absolutelyBangkok archive · Politics
Originally published Aug. 28, 2008
This is a bitter post. Listening to PAD leaders on Government House stage any outsider must be struck by their screeching diatribes. Forgive me the comparison, but last time I came across this type of inflammatory voices was while listening to recordings of, well, the Führer. Talk about instigation, demonization, mass psychosis.
It is no coincidence that a Bangkok Post editorial on day 3 of the PAD’s occupation of Government House reads: “To PAD watchers like Professor Prabhas Pintoptang of Chulalongkorn’s faculty of political science, the coalition has been seen as planting structural hatred and division in society on a scale far worse than that ever achieved by the previous government under ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra.”
The Post goes on that in an interview with Thai Post last month, Prof. Prabhas said the PAD had become “an ultra-nationalist movement.” He said the PAD was using the same demonization tactics employed by the right-wing militia to crush the pro-democracy student movement in the mid-1970s, which ended in the lynching of student activists near Thammasat University on Oct 6, 1976.
Many honest, noble, broadminded followers are drawn into something, into a pseudo-religious, para-nationalistic movement — no longer fully aware of the real extent of their disciple-like devotion. Used as cannon fodder in a way. Take another academic ’s warning that “only Chamlong Srimuang and Sondhi Limthongkul have the ability to control mobs. When they [the protesters] don’t have leaders, they won’t have leadership, and they’ll become lost.”
What? Come again? Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim? Just got elected and may bring the opposition to power after years of humiliations and jail?
I’m not saying. I’m just saying.
Et voilà — Charlie Chaplin, the Great Dictator. You’ll be surprised how familiar this all sounds. As he said back then: “In the name of democracy.”
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