True colours

re: "No time for cruel jokes" (BP, Edirorial, March 17, 2023) and  "By royal decree" (BP, PostBag, March 15, 2023)

Dear editor,

When Prime Minister gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha and allies insist that they act to protect children from bad influences, they accidentally speak a muddled truth, one that warrants clarification.  The latest telling quotation from the man who publicly exposed his attitude towards the majority of the Thai people and to the rule of law that established the Thai nation's popular form of "a democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State" (Thai Constitution, 2007; Thai Constitution, 2017) when he committed a coup against them is his recent response to a Thai citizen's quest to air her grievances, regarding which recent incident "video clips show at least six officers, men and women, charge and try to silence the 62-year-old woman."

When asked about it, Thailand's prime minister responded with the dismissive: "she breached the law, didn't she?" And therein lies the problem that is at the heart of all that is wrong with PM Prayut and those who think as he does. They refuse to see, or are unable to understand, that the law, their law, is the problem. The law is unjust. Since May 22, 2014, when he overthrew its supreme rule of law along with Thailand's "democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State", Prayut and supporters have weaponized the new law they had made up to serve their agenda, making the law itself a tool that corrupts justice, along with the institutions that serve that law. They then childishly insist (they do love to insist), like a schoolyard bully, that if only those being abused followed to the letter the bullies' laws, they wouldn't have to be punished in accord with those laws. This is the only sense in which authoritarians seek to protect the childish. In any sense of actually caring about Thailand's children and youth, they manifestly intimidate them into silence rather than listen to an alternative, and typically more mature, point of view.

Such authoritarians thereby prove themselves enemies alike not only of justice and democracy, but also of benevolence and righteousness. As Burin Kantabutra recently reminded us, ("By royal decree", PostBag, March 15, 2023), the example of what a genuinely benevolent and righteous person does when confronted by unjust law is that set by His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej The Great, who explicitly spoke out against the very law that PM Prayut's administration is using to silence patriotic Thais who peacefully call only for just, democratic principle to be respected. Benevolent and righteous people do not stand silently by, let alone condone it, while unjust law is used to abuse. Such abuse is the bullying of an immature child. Such childishness deserves to be neither protected nor accepted. Those who are in fact benevolent and righteous do not, whether by tacit silence or more culpably, accept such injustice masquerading as law.  

 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 March 19, 2023, under the title "True colours" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2531381/mixed-appeal