Here is an extended version of the paper I presented on September 19, 2011 at the conference on “Five Years after the Military Coup: Thailand’s Political Developments since Thaksin’s Downfall,” at Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore. The paper is entitled “L’état, ce n’est plus moi: Popular Sovereignty and Citizenship over a Century of Thai Political Development.”

ในหนังสือเล่มนี้ ผู้เขียนมองว่าเหตุการณ์ต่างๆ ที่เกิดขึ้นในปี 2553 ซึ่งหลายอย่างเป็นโศกนาฏกรรม เป็นสิ่งที่บ่งบอกถึงมรณกรรมของ “ประชาธิปไตยแบบไทย” ซึ่งเป็นระบอบการปกครองของประเทศมาได้ 50 ปีแล้ว  แม้ระบอบการปกครองแบบนี้จะหยิบยืมเปลือกนอกบางอย่างของประชาธิปไตยมาใช้ แต่ก็สงวนสิทธิ์ในการบริหารประเทศให้อยู่ในมือ “คนดี” ที่มีชาติตระกูล มีสถานะทางสังคมสูงและมีฐานะร่ำรวย   แต่ละบทในหนังสือเล่มนี้มีลีลาการเขียนที่ตรงไปตรงมาไม่อ้อมค้อมและวิพากษ์วิจารณ์อย่างไม่ไว้หน้าใคร หนังสือเล่มนี้จึงเป็นงานเขียนที่แปลกออกไปจากปกติทั่วไปเพราะเป็นการผสมผสานระหว่างงานเขียนทางวิชาการ งานเขียนทางวารสารศาสตร์ และงานเขียนที่โจมตีความอยุติธรรมและกระตุ้นให้เกิดความต้องการเปลี่ยนแปลงสังคมในทางที่ดีขึ้น

สารบัญ: คำนำ | 1. รัฐประหารประชาธิปไตย | 2. ในนามของพ่อหลวง | 3. เผด็จการผู้ใหญ่ | 4. ขายตัวขายชาติ | 5. แบบไทยโดยแท้ | 6. กบฏไพร่ | 7. พระเจ้าตายแล้ว

ดาวน์โลด “เทวาสายัณห์: มรณกรรมของประชาธิปไตยแบบไทย”(.pdf, 186 หน้า, 1.3 MB)

FOR NON-THAI READERS: The file made available for free download on this page is the (full text) Thai-language version of Thailand Unhinged: The Death of Thai-Style Democracy. The process of translating the book took over a year to complete, but given that my command of the Thai language is far short of perfect it was important to take the time to get it right. Rather than a word-for-word translation, the Thai edition seeks to preserve the spirit and feel of the English version, while telling the story in a way that might appeal to a Thai audience. The Thai edition is entitled เทวาสายัณห์ (Tewasayan; tewa=deity, sayan=evening), which is also the Thai title of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. For obvious reasons relating to costs and obstacles to distribution, there are currently no plans to release a print version of the book.

Download “Tewasayan” in .pdf

I am happy to announce the publication of a new edition of the book Thailand Unhinged, which was first released around this time last year. Below is a preview of the new Foreword, detailing the changes that were made for the purposes of this new edition. In a nutshell, the changes can be summarized in three words: un(self)censored, expanded, and revised.

Because I imagine that those most interested in this new edition are the same people who bought (or otherwise read) the first, I made a serious attempt to add at least some value to each chapter. This involved much more than changing a few commas here and there; it took perhaps a couple of months to take the old book apart and put it back together, mixing in a good deal of new material. The changes were substantial enough to give the book a new subtitle, which sums up my interpretation of the events that have taken place in the intervening time.

Compared to last year’s release, this new edition should be much easier to get if you live in Asia. The Kindle version is already available for download, while the iBooks version for iPad and iPhone should be shortly. Print versions can be purchased from Amazon as well as a wealth of other online book retailers. For those who have trouble with those retailers’ international shipping policies, the book can also be ordered through Equinox Publishing, which is based in Southeast Asia.

Once again, great thanks to Equinox Publishing for this opportunity. Aside from offering me a chance to publish these two editions of Thailand Unhinged (and to do so without any unnecessary delay), Equinox has given me the freedom to approach my work as a craft. I wish publishing were always this rewarding and enjoyable.

Download the Foreword in .pdf

The Legend of King Prajadhipok

By April 10, the government had seen quite enough. The operations would be carried out by thousands of soldiers, armed to the teeth, seemingly better equipped for a battle with an invading army than the dispersal of a crowd of mostly unarmed protesters. As the soldiers advanced towards the demonstration site at Saphan Phan Fa, on foot and in armored personnel vehicles, Minister of Propaganda Panitan Wattanayagorn publicly boasted that “order” would be restored by nightfall.

