re: "Thaksin, 16 years on: Coup was a stab in the back" (BP, September 19, 2022)
Dear editor,
Looking at the photograph of the seriously armed young lads on their tank parked in the street on those heady days of 2006, I wonder what the young soldier conscripts think when they are ordered to move against the Thai people whom they should know it is their duty to protect from such armed assault? Has any study been done where they are interviewed at periods after the event to discover the truths lurking in those dark places?
How were they led to follow such orders? What sacred ideology led them so far astray from their duty to protect the Thai people from armed attack? How did they feel at the time? What did they think of their acts against the Thai people and their popular form of democratic government thereafter?
The American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg famously said that "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." What, one wonders, does it take to make an otherwise good young Thai soldier in the ranks actively oppose the will of his own nation by actually taking up arms against his own fellow citizens?
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 September 22, 2022, under the title "Heady days of 2006" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2397493/heady-days-of-2006
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