be easy."

Even if this is just dialogue, relations between the U.S. and Burma have been so cold for so long that high-level talks do represent forward movement. Few expect miracles, Marciel said, especially given that all of their diplomatic precursors have failed.

America's risk of opening dialogue with the junta is looking for foolish for trusting the junta. But the potential payoff -- political prisoners freed, a halt to Burma's nuclear ambitions -- is huge.

So for now, given the extraordinary circumstances, the diplomats get a pass for heavy emphasis on the D-word.

"As to whether they ignored us," Marciel said, "time will tell."

Patrick's Links:

More Dispatches:

• Latest