But things would turn out quite differently this time. This time, the demonstrators — the vast majority armed with rocks, sticks, the occasional firebomb, and whatever they could find on the pavement that could be thrown at the security forces — refused to play along with the same script that similar incidents have followed since 1973. This time, the demonstrators failed to offer themselves as the inert victims of another state massacre. This time, the demonstrators fought back, with breathtaking courage, against the same kind of military regime that violently suppressed every democratic movement Thailand has ever known. As the street battles unfolded, thousands of people continued to stream into the Red Shirt rallies, laying down their lives before an advancing army. Red Shirt leaders, whom the government had so often dismissed as mere charlatans and opportunists, did not shirk from their responsibility to lead the resistance against the violent crackdown. Whether they were motivated by old intramural grudges or active support of the Red Shirts, perhaps not more than a handful of men dressed in black — suspected to have been themselves military officers — assassinated the operation’s commander, Col. Romklao Thuwatham, and some of his lieutenants before vanishing back into the shadows. Shockingly, for a regime that last updated its playbook in the 1970s, it quickly became clear that butchering a couple dozen people would not be enough to silence the Red Shirts. This time, there would be no taking it lying down. Ceasefire.

The botched crackdown left 26 people dead — 21 Red Shirts, four military officers, and a foreign journalist. A few days later, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD; Thailand is one of a growing number of countries where one can be for democracy without being against dictatorship, hence the redundancy) abandoned their encampment at Saphan Phan Fa and concentrated their forces at Rajprasong. The decision had its downsides. By retreating behind the barricades of a fortified compound in the heart of the city, the Red Shirts lost the mobility and adaptiveness that had enabled them to repeatedly embarrass the government over the previous weeks. But the upside was substantial. In a single move, the Red Shirts put the government in an impossible position — simultaneously making inaction untenable and action unthinkable. On the one hand, the occupation of an area of far greater commercial significance than Rachadamnoen Avenue placed Abhisit’s government under increased pressure from its own supporters to bring the demonstrations to a close. As the government wavered, coalition politicians grumbled, while the increasingly hysterical People’s Alliance for Democracy slammed the government’s failure to put down the Red Shirts whatever the cost. On the other hand, it would have been obvious to anyone who had ever taken a stroll across Red Shirt City at Rajprasong that their dispersal may not only have required a bloodbath evocative of the Paris Commune, but perhaps more importantly to lay waste to some of Bangkok’s most iconic developments. And the Red Shirts understood that, in this day and age, Louis Vuitton bags and Hermès foulards make for better shields than human shields.

Whether by choice or compelled by the military’s refusal to carry out his orders, in the end Abhisit had little option but to capitulate. He offered to dissolve the House in four months, a decision that would presumably have paved the way for an election in November. The offer, preceded by the usual platitudes about imaginary threats against the monarchy, was vintage Abhisit. Not confident enough in his ability to take action against people he had slandered as traitors and terrorists, at the same time the Prime Minister washed his hands of any responsibility for his miserable failure, prolonging his (and the country’s) agony for the sake of guaranteeing the long-awaited promotion of a handful of military men.

It might be worth asking how significant an accomplishment a November election might have been for the Red Shirts. Back in March, Abhisit himself had publicly stated his readiness to dissolve the House in nine months. Had it been worth holding out, at the cost of 30 additional lives, for a three-to-six-month discount on the proposed election timeline? This is a question that was no doubt spiritedly debated in the Red Shirt camp, as its leaders pondered a response. Since the breakdown of the televised “negotiations” with the Prime Minister, nonetheless, the Red Shirts had accomplished far more than an election to be held six months earlier than previously thought possible. Before the demonstrations even started, I noted that the Red Shirts’ goal was not merely to precipitate an early election, but rather to weaken the ancien régime to the extent that it would not be able to prevent the election from having any real consequence (see here; scroll down to the comments). Had the Red Shirts accepted to disperse, November’s vote would have take place in a context quite different from the situation the Red Shirts could have faced had they simply accepted Abhisit’s first offer and gone home.

For one thing, the myriad provocations that the Red Shirts had successfully carried out over the previous two months had not only exposed the dreadful incompetence of the country’s security forces, but also brought to the surface some troubling rifts within the military itself — damaging, one can only hope beyond repair, the credibility, confidence, and cohesiveness of the institution that remains the single biggest obstacle to Thailand’s democratization. The Red Shirts, moreover, had a chance to build an impressive organization and an identity of their own — decisively leading the movement out of the long shadow cast by Thaksin Shinawatra.

