“Thailand is disintegrating. Its once vibrant democracy is now widely viewed as an ungovernable and failing state.” - Joshua Kurlantzick
What’s wrong with Thailand? It’s the education system, economy and environment, stupid.
That, at least, is Kurlantzick’s assessment, and I have to say I largely agree with him. But I would add that at a more fundamental level, the real problem is the cynicism of a ruling class that can’t come to terms with a legacy of lies that they helped to perpetuate.
Thailand’s moneyed elite find it hard to accept that anyone could ever buy into Thaksin’s twisted conception of “democracy” without being bought off first, but refuse to acknowledge that the inexplicable gullibility of the masses is a product of decades of dedicated myth-making. Thailand has long believed itself to be uniquely blessed with a wise and benign monarch, and has invested heavily in the notion that he is the fount of all that is good in the Kingdom. This fiction has been propagated by generations of rulers who found it convenient to let the king worry about “social welfare” while the rich got on with the business of getting richer–largely by exploiting a nation of docile, grateful royal subjects.
The trouble is that with the monarch’s mortality looming large in almost everyone’s minds, this fairy tale has begun to unravel.
Thaksin, the opportunist extraordinaire, had the foresight to see that a large swathe of the population was looking for someone who would look out for them, and started usurping the role of the king as the people’s savior. Conditioned by a lifetime of royal paternalism, many of the poor fell for his populist policies, which have proven to be neither more nor less effective than all the Royal Projects out there in raising them out of their station in life.
The trouble is that Thaksin didn’t honor the other side of the bargain–providing the rich with a buffer between themselves and the rest of the country. They began to fear, in fact, that Thaksin intended to make them pay for his election-winning schemes by forcing them to cough up more in taxes. And so there was a showdown.
(Thailand’s rich, it should be said, are not entirely averse to ponying up for the underprivileged. But they prefer to do it on a voluntary basis, and through the right channels–namely, by donating to the royal family. This way they can remain rich and–almost as important–retain their aura of self-righteousness.)
カテゴリー:Thailand
