30 June 2010

Reading Thoreau’s Walden

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I have just finished reading Thoreau’s Walden. My immediate reaction is one of mild shock, and I am astonished at the likenesses between Thoreau and myself.
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Let me explain. I had always thought that I had read most of Walden, either completely or in major part. But I hadn’t. I had tried to read it in excerpts or from library copies when I was in high school, but I could never finish it then. I was bored with its length.
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I always recognized – from the bits of Thoreau that I had read and from reports of his life – that he and I were very close spiritual brothers. In my first major hitchhiking trip in 1968, right after high school and before the Marine Corps, I went to Concord, Mass. and to Walden Pond. It was an almost “religious” moment for me to stand alone at the site of Thoreau’s cabin.
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I know that I will read Walden again and savor it over time, and eventually I may write a longer review of it. Here I will just say that I have found a true personal classic.
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25 June 2010

Book Review: A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin

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I have posted a book review of Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon on my primary perennial blog, Zenwind. A great book.
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21 June 2010

CNN and BBC Slammed by Freelance Reporter

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21 June: Freelance farang reporter Dave Sherman wrote this article slamming the news coverage of CNN and BBC during most of the Red Shirt protest crisis of April and May. Thai news people had made the same complaints but the farang networks and reporters had defended their reporting. Dave Sherman voices the viewpoints of many Bangkokians, and it is well worth reading.
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-Zenwind.
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18 June 2010

Lumpini Park

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18 June: Yesterday was an all day trip for me into Bangkok. The main event was an evening meet up with my Bangkok libertarian friends, but I caught the boat in the morning for visits to theaters and bookstores and to take a city walk.
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In mid-afternoon I took a long walk, the middle leg of which was in Lumpini Park, one main scene of the Red Shirt occupation last month. I had walked past it before but never through it, and it is more beautiful than I expected. There are many ponds as well as a lot of shade trees and pavilions.
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I saw two monitor lizards on the shore, similar to but maybe not exactly the same species of monitor lizards we see at the house. (Tuk calls them “crocodiles” or “monsters.”) The adult was almost 6 feet long from snout to tail, and the other maybe 3 feet long. As I approached them they headed into the water and swam away.
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My main reason for going to Lumpini, besides the exercise and exploration, was to stand in the spot where a Red Shirt protestor fired 5 grenades from an M-79 grenade launcher at the Sala Daeng Skytrain station on the night of 22 April. The attacks killed one woman bystander and wounded a number of others. The Red barricade at that time was right by the statue of King Rama VI, facing the Sala Daeng intersection. (King Rama VI had created this park in 1920 when this was the outer edge of the city.)
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The M-79 was my main weapon in Vietnam, and I had checked out the general location of the attacks earlier, determining for sure that it was all within the M-79’s range. But now I was where the former Red barricade had been, and I could look over the ground from the perspective of the grenades’ exact trajectories going out.
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It was a exact match to the location of the TV news video footage of the shooting – minus the barricade – where a loud “bloop” of the M-79 was heard and an explosion a few seconds later at Sala Daeng station. The idea of that weapon as such an effective urban weapon still amazes me.
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I was soaked in sweat and very dehydrated, so I headed to an air conditioned theater to cool off. By the time I met my friends, my backpack was completely loaded down with books.
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In our group, we are mostly Americans but also have two guys from India whose insights and wisdom are really refreshing. We learn a lot from each other, which is what friends are for. We had incredible conversations on just about every subject in the cosmos, and we didn’t leave until after 1:30am closing time. Sadly, some of the world’s problems were left unsolved.
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Arriving home after 2:00am, the streets were quiet and cooler, and our cats were waiting up for me.
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16 June 2010

New Post on Zenwind Blog: "Satori on Parris Island, 1968"

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16 June 2010: I just added a post to my long-term project blog, Zenwind (linked above). The title is a play on the title of Jack Kerouac’s novel Satori in Paris, and it records a special moment in USMC boot camp.
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Street-Fighting Tactics Used by Red Shirts and Army in Recent Crisis [long post]

