One man proudly holds up a sign he has painstakingly drawn in blue pen, in English, presumably for the benefit of the foreign media covering the stand-off, condemning the reds – who are mostly but not exclusively made up of Thailand’s urban and rural poor – as “uneducate people”.
The clumsy effort to dismiss Thailand’s poor as idiots was not an isolated insult – it is at the heart of the philosophy of supporters of the current government led by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, and a central tenet of faith for the royalist ‘yellow shirt’ People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) which, in an uneasy alliance with Abhisit’s Democrat Party, has led opposition to fugitive former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
Their argument is that many Thais are simply not ready for democracy. Especially in rural areas, they say, feudal patronage networks and electoral bribery are rife, and country people often know no better than to sell their votes to the highest bidder. This means that populist and venal demagogues can seize power via the ballot box by duping and bribing the poor to vote for them, and then proceed to lead the country towards ruin by corruptly enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of Thailand’s national interest. And therefore, the argument goes, it is necessary for the enlightened elites among Bangkok’s middle and upper classes, the judiciary, bureaucracy, military brass and – above all – the monarchy, to act as guardians and custodians of democracy, intervening when necessary to prevent their less sophisticated fellow citizens from making terrible mistakes by misguidedly casting their votes for the wrong person. Western-style democracy is not appropriate for Thailand – at least, not yet – and for the moment the morally-upright and well-educated elites must steer their dim-witted rural brethren with a firm but benevolent guiding hand.