Suthep's chicanery

re: "Suthep's fall from grace gathers pace" (BP, Opinion, November 13)

Dear editor,

Whilst Atiya Achakulwisut's informative opinion piece on former deputy prime minister Suthep Thaugsuban was an enjoyable morning read, she might also have reminded readers that Suthep was so famously corrupt as a Democrat Party politician, a staunch man of that "hilariously misnamed" political party as Time magazine so aptly described it in November 2013, that his own party colleagues complained about him to the US ambassador. The Wikileaks  cable from the US embassy dated December 22, 2008 speaks of the "kamnan" as Abhisit's "close political partner Suthep." This despite the same cable going on to relate that "In recent years, Suthep has controlled the finances of the Democrat Party, and several Democrats have privately complained to us that he engages in corrupt and unethical behavior." But this was back in 2008, when Abhisit was forming his first government courtesy of an earlier coup against democracy. Worse was to come.

According to his own boasting shortly after it, Suthep was working from 2010 to destroy Thailand's civil constitution, which aim he and his allies achieved with the coup in May 2014. After blabbing a few  truths about the antecedents to their  overthrow of Thailand's supreme legal pillar and the foundation of Thailand's political system, he suddenly disappeared into a convenient but most unSuthepian monastic silence for some reason. It is hard to credit that this was from any commitment to such Buddhist ideals as right understanding, which ideal called for more elucidation of the background to the events from late 2013 that led to its overthrow shortly after of the Thai democracy which had proven itself to be evolving to serve as an effective solution to political problems:  Pheu Thai's sleazy amnesty bill had, after all, been halted in response to the outraged voice of the Thai nation. What followed demonstrated that the amnesty bill was merely a pretext for a deeper plot against Thai democracy.

Also interesting in the ugly story of the PDRC's well-plotted shutting down of a burgeoning democracy in Thailand is the mob psychology that so easily whipped to a zealous frenzy so many supporters, who appeared in all sincerity to believe that the bad they were aiding and abetting was actually good. Of course, this moral blindness that leads basically good people down the path to evil is not uncommon. The history of Christianity shows the same moral errors with its blasphemy trials, witch hunts, inquisitions, pogroms and other evils committed by those deluded by blind faith, by wrong understanding, to commit the most appalling atrocities, such as the Christian mob stripping the flesh from Hypatia before destroying the great library of Alexandria, the treasure house of Western culture, in 415 AD. Your typical jihadi terrorist today is equally convinced under blind, uncritical faith supporting evil that they are doing what is right. There was not only a moral failure on the part of Suthep's adulating street mobs as they actively worked to undermine the rule of law by smashing Thailand's form of democratic constitutional monarchy to replace it with a dictatorship, but a failure to understand, to reason critically. With a a view to preventing such outbreaks in future, it is worth pondering what went wrong in the heads of those so boastfully determined to "Shut down" civil society.

 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 November 14, 2018, under the title "Suthep's chicanery" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1575430/sutheps-chicanery
  

References

• Campbell, C. (2013, November 8). Thailand’s Democrat Party Is Hilariously Misnamed. Time. Retrieved from http://world.time.com/2013/11/28/thailands-democrat-party-is-hilariously-misnamed/
   
• NEW THAI CABINET APPOINTED, FACES CRITICISM [08BANGKOK3712_a]. (2008, December 22). Wikileaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BANGKOK3712_a.html