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16 June 2010: Here I want to analyze only the street-fighting tactics used in Bangkok in the last few months by the Red Shirt protest movement and the Royal Thai Army’s tactics in response. (Questions of ethics will be set aside now, as they have been addressed earlier. Both sides are blaming the other for the death and destruction, and the official inquiry panel looking into the violence is only now being formed.)
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Overall, both the majority of Red Shirt protestors and the majority of Army troops followed non-violent methods.
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Most of the protestors acted peacefully throughout the rally. A small minority among the Reds were armed and ready to use deadly force from the start. Widespread arson, should the rally be broken up by the Army, was recommended beforehand from the Red rally stage by some, but not all, of the main Red leaders.
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The Army’s policy was to be as non-violent as possible, and most troops showed very good fire-discipline. However, once both sides had taken casualties, a small minority of individual soldiers did get trigger-happy and shoot without care into unarmed protestor crowds.
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From the beginning, the Army leadership was extremely reluctant to use force against the protestors. The government had ordered the Army to disperse the rallies a number of times, but police and Army did nothing. Many of the ultra-conservative Yellow Shirts criticized the government and the Army for their hesitancy, and they were threatening to take to the streets themselves against the Reds.
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Gen. Anupong, the Royal Thai Army commander, insisted that this crisis must be solved through peaceful political means and not force. There was also an issue of which Army commanders were loyal to the government and which to the Reds, and this paralyzed the Army until they sorted it all out.
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One of the tactics of the Red Shirts was optimal use of M-79 grenade launchers. With an explosive projectile almost as powerful as a hand grenade and a maximum effective range of 375 yards, this proved to be an efficient urban weapon. Most often used at night here, a grenadier could fire from the shadows and be gone before the slow, looping round detonated.
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The leader of the armed Red Shirt faction was the rouge Army officer Maj. Gen. Khattiya, aka “Seh Daeng” (“Red Commander”). He had been training a group of Red Shirts – his “Ronin” warriors – in hand-to-hand combat techniques. Many of the armed Red Shirt “men in black” were suspected of being ex-Army Rangers under his command. Khattiya’s rhetoric had long been full of violent threats. Because of his breach of Army rules in playing party politics, Gen. Anupong had suspended Khattiya in January 2010. The next day several M-79 grenades were shot at Gen. Anupong’s office from moving vehicles on a highway overpass.
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The Army’s policy when trying to clear protestors out of an area was to have unarmed troops with only batons, shields and helmets in the front rows confronting protestors. As back-up if needed were troops with rubber bullets and tear gas. Only in the last resort were troops with M-16s, and their orders were to fire in the air if needed and to aim at protestors only in self-defense of troops.
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The reluctance of the Army to engage is evident in the early instances when Red protestors, armed with clubs and rocks overwhelmed the security forces, chased them away, and took batons and shields away from police and soldiers. Later they took M-16s and even combat vehicles away from troops. The Army was becoming a joke.
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On 9 April the Army even fired tear gas into the wind and back into their own faces. On that same day, I had walked through the newly Red-occupied intersection of Ratchaprasong, the prime shopping district in Bangkok, and thought that these tough-looking characters looked like they could take on the Army. (See blog entry on 2 June, “My Experiences with Red Shirts.”) I remember thinking that the Army should seal off this area now, and allow anyone to leave but no Reds to enter – after all, the main stores had by now closed – but the Army didn’t do this for another month.
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The first big bloodbath was on 10 April, when the Army finally moved in to try and clear the Reds out of their first main rally site, Phan Fah bridge. As Army Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Dapong admitted later, “It was worse than we thought.” The Reds’ armed faction, the “men in black,” showed up in the night shadows amongst the more peaceful Reds with AK-47s, M-16s and M-79s. Right off the bat, the Army commander on the scene, Col. Romklao, was killed (either by a rifle or an M-79 round, reports vary), decapitating the Army’s command structure and causing chaos in the ranks. This hit required good inside intel, and it spooked the Army into not knowing whom to trust. Five soldiers were killed. As the unarmed frontlines of troops fell back, the armed soldiers fired into the oncoming Red lines, and over two dozen Red Shirts were killed.
