re: "Silly conspiracy theories fall flat with young folk" (BP, October 17, 2019)
Dear editor,
Surasak Glahan is right that whilst such bizarre tirades strike sensible people as silly, they are also profoundly sinister. It is encouraging that many have laughed at the latest conspiracy theories as they deserve. But bad people, often sincerely believing their own incredible fantasies, have a long habit across history of first making up bizarre tales to divide society by demonizing those they irrationally fear before moving against those they have deceitfully demonized.
The Jewish high priests demonized Jesus as a political radical and religious heretic to justify having him executed (religion has ever been a powerful ally of bad men). White Americans demonized African Americans as sexual predators preying on innocent white girls to justify repressive segregation to keep them in their place. The Nazis demonized Jews, gays, Gypsies, communists and others as undermining good morals and the state to justify the Holocaust. Pol Pot demonized the educated to justify his mass murder. The US under McCarthy demonized alleged communists to justify his unAmerican assault on political opponents, academics and other patriotic Americans who disagreed with his perverted vision of American greatness. Mao demonized almost everyone to justify his policies that killed tens of millions of Chinese.
And Thai army politicians have a long history of demonizing patriotic Thai citizens who have a different vision of their nation as a strong, healthy democracy with a respected constitutional monarchy. Such bizarre conspiracies might be very silly, but they have divided Thai society, turning Thai against Thai, and led to the murders of thousands of good Thai men and women in defence of a faith-based ideology that blindly rejects reason, fact, honesty, and the other good morals that found democracy, which form of government section 2 of the Thai constitution explicitly defines Thailand as having.
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 18, 2019, under the title "Sinister tirades" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1774594/sinister-tirades
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