Perhaps most importantly, the Red Shirts had already all but destroyed Abhisit Vejjajiva’s political career — in the process, taking away the most handsome, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and fiercely amoral facade available to this thuggish, unelected regime. To many among those who did not like him to begin with, Abhisit was now a murderer whose hands were covered in the people’s blood. To many among those who had no firm opinion, Abhisit was now just the last in a long series of weak Prime Ministers at the mercy of people and institutions he could never really hope to control. And, to many among those who enthusiastically supported his rise to power, Abhisit was now a coward whose failure to take decisive action bordered on treason. Under siege and seemingly in the throes of unharnessed desperation, the Prime Minister had played the “protect the monarchy” card from the bottom of the deck — alleging a fanciful conspiracy illustrated by the now infamous diagram that Colonel Sansern handed to reporters, with no sense of the ridiculous, in a gesture worthy of Inspector Clouseau. This could have been a blunder of potentially career-ending proportions. Manufacturing an existential threat to the nation might have served as a convenient excuse for mass murder. But if one is unable or unwilling to massacre hundreds of people, it is inevitable that those who believed the charges (or in any event found it convenient to hype the allegations) will judge the refusal to confront an existential threat head on as tantamount to dereliction of duty, if not out-and-out complicity.

Still, the offer placed the Red Shirts before a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, rejecting the deal was sure to make them appear unreasonable to many among those who had remained “neutral” throughout this fight — perhaps especially, those urban middle class voters the UDD had worked so hard to court ever since it set up camp on the streets of Bangkok. On the other hand, Abhisit’s offer came with no real guarantees. To accept it without conditions would have meant for the Red Shirts to suspend their rally in exchange for promises many suspected to be empty. For one thing, questions remained over whether Abhisit could credibly commit to keep up his own end of the bargain. Considerable uncertainty, in particular, surrounded the outcome of two Constitutional Court rulings that might yet dissolve the Democrat Party in the weeks to come. It was (and is) still unclear whether the timing of the Election Commission’s decision on the long-delayed cases was mere coincidence, whether it was designed to induce the Prime Minister to leave or remind him he answers to higher powers, or whether it was merely a cheap trick to deflate the Red Shirts’ outrage against perceived “double standards.” Considering, moreover, that Thailand was now under the worst censorship regime since the days of Tanin Kraivichien (of book-burning fame), there would not be anything like a “free and fair election” so long as this kind of government stayed in office — it mattered little whether Abhisit or Chuan Leekpai served as the executive’s titular head. And despite the lip service paid by the Prime Minister to the need to investigate the deaths on April 10, everyone knows that human rights abuses on this scale have never received any proper investigation in Thailand, much less any real justice.

The UDD leadership sought to thread the needle by outwardly embracing Abhisit’s so-called “roadmap to reconciliation” (or better still, to the restoration of the lumpenproletariat’s lost acquiescence) conditional upon being granted two guarantees one would be hard-pressed to describe as unreasonable — the relaxation of censorship and the launch of an independent investigation into the April 10 incidents. The third condition — that Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban turn himself him to acknowledge criminal charges the police had not yet filed — seemed more specifically designed to derail the entire process. In so doing, the Red Shirts effectively threw the ball back into Abhisit’s court. The Prime Minister, his escape routes now blocked, would now have to pick his poison. His options were limited to dissolving the House, and hence commit political suicide, or crack down so ruthlessly as to not only self-destruct, but possibly bring the entire regime he represents down with him.

A few days passed, more deadlines to comply with the last in the government’s long series of ultimatums came and went, but in the end operation murder-suicide was a go. Abhisit took his offer of an early election off the table, as troops and armored personnel carriers gradually encircled Rajprasong. The first shot, fired by a sniper, rang out on May 13, assassinating the rogue Major-General Khattiya Sawasdipol. In the following days, the carnage unfolded as battles raged at Din Daeng and along on the southern edge of Lumphini Park. Ever obsessed with the appearance of urbanity and bourgeois propriety, the government placed signs designating “Live Fire Zones” — more specifically, killing fields where the military had essentially been given carte blanche to shoot civilians, journalists, emergency medical personnel, and generally everything that moved. After days of fighting, the siege of Red Shirt City successfully softened the UDD’s resistance, while the savagery displayed by the regime against its own citizens depressed the number of protesters left at Rajprasong. On the morning of May 19, the army easily overrode the Red Shirt barricades and penetrated their encampment. Faced with the certainty of defeat, the movement’s leaders saved the lives of perhaps dozens of their followers, many apparently determined to fight to the death, by waving a white flag. The surrender had to be announced in haste. Before they could persuade the weeping, jeering crowds of the wisdom of retreating, shots rang out and the Red Shirts leaders ducked for cover, scrambling to leave the stage and reach the safety of the nearby police station. Now leaderless, some of those left in the streets took out their anger and disappointment on some targets of opportunity and a few others of symbolic significance, setting a number of buildings ablaze as they scattered throughout the city.

