Larvatus Prodeo

Harry Nicolaides, the Australian expat arrested in Thailand for writing a book insulting their royal family (background in this earlier LP post), has been sentenced to the minimum three years’ jail after pleading guilty.

Paul Bullock has done some homework, including finding a PDF copy of the novel concerned, and some other examples of Nicolaides’ writing; amongst other things, the first couple of pages of Verisimilitude make abundantly clear why it was self-published. But mediocre writing is not a crime. Nor should writing about the Thai monarchy in insufficiently reverential tones. As Paul puts it:

In the end it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if he is a good writer or not, it doesn’t matter what kind of guy he is, it doesn’t even matter whether he deliberately or recklessly got himself into this mess. What matters at the moment is that a man is in prison for nothing more than exercising free speech and making a poor choice of travel destination, and at the moment he seems to be getting less help from our government than a certain group of convicted drug traffickers in Indonesia.

Continue reading ‘Harry Nicolaides jailed’