Trotting excuses

re: "Army chief says no need to intervene if politics stable" (BP, October 17)

Dear editor,

There were a couple of troubling statements in the new army chief's recent news conference as reported in "Army chief says no need to intervene if politics stable." First, when he says that "We [the army] cannot let politics use us," the general appears unaware of the fact that it is, on the contrary, army generals who have persistently played at politics, repeatedly using the weakest of excuses to overthrow Thailand's democratic form of government.

Second, when he asserts the conditional that "If politics does not create conflict like in the past, there is no need for us to intervene," he fails to  forswear absolutely such unjust intervention in Thailand's evolution of political solutions to political issues. His loyalty should be to Thailand's democratic constitutional monarchy, which loyalty would seem to preclude a coup against that form of government of the Thai nation.

There are excuses trotted out for every coup against the democratic aspirations of the Thai nation, all of which fail to pass scrutiny. That there is corruption in politics is certain: it is there in both civil and military governments, but only one of these forms values the transparency essential to identify and eradicate the cancer of corruption. It is also certain that protests sometimes turn violent. But to think that these or any other defect in politics can be solved by a non-political intervention that destroys what little democratic maturity has evolved  is a mistake. It is equivalent to a Victor Frankenstein who, quite possibly from the best of motives, decides to treat cancer by cremating the patient. This might well give a deceptive appearance of working since, although continuing to infest others, the cancer in those prejudicially targetted subjects who are cremated will indeed be destroyed; but reasonable people might prefer a solution that  seeks to treat the cancer in all those infected in a way that is less certainly destructive of what truly matters.

As the history of the US, the UK, Australia, Italy, Japan and all others show, every democracy has problems. As history also shows they can be, those problems should be solved by political means, not by suppressing such solutions: cancer patients are not well-served if doctors who use chemotherapy, radiation therapy or surgery are banned from assisting those in urgent need, who are instead thrown onto a bonfire to the vanities of self-styled saviours.

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on October 19, 2018, under the title "Trotting excuses" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1560694/trotting-excuses