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After this, the Red leaders decided to abandon the main Phan Fah rally site and move all their people to the Ratchaprasong shopping district because it was more defendable. It would also disrupt Bangkok more. The Red-occupied area then expanded east from Ratchaprasong and then south to Lumpini Park and just north of the Silom/ Sala Daeng area, the financial district. (I had thought that the Army should never allow the Reds to occupy Lumpini Park, but of course I wasn’t consulted.)
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The Reds built massive barricades around their positions on the streets with old tires, sharpened bamboo stakes and barbed wire. The Reds desperately wanted to take over the Silom financial district to further paralyze the city, so this Lumpini Park/ Sala Daeng border became the flashpoint of violence.
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On the evening of 22 April, Red Shirt M-79 grenadiers fired 5 grenades from Lumpini Park at the Sala Daeng Skytrain station, killing one civilian and wounding many. This was the maximum range of the M-79. Video footage from right behind the Red frontline barricade in Lumpini Park recorded the unmistakable sound of the M-79 (“bloop”) from the shadows, followed a few seconds later by the explosion at the station.
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On 3 May Prime Minister Abhisit offers a compromise reconciliation plan. Elections will be held early – at the end of the year – and the Red protestors must stop their rally now. The Red Shirt leaders were close to accepting it, but spoilers among the Reds derailed it, and Khattiya was thought to be the main spoiler.
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On the evening of 7 May Red gunmen on a motorcycle did a drive-by shooting into a group of policemen at Sala Daeng, killing one. (I was 400 yards away, unaware of it, while listening to live music in Nomads pub.) Later that night an M-79 attack killed another cop.
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On 13 May a sniper shot “Red Commander” Khattiya in the head while he was being interviewed by the NY Times at Lumpini Park. We will probably never know who exactly ordered the killing, but all bets are that it was Thai Army. Taking out Khattiya was a brilliant way to decapitate the command of the armed and violent Reds – just as the hit on Col. Romklao had decapitated the Army command on 10 April; and perhaps there was revenge involved because Col. Romklao was a respected former bodyguard to the Queen.
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From 14-18 May the Army finally tightens down with a quarantine of the Red Shirt rally, from its main stage at Ratchaprasong (where the more peaceful Red Shirts are centered) down to Lumpini Park (where the violent ones are). There is not much choice for the Army now, because the embassies of the USA and the UK, among others, are in the direct neighborhood of the Reds’ spreading occupied zone.
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Reds were allowed to leave Ratchaprasong but not to enter. The bulk of the peaceful Reds were there, while the violent ones went elsewhere. The Reds utilized motorcycles for quick transport to and escape from various flashpoints in the city. They would hit the Army at weak points while most of the troops were massed elsewhere.
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In the early hours of 19 May, the Army is finally ready. They move on Lumpini Park. They use armored vehicles to smash over and through the Red barricades. The Army moves into and clears out Lumpini and then the neighboring streets, and by the end of the day it tightens the noose on the Ratchaprasong Red center.
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The Red leaders surrender to the police at 13:30 and tell their Reds to go home. But the violent Red factions start burning buildings as they had threatened to do. Central World Plaza, one of the finest malls in Southeast Asia, is invaded, looted and torched. Firefighters cannot get near the building for many hours because Red snipers are shooting at them, so the fires burn on.
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The Army halts for the night before trying to take Ratchaprasong, because they don’t want the cornered Reds to panic and give rise to a bloodbath. To the west of the rally center, the government has buses ready to transport any Reds back to their home provinces for free. Inside the Ratchaprasong area is a big temple that is accepted as a safe zone by all parties, and the peaceful Reds go there for the night. (There are 6 bodies found the next day in the temple grounds, and both sides blame the others for the killings. Still a mystery.)
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The Army learns from the Reds and starts using motorcycles tactically. Squads of soldiers armed light with M-16s are on cycles and rush to trouble spots. On this evening of 19 May there are two of these “mounted” squads just outside our house with other soldiers who are guarding a street to a utilities office complex. Suddenly they roar off to another part of the city.
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After 20 May the city starts recovering and getting back to normal. There was a curfew for a while during the next week or so. Now (16 June) there is still a State of Emergency in Bangkok, which gives the police and Army room to move against any Red underground threats, but this will be ended soon.
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Both sides learned a lot from this crisis. The more hard-core violent Reds will probably go underground and make selective attacks on government targets. The Army learned a lot about crowd control and urban combat. We probably have not seen the end of this mess.
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-Zenwind.
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12 June 2010

