Thailand: an education from Dave’s Part

May 17, 2010 at 9:34 pm (blogging, Jim D)

If – like me – your knee-jerk reaction to the Thai crisis is to support the “red shirts”, but you don’t really know much about Thailand or the issues at stake, then Dave’s Part will be an education.

This is blogging at its best.

Dave starts off with the analysis of Giles Ungpakorn, a Thai/British academic who fled to Britain after the 2006 coup d’etat, and is associated withh the SWP. Ungpakorn’s analysis is that the “red shirts” are an unambigiously progressive movement and that the PAD yellow shirts are a “proto fascist group supporting the aristocracy.”

But a correspondent, Les Abbey, who (it turns out) played “a very small part in the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon“, takes issue with Ungpakorn, arguing that:

“So, the line being peddled by Giles Ungpakorn over at IS or whatever it’s called now-a-days is that the UDD red shirt movement is part a peasant based class struggle against the Bangkok aristocracy while the PAD yellow shirt movement is a proto fascist group supporting that aristocracy.

“You could almost sell that line except the red shirts are fighting for and financed by Thaksin Shinawatra. Now Shinawatra has gone into exile to avoid a two year jail sentence for corruption while prime minister and has had much of the proceeds of the sale of his telecom company to a Singapore government owned company confiscated by the courts due to among other things failure to pay tax and hiding the true ownership of his shareholding.

“What should be avoided is comparing this man with Chavez. The more accurate comparison is with Berlusconi. While in power, which he obtained by buying off the old and most corrupt gangster run political parties in Thailand, he put his family and friends in most of the powerful positions in the country. He turned the Moslem independence movement in the south from a low level insurgency into a full blooded war because he wanted to copy Blair and Bush. He corrupted the business government relationship even more than usual which is saying something. He enacted a regime of police killings against small time drug dealers probably finishing off about a thousand of them. And this is just the tip of the iceberg…”

I don’t like Les Abbey’s repeated attacks on “Trotskyists” but as by that term he seems to mean the SWP and its Thai grouping, I’m not that worried. It’s clear, reading the correspondence that follows Dave’s opening remarks, and Les Abbey’s comments, that readers of Dave’s Part have had the unusual experience of engaging with someone who speaks with authority and knows what they’re talking about.

Top quality blogging!