In a strictly tactical sense, the operation proved to be a success. Though it was never in doubt that a modern army, even one as incompetent, would eventually defeat a few thousand protesters protected by several dozen lightly armed men, the final push produced far fewer casualties than many had feared — “only” 54 people are officially said to had died since Seh Daeng’s assassination. But even the government could not bring itself to describe the operation’s relative success as a victory. No government has ever drawn much in the way of a long-term benefit from a carnage of this magnitude. Besides reclaiming 2-3 square kms of prime real estate, at the total cost of at least 85 lives, the operation solved none of the current regime’s fatal structural flaws. And the extreme measures that the government was forced to take by the Red Shirts — the Emergency Decree, the suspension of most civil and political rights, the suppression of most alternative sources of information, and the establishment of a new organ, the Center for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES), bearing an uncanny resemblance to a hurriedly cobbled-up junta in the mold of Burma’s SLORC — wrecked the democratic appearances Abhisit had once taken great care to keep up. To defeat a movement that objected to its illegitimacy and authoritarianism, the government had to fully reveal itself as such.

As least by the official estimates, the battle that just came to an end was the worst episode of repression of pro-democracy demonstrators in the history of Thailand. And if massacres always have their supporters at the time they take place, any such support tends to fizzle as the stern judgment of history gradually sets in. History has a way of transforming those who witnessed episodes of state violence as idle by-standers and cheerleaders into former freedom fighters. Once he completes his “duty,” falling on the sword for people more powerful than himself, Abhisit will ever since be known as the butcher of Bangkok. Quite possibly, that will be the only thing for which he will be remembered.

It must be said that the Red Shirts do not emerge from Rajprasong looking especially good either. Thanks to their leaders’ decision to surrender, their last stand did not turn out like the Paris Commune. Still, they lost more than 50 additional people. Their support among middle class voters in Bangkok and some of the surrounding provinces will be compromised by their intransigence as well as the property damage inflicted in the wake of their surrender. Their leaders were arrested and might conceivably face more serious charges as a result of having forced Abhisit to murder more of their people. In addition, the arson attacks committed by some of their followers provided the government — and Thailand’s eagerly compliant media — with just the sort of apocalyptic images it needed to further dehumanize the Red Shirts, ignore the pile of corpses sacrificed on the altar of smoother traffic and a more satisfying shopping experience, and at least in the short run provide retroactive justification for the killings.

Then again, nothing really is lost — only the latest victims of state violence and civilian complacency will never come back. The movement’s support remains strong. In the North and the Northeast as among the urban underclasses, their supporters are not likely to shed any tears over the fact that some rich punk in Bangkok can no longer shop at Central World, when dozens of people like them lay dead at the hands of the government. If anything, those who already sympathize with the Red Shirts will likely react with justifiable disgust at the sight of upper- and upper-middle-class citizens in Bangkok making such a scene out of mourning the loss of a shopping mall — whose burning was compared, laughably, to September 11, 2001 — while they continue to shrug off (and in many cases celebrate) the murder of so many people. And the support for the regime is quite likely to only go downhill from here, as the deluge of lies and repressive measures necessary for the government to keep its story straight prove increasingly unpopular, or as the government’s roadmap to “reconciliation” proves to be nothing other than a futile, clumsy attempt to shove the toothpaste back into the tube.

Earlier promises to the contrary notwithstanding, this was nothing close to a “final battle.” Indeed, given that the millions-strong crowds never materialized, this was a battle that would certainly not have been final even if the Red Shirts had ultimately won it. Nonetheless, Thailand seems to have reached a point of no return — perhaps more fittingly, the “end of the beginning” of what is still going to be a difficult transition. The road ahead remains long and uphill; along the way, it will no doubt be marked by victories as well as demoralizing setbacks and unsavory compromises. To borrow imagery from a stirring speech that Nattawut Saikua delivered in 2008 (EN, TH, video below), however, the sky is closer today than it has ever been. The old order is dead. Those who would seek to restore it are badly wounded. And while the star of its big-time players is fading fast, the establishment’s bench is not deep on charisma, competence, and legitimacy. Most important of all, the Red Shirts have already conquered that once-elusive “rightful place” where they can firmly “plant their feet,” having busted down the gates of a political system from which the masses have long been excluded. The Red Shirts have already seized for themselves the right to be “Thai” by colorfully rejecting their old status as second-class citizens. To those inhabiting both the earth and the sky, who so often described them as corruptible and unprincipled, they have already shown the strength of their hearts and the fortitude of their souls. Having now shattered a once impenetrable noise barrier of censorship and indifference, their deafening cries already fill the high heavens.

“What happened to us?” — he wondered aloud, an expression of stunned disbelief on his face — “what happened to our patience, to our tolerance, to mai bpen rai?” 

