Showdown in Thailand

Thailand’s embattled Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiwa has said that society can not be changed through intimidation. He was speaking of red-shirt protesters who’ve shut down an upscale hotel and shopping district in the center of Bangkok with their barricades of tires and bamboo poles. Abhisit has also made some serious threats to drive out the protesters by force.

This is beyond ironic since he owes his own tenure to yellow-shirt protesters who shut down Bangkok’s international airport in order to drive out an elected government. The yellow shirts represent the army brass, royalists and the Bangkok elite. They call themselves People’s Alliance for Democracy but they want a majority of parliament to be appointed rather than elected because in a free election they are certain to lose to the red-shirts who represent the masses.

The yellows positively despise Taksin Shinawatra, deposed leader of the red-shirts; at this point he’s more like a spiritual leader and probably financial benefactor. He’s in exile and can’t return without facing a jail term. I have very little respect for him myself; I consider him responsible for mass murder. He campaigned on a pledge to rid the country of drugs within three months of his election and upon taking office he ordered the police to take out a lot of ‘drug dealers’.

In the event 2500 people were summarily executed. According to the police they were all killed in drug turf shootouts. The killings met widespread approval amongst the people. The problem in Thailand is mostly meth which can certainly be a scourge. Even an expat I talked to not long after the killing spree thought it was a good idea; that is, until I pointed out that without benefit of fair trials and the opportunity to defend oneself, it was likely that at least ten percent – 250 people – were either entirely innocent or at most guilty of small time misdemeanors: certainly nothing worthy of death sentences.

The major complaint the establishment had against Taksin was the special treatment he set up for himself when he sold his telecom company, largest in Thailand. He had legislation passed which exempted the $1.9 billion sale from taxes. He was only the richest man in the country, but couldn’t stand to pay his fair share of the cost of government. It also rankled the elite that he sold it to Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, in other words it is now owned by a foreign government.

As a result of the hatred of Taksin on the part of the elite, he was ousted in a military coup in 2006. The problem is that he’s the most popular elected leader in Thai history. He’s the first to serve out a full term in office, the first to be reelected to a second term and the first to win an outright majority in parliament and not need coalition partners to govern.

He accomplished that popularity by being the first Thai leader to take account of the needs of the rural poor and common people in general. It certainly can be argued that he really doesn’t give a shit about the people and that his policies are pure populist vote buying, but that’s neither here nor there, the fact is he did it and the people love him for it.

The first prime minister chosen by Taksin’s party – which was still in power - after the coup was removed by the courts because of a conflict of interest: He hosted a cooking show on TV for which he received a token $50 payment. The second, as mentioned previously, was ousted, essentially driven out of power, by yellow-shirt protesters who shut down the airport until their demands were met.

The big question is why they were so adamant about ousting a Taksin oriented government after Taksin himself was out of the picture. I don’t live there, only in a neighboring country, but I have lived there in the past and have traveled there extensively. Even so, I can’t claim to be an expert on the situation, only an interested observer. At any rate, the only reason I can come up with for the elite’s resolve in removing an elected government is that they couldn’t stand seeing public benefits going to the country’s poor. I know it makes no sense, but that’s the best I can make of it.

The common people of Thailand have found their voice and their strength and are no longer willing to accept the trickle down benefits offered by the elite. Thailand has one of the least equitable societies in this region.

What gets me is how the royalists thought they could use people power to oust a government without expecting the opposition to take the same tact.

Where it stands now is that the red-shirts are demanding new elections. The prime minister has offered to bring up the date of the next election to this December instead of a year December, but the red-shirts are holding firm to an earlier date. How much more basic can you get than ask for an election to replace an unelected government?

There’s one wild card in the mix; Thailand’s ailing king. He is highly revered by the people and if he wished to intervene, the government would be out in a wink. Thailand has very strong Lese Majeste laws which make the least criticism of the king a serious offense. The king is still a strong stabilizing force, but his son, heir to the throne, is widely disliked by the Thai people. When the current king dies, there will be an additional strong destabilizing force in the situation.

I don’t see civil war, but in this volatile mix, almost anything is possible.

Iran – Honduras – Bolivia – Venezuela – Thailand - USA

Fascinating changes are happening in Iran, but first a little background. In 1954 a democratically elected leader named Mohamed Mossadegh was ousted in a CIA backed coup and replaced with our man, the Shah. As I recall Mossadegh was a leftist who had plans to nationalize the oil industry and when American corporate profits are threatened the CIA steps in. (If anyone is interested in learning more about how the CIA works I highly recommend a very lengthy book by Norman Mailer entitled Harlot’s Ghost. It’s a novel but it includes an extensive bibliography; it’ll scare the hell out of you.)

The Shah had his good points – he was a modernizer and increased the role of women in society – but he was cruel and heartless in maintaining his rule. I’ll never forget a picture taken after the Iranian revolution which showed a man, surrounded by a crowd of people, holding up a young child who had had his arms chopped off by the Shah’s secret police as a means of punishing his father. It doesn’t get any lower than that.

But dictatorships cannot last. Despots either die or are removed through revolution. If it’s by the latter there’s a good chance the country may turn in a radical direction as Iran did, and if the brutality wreaked on a country can be attributed to the actions of another country, in this case the US, it’s fair to assume a backlash against the offending nation.

Democracies, on the other hand, may have coups but never revolutions. It’s reasonable to make another assumption; that if America had just left Iran alone back in the fifties it might well now be a secular, modern and relatively prosperous country. I admit it’s a stretch to make 50 year assumptions, but it also seems entirely possible that Iran would have turned out very differently than today.

