It is easy to get confused about what’s going on in
Ostensibly, some distinguishing features of PAD’s leadership are: 1) they speak good English, 2) they are moralistic, white collar, intelligentsia and lay religious types like the Edsa I and II “civil socialites” here, and 3) they look down on the Thai “masa” especially rural folk who have resoundingly given Thaksin and the current Prime Minister Samat their electoral mandates. But what's lesser known is that they are wards of Western ideological and financial sources like the National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros.
Amid all the hoopla, the PAD’s real target has been Thaksin, charging him with massive corruption. His personal and family fortunes are, however, known to precede his stint as prime minister. Thaksin built his multi-billion dollar Shin Corp. telecoms empire before he sold it to Temasek Holdings, a Singaporean firm with a bevy of Chinese investments, according to some sources.
That sale exacerbated his political troubles as Western and traditional domestic aristocratic interests were incensed that the sale did not benefit them. However, the start of his troubles preceded that as two of Thaksin’s policies already ran counter to powerful geopolitical forces in the Indochinese peninsula.
The West has long used Thailand as a trading post for opium grown by historic British clients such as the Karen in Myanmar , as well as, the US ’ cohorts like the Kuomintang-led Khun Sha Army in the Golden Triangle.
As a former Thai police official, Thaksin had committed to eradicate illicit drugs in
Human Rights campaigners, though, can serve double purposes as they protect the so-called “rights” of drug dealers (something which Opium War victim
The nationalist US publication EIR sent an article by Michael Billington, which we quote: “The Soros-linked mobs on the streets today against Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, as in 2006 against the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, are but a continuation of Soros's brutal economic destruction of Thailand in 1997 on behalf of his British controllers…It is also no coincidence that Prime Minister Thaksin's ‘war on drugs’ in Thailand in 2003 was a major target of the global Soros-funded human rights mafia, building towards the 2006 coup, nor that Prime Minister Samak has discussed reviving the war on drugs this year.”
Drugs from the Indochinese peninsula have been Western imperialism’s currency in this region, like Colombian drugs in Oliver North’s Iran-Contra operations.
Meanwhile, the other policy of Thaksin contrary to the West’s agenda was the massive rural development initiative of his Village Revolving Fund (70 billion Baht for 70,000 villages), which boosted rural production, incomes and spending. Although this was vote-buying, as alleged by the PAD, even the Economist magazine had to grant this as a positive boost to the Thai economy.
Like the PAD, the IMF-WB painted it negatively too, claiming it was “subsidizing” the poor, which to my mind, should be appreciated as plowing money to the sectors where it is needed most, which makes “trickle up” economics most effective. But then, this naturally didn’t sit well with the traditional power elite in
Interestingly, Asia Times’ Shawn Crispin has another perspective: “While the US maintained strong ties with Thaksin's authoritarian administration, particularly through cooperation on counter-terrorism issues, there were concurrent concerns in Washington that the ethnically Chinese Thaksin was gradually moving Thailand closer to Beijing at the United States’ strategic expense.”
Among other issues, Crispin cites the role of Thaksin in arranging the first satellite link with
My point in writing this piece is to help the Filipino observer of the current Thai crisis see through the PAD and Western reportage of alleged “corruption,” and appreciate the underlying pressures exerted by Western imperialism, using well-funded “civil society” lackeys.
At the same time, we must note how the Thai military is behaving, as it is unwilling to crack down on the economic sabotage being committed by PAD because of the role of US-controlled retired military officers. Like Fidel V. Ramos in the
The revered Thai monarch, too, has an enigmatic role in the Thai military inaction, but has apparently shirked in his duty to maintain law and order in the current crisis. No doubt, if the demonstrators were poor rural folks, the Thai military would have cracked down on them, and cracked skulls and bones or even started mowing them down as they have done in the past -- like the massacre of our poor in Edsa III.
Truly, Western imperialism is still the main issue today. In
But through it all, only one Filipino political leader has stepped forward to tell it like it is, instructing the US Embassy to “keep off our
He is the same democratically-elected leader whom the
As Sun Tzu once said, “…know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
In