Of course, anyone with a cursory knowledge of the country’s history already knows that Thailand’s ruling class has never been famous for taking anything like a “mai bpen rai” approach in dealing with challenges to its authority. So it was hard to escape the conclusion that Panitan could not have been lamenting the change he observed in the posture of generals, noblemen, privy councillors, politicians, and crony capitalists of all colors and stripes. His dismay could only have been directed at the vast majority of the Thai public, at those who have long been expected to turn the other cheek to violence, injustice, and exploitation. It is only their refusal to accept the latest usurpation of their power, their failure to take it lying down, that could now lead the noted sakdina intellectual to profess his bewilderment. Certainly, Panitan’s astonishment and anguish are shared rather broadly these days within Thailand’s increasingly besieged political establishment.

Not five decades ago, political scientist David Wilson described Thai society in terms that might perhaps provide a window into the source of Panitan’s bemusement. Wilson observed “a clear distinction between those who are involved in politics and those who are not” and noted, ever matter-of-factly, that “the overwhelming majority of the adult population is not.” He went on to say:

The peasantry as the basic productive force constitutes more than 80 percent of the population and is the foundation of the social structure. But its inarticulate acquiescence to the central government and indifference to national politics are fundamental to the political system. A tolerable economic situation which provides a stable subsistence without encouraging any great hope for quick improvement is no doubt the background of this political inaction.

As it turns out, David Wilson was correct to identify in the “acquiescence” and “indifference” of the vast majority of the public the fundamental basis of “Thai-Style Democracy” — a system of government that, notwithstanding the shallow deference paid to some of the most meaningless trappings of democracy, largely preserved the right of men of high birth, status, and wealth to run the country. Indeed, it was in the interest of building this system of government that Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat insisted that peasants continue to live off the land. It was in the interest of preserving this system of government that the Thai people have more recently been urged to walk “backwards into a klong” and renounce progress in favor of a simpler existence. And it was in the interest of reiterating what this system of government once expected of them that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva recently promised that everything will be fine, so long as the Thai people accept their station in life and, as he put it, continue to  ”do their jobs lawfully.”

“Thai-style democracy” was not destroyed in one day. Despite increasingly desperate pleas to be content with what they have, over time the people of Thailand have had enough of “stable subsistence” and have flocked to Bangkok to fulfill dreams their leaders said they should not dare harbor. Economic growth and modernization gave rise to hopes that a “quick” and decisive “improvement” in their material condition was now within their grasp. Confronted with the refusal by the country’s ruling class to grant them a fair share of the country’s newfound prosperity — reliably built on the backs of the people — they shed their “indifference” and began to vote, en masse, for those who at least bothered to pay some lip service to their empowerment. And when their will was overturned, not once but three times over the last four years, for many among them “acquiescence” was quite simply no longer an option. “Mai bpen rai” has turned into “mai yorm rap.”

For a variety of reasons — not the least of which is the cretinous arrogance of its guardians — “Thai-style democracy” has been in failing health for almost two decades. It finally died last week, overpowered by the tens of thousands of people who marched on Bangkok to demand equality, justice, and “real” democracy. Last Saturday, its corpse was paraded through the city in a festive, 50-kilometer-long procession — an unmistakably Thai rendition of a New Orleans jazz funeral.

The red shirts could never hope to bring a million people to Bangkok, given the monumental logistical challenges that would have presented under the best of circumstances. At the end of the day, their numbers were depressed further by the fact that these were not the best of circumstances. Thanks, in part, to the complicity of their own, most dimwitted leaders, in advance of the march the reds were successfully portrayed as barbarian, “rural hordes”  — most of them paid, some of them brainwashed, many among them not really Thai — determined to lay waste to the capital city in a last-ditch effort to rescue the dwindling fortunes of one man. Just in case the widely anticipated prospects of violence and chaos (periodically revitalized by staged police raids and mysterious bomb attacks) had failed to scare enough people into staying home, hundreds of tripwires were laid down in the form of checkpoints extending deep into the Isan countryside. Then, just at the opportune time,  the government pressed the panic button when it imposed the Internal Security Act and began speaking openly about the possibility of an emergency decree — what would amount, in practice, to an autogolpe.

And yet they came — not in large enough numbers to inaugurate a new system of government, to be sure, but in numbers certainly large enough to trample the old one to death. Some have argued, with merit, that their goals remain unclear, their motives diverse, their demands inarticulate, their strategy underdeveloped, and their leadership coarse, homophobic, and hopelessly divided against itself. Still, the death of the old system requires no clear vision, no unanimity of motive, no strategic acumen, and no enlightened leader; indeed, it does not even require the physical removal of the current puppet regime. What definitively snuffed the life out of “Thai-style democracy” is that its foundation of indifference and sheepish acquiescence has been thoroughly dismantled.

