La Lotta Continua in Thailand?
A good BBC background piece on the situation in Thailand that gets to the heart of the issue, at least within the limits of ‘BBC style’ anyway:
Go to a red-shirt rally and you will hear the same mantra; “We are grass-roots people, fighting for democracy, against the ruling class”.
Go to a yellow-shirt rally and you will almost inevitably hear a different mantra; “We are educated people, fighting against corrupt politicians who abuse democracy”.
Whether or not there are actually ‘no winners’ as this piece suggests remains an open question as far as I’m concerned. Although I’m seeing it from afar this conflict seems to be a having a slow but profound radicalising effect on large swathes of poorer Thais. Whether that radicalisation can simply be absorbed back into the traditional clientilist, royalist and nationalist politics of Thailand (represented by Thaksin as much as by Abbhisit) remains to be seen.
