I do wonder what Giles was looking for. Was it something similar to a Maoist Nepalese peasant movement or even the earlier Khmer Rouge one. Whatever it must have been so tempting to use Thaksin finance and PR companies to build this movement, in his mind anyway.

Did Lenin or Trotsky ever envisage such a method or would they have called it adventurism. Still Giles won’t have to suffer as he’s out of the country.

Susie Wong: “The Red Shirt Movement represents the poor and the thirst for freedom and democracy”.

But the Thaksin thing has a higher priority for them, and the poor are just people they cynically manipulate without actually listening to them. This is a power struggle that will deliver nothing to the average Sompomg, since it was initiated by bourgeouis who are far more interested in their own personal stake in the hiso pig trough.

Susie. Where are the Communists & socialists in all this? Banned by both sides, of course. We can’t have people messing up the cosy poo-yai system of parasitism by talking REAL politics. Political movements here always end up being hijacked by the poo-yais.

“The Sydney Morning Herald’s International Editor, Peter Hartcher, has an op-ed entitled “Thailand turns into Indonesia – and vice versa”

Today we see an extraordinary role reversal. Thailand is now a wreck, suffering a constitutional crisis, emergency rule and an investment strike.

Indonesia, on the other hand, is stable and tolerant under a mature and clean president, with better growth prospects than any of the states in the region. The US think tank Freedom House has designated Indonesia for the first time as the only fully free and democratic country in South-East Asia.

The essential difference is that Indonesian power elites universally respect the legitimising power of democracy. The Thais have not.”

Whereas the evolution of NGO in Siam since 1980s has nothing to do with modernization process but has everything to do with the Great Powers’ geo-strategic objectives of the Asia-Pacific Theatre. Thus the behavior of NGO in Siam must be interpreted in terms of politics. The search for understanding the NGO in Siam outside international politics is doomed to frustration. The issue is there are no one in Siam and in the Asia-Pacific region that has the knowledge of the linkage between the second image (domestic politics) and the first image (international politics) of the post-Cold War world especially at the Grand Strategy level. As a result, the analysis has been focused on domestic politics, political economy, anthropology, any analysis from strategic standpoints would be discarded because lacking of strategic knowledge.

It is easier to intervene into the domestic politics of other country with “non-state actors” like NGO to mobilize the mass for one’s strategic objective. Siam is the heartland of mainland Southeast Asia, the control of Bangkok and the South would provide any Great Powers geo-strategic advantage in particular the Sea Power domination. Since the 19th and the 20th century, Navy has been the decisive factor in the outcome of the Great Powers rivalry, as such the 21st century will continue to be the same.

The NGO in Siam joined hand with PAD and the Democratic Party to keep the status quo and against any change which is very different from NGO in other countries. Professor Ji Ungpakorn has put forward the issue that is important but I think the analysis about the NGOs in Siam has to go deeper and broader to encompass the strategic issue in order to understand why they mobilize the middle class against change when most middle class in other countries support change.

You would be if Giles gave citations and made it clear what he was talking about.

Giles is a university professor and yet cites no sources so we can get a more accurate idea of what he is trying to communicate to us.

Giles litters his prose with a confused mixture of ranting and name-calling. He tells his reader what to believe, yet garners no evidence.

And of course there is the myopic self-referential approach so typical of area studies “specialists” that makes no attempt at all to link to comparable events or phenomena outside of their area, Thailand in this case, as if Thailand lives in a little cocoon making comparisons with neighboring countries impossible. (If Thailand has such and such a problem, is this the norm or an exception? Seems like Thailand has navigated through history with a lot less problems than its neighbors. What are the similarities and differences between Thailand and other countries that have passed through similar stages of development such as South Korea? Is Thailand atypical? Or is all that Giles wants to do is foment revolution?)

Ranting rather than posing falsifiable questions truly puts you in the stone age, Giles.

Or perhaps you are just trying to be “post-modern” and pawn off your personal diary, as Jim Taylor does, as some profound intellectual exercise.

Provide the essential background information before you launch into your rant, Giles, that is if you want anyone to respect you.