The red shirts may well be confused about what they want to build, but they now have a good idea of what they are against. Perhaps the most revealing development in this regard is the resurrection and endless repetition of the word “phrai,” a word that strips its complement — “amartaya” — of all its remaining ambiguity. Phrai does not mean “slave,” “proletarian,” or “pauper.” It means commoner. And though attempts to spin and muddle the meaning of this phrasing are legion, everyone knows what a “commoner” is not.

Whatever the Prime Minister might say, this is not a “class war” in the sense that it pits poor against rich. This fight is about restoring the aristocracy to the ceremonial role it formally accepted, at the barrel of a gun, on June 24, 1932. Most importantly, this fight is about subjecting the amartaya — the mandarins and praetorian guards, most themselves phrai by birth, who have long exploited the pretense of defending the monarchy to hoard power and riches for themselves — to the will of the people. And while the reds have yet to achieve either of those goals, “Thai-style democracy” could no longer endure once its founding ideology was exposed as an especially ignoble adaptation of Plato’s “Noble Lie.” It is merely by standing up to say “enough” that hundreds of thousands of people, many belonging to social classes whose right to participate in the country’s governance has never before been acknowledged, accomplished what previous democratic movements could not — put the old system to death. While no one knows exactly what kind of new social contract will take shape in the years to come, the only chance of stability is offered by one that recognizes the people’s right to govern their own country. A “real” democracy, if you will.

“Thai-style democracy,” the spawn of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, is survived by its adoptive father and its loving caretaker of three decades. There can be little doubt that the latter, now aged 89, will spend the rest of his days clinging to the vestiges of the old system like a grief-stricken gorilla sometimes spends weeks carrying around the carcass of her dead pup. One can only hope that those around him will have the presence of mind not to embark on a collective suicide mission, throwing themselves in the path of a stampede in the deluded hope that they might somehow bring back to life what has now been definitively consigned to the history books. With some notable exceptions, it seems, the people of Thailand are no longer willing to prostrate themselves to the level of dogs.

It’s my great pleasure to announce that the book “Thailand Unhinged” — a draft of which had been posted here in early January — was released today by Equinox Publishing (click here for the press release). It comes with a new subtitle: “Unraveling the Myth of a Thai-Style Democracy.” The blurb on the back reads as follows:

Thailand Unhinged offers a trenchant analysis of Thai politics and society over the tumultuous years that followed the ouster of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thailand’s ongoing political crisis is explained through the prism of the country’s painful post-absolutist history — a history marred by the systematic sabotage of any meaningful democratic development, the routine hijacking of democratic institutions, and the continued suffocation of the Thai people’s democratic aspirations orchestrated by an unelected ruling class in an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to its power. The book includes scathing critiques of both Thaksin’s administration as well as the military-backed government that came to power in late 2008, following the week-long siege of the country’s busiest airports staged by the “yellow shirts” of the People’s Alliance for Democracy. The essays are written in a provocative, confrontational style — making Thailand Unhinged a decidedly unconventional mix of academic scholarship, literary journalism, and radical pamphleteering.

The book will be available at online retailers, among them of course Amazon.com (click here for the book’s Amazon page), as well as select bookstores in Southeast Asia. While Equinox will pitch it to bookstores in Thailand, it remains to be seen whether it will be distributed there (or, if so, for how long). Though I did make a serious attempt to steer clear of violating Thailand’s thought crime legislation, that’s not the only reason why bookstores might elect not to carry it.

For those who read a previous draft and liked it, and those who downloaded the draft but didn’t go through it yet, there are at least three reasons why it makes sense to buy this book. First, the printed version comes in a beautiful package. The cover, in particular, is alone worth the price of the entire book. Thanks to the generosity of Chatchai Puipia — easily one of the most talented artists of his generation — I am proud to feature the stunning (and delightfully haunting) painting “Siamese Smile” on the cover. Second, a lot of painstaking work has gone into improving the book since the previous draft was taken down from this site. For this, I am grateful to my colleague D., who agreed to spend hours with me going through the manuscript, virtually word-for-word, in an attempt to make the prose as elegant as possible — the occasional profanity notwithstanding. Third, I would love it for my publisher — who took a chance on this book after many others shirked or sneered — to reap some kind of reward from the book’s publication.

Because the book has no section dedicated to “acknowledgments,” I want to take the opportunity now to publicly thank some people without whom the book might never have seen the light of day (or wouldn’t have turned out quite as well). Aside from the aforementioned, I want to thank my good friend C., who has spent months promoting this work. Given that there was certainly nothing in it for him, I have often been touched by the relentlessness with which he helped get this out. In addition, I want to thank BangkokPundit, the guys at New Mandala, and Freedom Against Censorship Thailand for calling attention to the book. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor B.J. Terwiel, who agreed to my request to print a comment of his on the back cover.

