The familiar signs of autocracy
I remember very well at the very end of Chavalit Yongchaiyudh's brief tenure as prime minister when the baht was plunging to unheard of worthlessness, finance companies were turning bottoms-up on every block, and the first waves of the poor were arriving
It was the 1997 financial crisis, and for the first time a big-time people’s politician from Isaan was playing the Us-and-Them card in a speech which was deliberately divisive, encouraging the poor to rise up against the rich in order to keep one single good man in power.
That was when the maan word was first used by a prime minister in Thailand, I believe – the dismissive “them” pronoun that identifies those we all know are beneath contempt, not to be trusted, pale and unhealthy; the “other” that threatens our very well-being and of course that of our families and children. The bogeyman that sucks out our blood.
I remember too how editorials, letters and talk-show discussions sprang up everywhere cautioning against such inflammatory language. From every quarter there were wise words emphasising the harmony that had always been a hallmark of Thai society – the world-renowned Thai acceptance of others, the absence of class rivalry and class hatred among the descendants of Sukhothai, the recipients of the wisdom inscribed on the Ramkamhaeng Stone.
No such caution anymore, no more restraint. Songkran 2009 and then Ratchaprasong 2010 witnessed the baying for the blood of the maan over and over at high volume, the maan that controlled everything behind the scenes and sucked the blood of the people, the elite maan that went to Oxford and spoke such high-class treachery while hidden in the skirts of the military, the maan that kept the poor in their places and the money in the pockets of the rich.
And of course at that point the maan morphed into the ammart, the courtiers, the hi-sos and generals, the judges who delivered un-justice, and the doctors un-health, the professors who spoke nonsense in their ivory towers of privilege and the snotty economists who kept Thailand all to themselves.
Just how most dictators get started, the brown shirts, the white robes, the black masks, the colours that frighten the living daylights out of everybody. Terror in the streets, the Reichstag in ashes, a man dangling at the end of a rope. Oh how we’ve been there, oh how we human beings have done that before!
Lung Kip
Chiang Mai
