Bangkok Mayor Sukhumbhand Paribatra said that on Wednesday it will become clear whether the Thai capital will be able to withstand the onslaught of water from the country's flooded Northern provinces. Prime Minister Yinglak Chinnavat warned earlier that the issue with the outflow of river water may be compounded by the high sea tide at the end of the week.
It's difficult to imagine that enormous modern capital of nine million people under a meter and a half of water in the 21st century. But at the same time, we can say that we're entering an era in which everything is possible - Western civilization simply does not want to believe in this. This civilization is highly rational, it believes in progress and the omnipotence of intelligent people. From its perspective, all troubles come about as a result of poor decisions.
Too much water
I left Bangkok two weeks ago. I knew that Syvarnabhumi Airport was open for flights (the old Don Mueang Airport to the north is now flooded), and the highway leading to it is elevated 20 meters above the ground. However, there was a stretch of about a kilometer on the street leading from the embankment of Chao Phraya to the overpass that could have been flooded, but I was lucky on that day.
Being in South-East Asia, you understand that in addition to being a symbol of technological progress in various small areas, it is also a place of routine floods. Could the entire country turn into a lake? Something similar happened in neighboring Myanmar (Burma) in May 2008 when it was hit by Cyclone Nargis. The losses were estimated at 23,000 people, which included those who were swept off by a raging flow of water and hit their heads on trees (especially children and the elderly), and also those who were left with nothing to eat or drink, strange though it may sound.
In general, the strangest thing about floods in this part of the world is that they make it very difficult to supply people with clean water. Your house is flooded; garbage from a village or city is floating around, as well as crocodiles that escaped from some farm in Phatthaya, snakes that were washed out of their holes and the contents of urban sewage facilities.
I flew to Thailand from the Philippines, and two days later the old downtown area of Manila where I had been staying was hit by a strong typhoon, and suddenly found itself under half a meter of water. A sea wave four meters high rushed over the concrete breakwater of the embankment, but could not go back. It became a city without cars, with flooded power transmission lines and other impossible things, if only for two days. At any rate, I have escaped from floods twice, and this has given me something to consider about finding a pattern in these events.
Punishment from above
For centuries, people in Asian countries have drawn a connection between divine retribution and mistakes by the authorities. The special, collective character of Asian societies and their rigidly centralized power have emerged from the permanent need to create and maintain irrigation systems (which involve an enormous number of people with shovels), to stock rice reserves because floods may destroy the fields, and so on. The authorities were perceived as an intermediary between the elements and society, and for this reason were given a sacred status.
Incidentally, many in Burma considered Cyclone Nargis to be punishment for the military regime in that country - in 2008 it was defending itself from the attacks of the George W. Bush Administration with particular ferocity, and prevented U.S. and other Western warships from coming near its shores. Meanwhile, these warships could have aided them like they did after the tsunami in Japan this year and in Indonesia in 2004. Now the regime is reforming itself with amazing speed and the floods in Burma are generally within the norm, although they are nearly as destructive as in Thailand.
But why would Thailand be subjected to divine punishment? Is it because of the elections in July, three weeks before the start of the rainy season? In theory, the punishment should have been administered earlier, during the rule of the former government that was trying to establish a dictatorship of the urban middle class over society as a whole. The current authorities have been subjected to a trial that is practically impossible to sustain because it could not have been predicted. But political changes still take place in these situations.
For Europeans or Americans, who subconsciously believe in progress and that any natural disaster can be prevented by not making mistakes, it may be difficult to accept that sometimes floods or tsunami just happen. People in the West are highly prone to the Stalinist mentality in which every disaster has its given name, patronymic and family name. The popular concept that global warming and climate change have been caused by human activities, and can therefore be corrected by humans, may or may not be correct, but it is absolutely Western.
Weather and superpowers
Climate change has taken place in the past as well, and it has led to shifts in global politics. Russian historian Ivan Mozheiko points out in his lectures and books that before Genghis Khan came onto the scene, the weather in the steppes had been fair for several decades, as a result of which verdant pastures appeared, and people and cattle thrived. What came next is well-known: Genghis Khan's campaigns and the downfall of the then superpowers...
Vitaly Melyantsev said in his lectures at Moscow State University that many historians have suggested explanations for answering the question of how the then modern and powerful Chinese Empire, the world leader at that time, declined into a systemic crisis for two hundred years, starting in the 18th and 19th centuries. They argue that all this was caused not by the conservative policy of the ruling Manchurian dynasty, but by climate change, the collapse of agriculture and the ensuing impoverishment of peasants.
Lots of impossible things happen in politics too, not only in the climate. Thus, in the first half of the 1930s it was hard to believe that WWII could be possible. Nobody had any reason to start it. It is difficult to believe that today, in our enlightened century, after the regimes of Ataturk, Nasser or Mubarak, millions upon millions of people in the Muslim world could turn from the epoch of education to wild Wahhabism.
But we have witnessed elections in Tunisia, as well as wars and revolutions in Egypt and Libya with a clear radical - rather than the expected democratic - tinge. And further, there were the Saudi and Iranian nuclear bombs and various other things that seemed to be the main threat after the 9/11 attacks but have somehow become less frightening. So today everything is possible, at least in theory.
People are conservative by nature, and progress is a relative term. But this is helpful, at least with regard to Thailand. A nation that was built on rivers, boats and river bed piles is now displaying an unprecedented ability to adapt itself, even in that bastion of modernity, Bangkok. It is enough to mention the concrete semi-circular dams by the entrances to shops that are instantly erected, and will come down just as fast when the water subsides.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