I should add that the experience of writing this book was personally enriching beyond anything I had ever written before. Perhaps the best thing to happen in the past year was the opportunity to make the acquaintance of people who at different times happened to stumble on this site — academics, writers, artists, journalists, and regular readers. While a few have since become good friends, I am frequently moved by the words of encouragement and support I receive from people I barely know and, most often, have never met. Regardless of how well or how poorly this book does commercially, on a personal level it has already been a smashing success. So thank you — to all of you who took the time to read my work and contribute your opinions.

Though the timing of the book’s release is entirely fortuitous, I don’t think I could have chosen a more opportune time had I been given the chance. Many thanks to Mark Hanusz at Equinox for the amazing opportunity to publish this book, precisely at the kind of critical juncture that renders it most timely.

The recent wave of demonstrations had started as a stunning success for the red shirts. The series of coordinated actions that led to the spectacular debacle in Pattaya revealed an unexpected measure of discipline and organizational prowess for a movement often thought of as rudderless and unruly. Important goals were achieved. The country’s piteous Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was humiliated and exposed as the puppet that he is — at once so powerless as to fail to afford his illustrious guests the security civilized countries routinely guarantee them and so cowardly as to rely on a private armed militia, the blue shirts, to ambush protesters he could not get the army or the police to keep out of the area.

When the military did step in, following Sunday’s emergency decree, even the incipient crackdown appeared to bolster the red shirts. The reaction of the authorities, in particular, clearly evidenced the “double standard” their leaders had lamented all along. Reactionaries can shoot their opponents, run police officers over with their trucks, riot in front of Parliament, trash Government House, and occupy the airports for a week with the impunity characteristically accorded in Thailand to the champions of the establishment. But if you are against the bureaucrats, the aristocrats, and the generals who have run the country for the last 75 years, shattering the glass doors of a five-star hotel  is all it takes to be branded an “enemy of the state.”

The luck of the red shirts turned in a mere matter of hours. By Monday afternoon, the movement’s once-buoyant leadership had effectively lost control of the situation. Supporters scattered all over Bangkok resorted to desperate measures to halt the army’s methodical advance through the capital. The height of irresponsibility was reached as red shirts commandeered LPG tankers and drove them into highly populated areas such as the Din Daeng triangle and Soi Rangnam, as if to threaten the annihilation of entire neighborhoods should the army dare to move in. To protect themselves, at least some of the red shirts had proven willing to endanger the lives of regular people — those whose interests and aspirations they ostensibly advance, those whose support is indispensable to the success of their movement. In the process, the red shirts squandered any good will the local population might have harbored towards them — reducing, for the time being, the prospects of a popular uprising to mere fancy.

As they increasingly lost control of their own supporters, the red shirts quickly succumbed to the mediatic onslaught that accompanied the regime’s crackdown. Given the military’s shameful history of repression and mass murder, it is hard to think anyone would believe a word that comes out of a Thai general’s mouth. But the government successfully disseminated its self-serving narrative nonetheless, portraying its actions as deliberate, orderly, and restrained in the face of an unwieldy terrorist mob. The servile local media eagerly obliged; the facile foreign press swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Of course, the official version of the events was the usual pack of lies and half-truths. Photographs and video already contradict the preposterous notion that soldiers merely fired warning shots in the air, or that the weapons seen firing directly into the crowds had only been loaded with blank rounds. In the next days and weeks, we will find out just how many red shirts those blank rounds injured or killed.

By Monday afternoon, nonetheless, the red shirts had lost much of their support, their message, and their claim to “democratic” legitimacy. Their numbers vastly diminished, their resources depleted, their credibility in tatters, it would have been suicidal to lead the remaining protesters at Government House into a showdown with the army. Under the circumstances, to beat an orderly retreat was not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Thanks to its guns, its money, and whatever remains of its traditional stranglehold on the media, the old order lives on. The military and bureaucratic elites are still in charge. But, as wiser and more illustrious colleagues have noted (see here and here), it increasingly looks as if God is dead in Thailand (in the Nietzschean sense of that expression). And so those who yearn for real democratic change — those whose ideals transcend the restoration of Thaksin to an office he occupied legitimately and abused shamefully — should take heart in the recognition that the events of the last few months may have already undone decades of establishment propaganda. Old taboos are being shattered. Old myths are being destroyed. And, at long last, the iniquity of old untouchables is now being increasingly exposed to well-deserved public disgust.

The garbage removal process has only just begun.

