Let there be light too, before it's too late

Somsak Pola’s letter yesterday was obviously in reply to my letter of the day before, but both the parent and child in his world are, unlike mine, perfect. Indeed, Somsak says Thailand was formless before Thaksin, and that in the last 10 years the Thai people have been entirely recreated by his genius – even as man was created by God in his own image, the rhetoric says.

Like in North Korea, perhaps, Khun Somsak? How Kim Jong-il heaped his people’s plates so full of food, gave them warmth and security, delivered them from their terrible poverty so utterly? How he made his people like gods, in fact? Is that why the people wept so bitterly at his death, because their leader was so good? Because I saw that in their faces too, and I have no doubt that the grief was genuine. 

At first I felt that the Pyongyang mourners were just pretending, putting on a propaganda show for the cameras, but having seen the photos, I know that that sort of grief could never be simulated. The North Korean people by the hundreds of thousands were weeping in genuine, heart-rending grief at the loss of their god and father – despite the little man’s personal foibles, his extravagance, his bouffant hairstyle, grotesque unpredictability, isolation, cruelty and mismanagement. They wept out because their Great Leader was no less than their god.

A tendency which worries me here in Thailand too, Khun Somsak, a lot, because whenever the sort of deification you are bestowing on Thaksin has appeared in human history, it has always led to terrible suffering and bloodshed. In my recent letters I’ve mentioned a few historical periods in which demagogues have been elevated to gods in the same way. Here’s another: those young Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution in China, how they were willing to humiliate even their own parents to create the perfect society. The Red Guards beat the living daylights out of their cousins, friends and neighbours to achieve harmony and social perfection! Go and look at those young faces in the 1967 photos, how passionate they were, how utterly they believed in what they thought they were doing for the good. And how little they knew about what was really at stake, or what they were tearing right off their own family walls with their hands.

I can still say this openly in Thailand – which gives me hope that the country may in the end be able to avoid the same sort of cultural self-mutilation. Needless to say, the subject can’t even be mentioned in North Korea or China.

Lung Kip

Chiang Mai