For one thing, the demographics of the country would have been very different. It’s axiomatic that modern, secular countries where educating and liberating women is undertaken brings lower birth rates. I would therefore argue that the Iranian revolution is experiencing blowback from its very high proportion of young people – 60% of the population is under 25 - produced as a direct result of the repression of women.

Iran’s educated urban people and especially the young are rebelling against the theocracy imposed upon them by aging, hard-line clerics. The semblance of democracy they are allowed has whet their appetites for more. The so called ‘reformers’ who lost the recent election are barely different from Ahmedinejad, but they offer a cause to rally around. Iran’s true rulers are the clerics who absolutely would not allow a true reformer to stand for election.

An essential fact pertaining to the recent Iranian election that you’re probably not aware of is that Ahmedinejad’s winning margin of greater than 60% closely confirmed opinion polls prior to the vote. He very likely won the election and did it with the votes of the rural poor – he’s a populist.

What baffles me about the whole affair is why his people felt such a strong need to commit fraud or act suspiciously like they were committing fraud (I won’t go into the details but take it from me, there was a lot of fishy stuff going on) when he had the vote sewed up. Maybe they anticipated the backlash from restive youth and the urban elite yearning for a more open, modern society and wanted to wrap it up very quickly.

Meanwhile their brutish, heavy handed response to the demonstrations and protests has turned a large segment of society as well as the international community against them. Furthermore it has exposed the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who is supposed to have a divine mandate, as a crass political hack. At this point his rule will be permanently tainted. When politics and religion mix, both are sullied.

The mark of a true democracy, or maybe I should say, an evolved democracy, is how well it treats its minorities. As long as the conservative clerics leave no room for the urbane, the educated, the youth to express themselves, unrest will develop. And in this case could well mean revolution. Iran has elections but it is not by any stretch a democracy.

Another factoid worthy of note in all the hoopla about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, is that they have not instigated a war in 250 years. If they indeed want a nuke it’s only to protect themselves from Israel, which does have nukes and would have no compunctions about using them.

In Honduras, the elite staged a coup to depose an elected leader, Manuel Zelaya. They say (and it’s endlessly repeated in the media) because he was trying to engineer an unconstitutional third term for himself, but that’s total bullshit. He set up a referendum to establish a constitutional convention that wasn’t even going to convene till his term was nearly over, making it impossible for it to enable an additional term for him as president. No, his great crime was pushing through a minimum wage and fighting for other benefits for people on the lower rungs of society.

Bolivia and Venezuela are similar in having lighter-skinned middle class people implacably opposed to leaders elected by large majorities of voters. In the case on Bolivia, Evo Morales is the first president of indigenous descent in a nation that’s 2/3 indigenous. Hugo Chavez, though repeatedly referred to as a dictator by the American media and treated as such by the US government, including the Obama administration, has won three free and fair elections in six years by margins over 60%.

In Thailand’s case, Taksin Shinawatra, elected twice by a comfortable margin, was ousted in a coup generated by the urban elite who rightfully hated him because he was corrupt but who also never gave a minute’s thought to the needs of the majority rural poor. Whatever his underlying motivations were (some say crass political calculations) Taksin won the hearts of the people by, for example, providing medical care at a negligible cost and allocating money for rural development. When the people voted in a successor government of his party, the Bangkok elite also drove it from power. Now they want 2/3 of the legislature to be appointed because they think the masses are too dumb to be entrusted with electing a government.

The US had its coup when the Supreme Court installed Bush in power, but it is still continuing. The elite own the US government and the health care debate is a prime example. Obama was an advocate of single-payer, or Medicare for all, as a Senator and candidate, but now that he’s president neither he nor anybody in Congressional leadership is allowed to even mention the term as a possible alternative. Obama’s personal physician for the past 20 years was scheduled to appear on an ABC forum on health care. He was disinvited a day before the broadcast because he’s an advocate of single-payer. It now looks like the administration is willing to compromise on a public option, all to appease a rabid Republican Party.

And yet a recent poll showed 60% of Americans in favor of some form of direct government involvement in health care whether it be single-payer or a public option to private health insurance. If you further break down those numbers into political affiliation you see about 90% of Democrats in favor. Just who then are the Democrats representing?... Exactly. The Democrats lately have received more money from the health care industry than the Repugs. In fact, it looks like a single-payer bill, co-sponsored by 90 representatives, will come up for a vote in the House though it’s sure to lose since the leadership is totally opposed. Voters will get a chance to see where their representative’s true loyalties lie.

The minority in Iran is on the right side of history since it is seeking openness, freedom and true democracy. In all the other cases mentioned the minority is implacably opposed to any changes that might dilute their power. The well-being of their societies as a whole never enters their consciousnesses.

To understand how low down the discourse in America has gotten there’s no better example than seeing pensioners disrupting town hall meetings by yelling they don’t want the government to mess with their Medicare. It doesn’t get any dumber than that. Or realizing that a majority of Repugs think Obama is not an American citizen. Those people are so stupid they are dangerous.

As for me, if my personal life wasn’t so easy and enjoyable I’d be freakin’ end of the line cynical. If I had to live in the States I’d be positively livid. What’s most depressing to me about the situation in America is that the only people with the energy to protest are the wingnut idiots, while the left stands idly by as they witness the theft of the government and wholesale trashing of American values. America should have leaders like Chavez and Morales who are willing to fight to the bitter end for they believe in and for what they were elected to accomplish. They should be shutting down the government as the protestors did in Thailand. They should be as brave as the Iranian protestors who face brutal repression in the pursuit of their basic rights. Instead they settle for almost-as-bad-as-nothing and think it’s progress.