On the other side, in red, stand the poo yai of a different kind — provincial gangsters, corrupt upcountry politicians, and (former) Bangkok-based businessmen who have fallen from the grace of the military and bureaucratic elites. They too want the whole pie for themselves. They too have used public office to line their pockets, reward their cronies, and silence their critics. They too have have labeled their opponents foreign agents and threats to society. They too have ruled with the crassest disregard for human rights and democratic freedoms. They too have exploited the people’s fear of “the other” — supposed deviants, presumed insurgents, and purported foreign invaders — to bolster their credentials as the strenuous defenders of Thailand’s social cohesion, independence, and tradition. They too have raped, tortured, and killed. The difference? Instead of viewing them as a threat, those in the red shirts see the people as an opportunity. Instead of telling them, to their face, that they have no right to a government that works for them, they seek to ride the people’s long-frustrated aspirations all the way back into executive office. What they offer in return is a chewed-up, leftover bone — mere scraps of the spoils of power they once again seek to hoard for themselves and their henchmen.

It is often the case that of the deepest, darkest crises are borne the most spectacular of possibilities. Thailand is in a rut, but its current predicament is no different. It is at this painful juncture, after the tragic setbacks that followed the triumph of the 1997 People’s Constitution, that the Thai people have an unprecedented opportunity to take charge of their own destiny, to reach for what they have long been denied. As Thaksin’s influence continues to wane, those committed to real social and political change have the opportunity to channel the unity of purpose that the provincial masses achieved — for the first time in their history — under the leadership of Thai Rak Thai into a genuinely democratic movement. One that seeks the people’s empowerment but rejects the corruption, the cronyism, the violence, and the contempt for the rule of law of the old TRT regime.

At the same time, the corruption scandals that have hit Abhisit’s government, the atrocities it has desperately sought to cover up, and the wave of paranoid repression it has unleashed have exposed the yellow shirts for all their hypocrisy. It is now painfully obvious that the military-backed elites who have paralyzed the country and pissed all over Thailand’s international image have gone to such extremes only just so they could substitute the will of the people for their own, superior wisdom. Only just so they could replace corrupt politicians inimical to their agenda for equally crooked but more malleable ones. Only just so they could establish their own dictatorship masqueraded in the most meaningless trappings of democracy. Should Bangkok’s students, professionals, and middle-income, white-collar workers rise up — just as they did when they caught on to a similar fraud in 1992 — they would not only deprive the new regime of a constituency whose tacit support it needs to survive, much like Suchinda’s regime did 17 years ago. This time, urban middle-income voters have a chance to parlay a potentially invincible alliance with the once-dormant rural populace into sweeping, long-awaited social change.

What will it take to marry the aspirations of the provincial masses with those of the urban middle classes? It will take meeting half way, to join hands in a movement that is neither red nor yellow, but rather embodies the noblest sentiments of each. It will take for the provincial masses to recognize that the gangsters they have often called their representatives are as much an obstacle to their empowerment as the poo yai in Bangkok. It will take for them to throw Thaksin under the bus, embracing the urban electorate’s desire for a cleaner, more transparent, more honest, more responsive government. It will take for the urban middle classes to acknowledge that the Bangkok-based poo yai are as much an impediment to the country’s progress as the provincial politicians they viscerally despise. And it will take for those among them who share with the PAD rank-and-file a sincere reverence for Thailand’s most sacred institutions to openly reject their PAD’s elitism, its contempt for democracy, and its fascist fantasies. 

This is the people’s chance. A chance to substitute Thai-style dictatorship with a real, Thai-style democracy. A chance to honor king, nation, religion, and each of the distinctive traditions that make Thailand a unique, special place without subjecting dissenting views to censorship, legal harassment, or violence. A chance to reject the simplistic, vulgar reduction of “Thai culture” to the mere requirement that the most desperate must always grovel before the most fortunate. A chance to recognize, as Prince Damrong did, that tolerance, freedom, and non-violence are as much an integral part of Thai culture as sakdina-based social hierarchy. A chance to elevate, as King Mongkut demanded, the pluralistic traditions of Sukhothai on par with the more conservative legacy of Ayutthaya. A chance to restore Buddhism to more than just the legitimation of social inequalities. A chance to bring the military under civilian control. A chance to come clean about recent history. A chance to acknowledge that the story of the last 75 years is not the “development” of democratic institutions, but rather the elites’ increasingly frantic attempt to deny the people real democracy. A chance to pay homage to the sacrifice of those who died for democracy by telling the truth about their executioners. A chance to stop exchanging human rights abusers for statesmen, heros for troublemakers, and novelists for criminals. A chance to put the elites back in their place. A chance to make government work. A chance to empower the people through equitable development, education, rights, and participation. A chance to lead Thailand into the developed world not through the back door of repression and exploitation, but as the nation of laws, freedom, justice, and opportunity it has always aspired to be.