World Cup Soccer Tournament

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The entire culture here has stopped – for the World Cup, the most popular sporting event in the world. The news commentators talk and write of nothing else. As the World Cup is only held once every four years, like the Olympics, fans and players are really up for it when it does come around again.
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As for a minority opinion, it is said:
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“There are only three sports: Mountain Climbing, Auto Racing and Bull Fighting. All the rest are merely games.” -- attributed to Hemingway.
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I like that, although I have never tried bull fighting and I wonder why he didn’t mention boxing.
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I never was a soccer fan, and I get so sick of seeing it on Thai TV news here nearly all of the year. But I will say that these World Cup players look extremely competent at their game. The play is definitely much better than the ordinary footage throughout the year. As it is a worldwide national-team event, feelings run high. I will also say that soccer demands incredible stamina from the players, who run up and down the pitch at full speed with no time-outs.
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Also, I was never much of an American Football (gridiron) fan. But seeing soccer so much on TV, I yearn for some good old football. There are farang sports-bar venues downtown that show American football, and next season I’m going to look them up. But for now, it is the soccer players' moment.
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In about 5 hours – 01:30 hours for me here – the teams of the USA and England will square off. Of course, I must stay up to see it. I have popcorn and beverage ready.
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-Zenwind.

02 June 2010

My Experiences with Red Shirts

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2 June 2010: I think that I am a fairly good judge of individual character. Although my experiences are limited, here are some of my impressions of Red Shirt people I have met.
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On 9 April, the day before the first big exchange of gunfire between the Reds and the Army at the Phan Fah area, I walked through the Red-occupied area at Ratchaprasong intersection, the prime shopping area of Bangkok. The Reds had been starting to occupy this area for a week, and after the violence of 10 April they would move their main rally area here from Phan Fah because it was more easily defendable and would disrupt Bangkok life like few other spots. The peaceful Reds, the photogenic families shown on TV, would soon be transferred to Ratchaprasong for the last stand.
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I had finished important business at the US Embassy not too far away, and I took a taxi to try to get to Siam Square on the other side of Ratchaprasong. But the Red Guards had blocked all entrances to Ratchaprasong except for their own vehicles. Finally, I just paid the taxi driver and got out to walk through Ratchaprasong to get to Siam Square.
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As I got out of the taxi I noticed two things. The first was the smell. Urine and garbage smells were far stronger than one usually smells in downtown Bangkok. The second impression was how extremely tough-looking the people were there. Everyone was dressed in red except me. I got mean glares from very thuggish-looking people. Even the women looked mean – not at all like the ones filmed for TV audiences in front of the rally stage.
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The whole atmosphere reminded me of a seedy rock festival that was taken over by one of the more thuggish biker gangs. I didn’t see a kind face in the whole of the few blocks I had to walk through, and I was glad it wasn’t nighttime. I remember thinking that these characters could easily take on the Thai Army.
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My last up-close encounter with a Red Shirt was on 19 May and was much different. This was the day the Army moved in to disperse the rally at Lumpini Park and Ratchaprasong, but this was in our neighborhood far from the action. I was heading to the local store to stock up on batteries, ice, tea and lots of instant noodles, because no one knew how the day would end.
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I rounded the corner and saw a meek little guy in a red shirt and in a pathetic situation. He looked entirely out of place in the city. I would guess that he was a rural guy. He looked very scared, as if he believed the exaggerated Red stories about troops shooting indiscriminately at protestors.
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I saw him on the narrow sidewalk leading to the store. He was crouched down and counting his money from a plastic bag, and I could see that he didn’t have much. That small change and his clothing were the only things he had. I remember thinking that he was probably fleeing from rumors of the Army action downtown and trying to get through the city and go home to the north.
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As I returned from the store, my hands were full with huge bags. I came across this same little Red guy on the narrow sidewalk as he was trying to urinate against the wall, at noon on a crowded street. He looked desperate and humiliated, as women and kids were passing by. I felt so sorry for him and tried to keep from looking his way during his embarrassing plight.
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The crowd moved me along before I could really think about it, but later I wished that I could help him somehow. I had no money on me because I’d spent all in my pocket at the store. I would have liked to have given him some money and food that he didn’t have to cook, but that wasn’t possible.
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I hope he finally made it home okay. I am still haunted by this brief encounter, because I missed an opportunity to help the unfortunate guy.
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Case FOR the Red Shirts

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2 June 2010: I sympathize deeply with the good people among the Red Shirt movement (but not with the violent Reds or the Red leaders). These are the decent rural folks from upcountry, the North and Northeast, who had hoped for justice, opportunity and a voice. Video footage of the earlier rallies showed these people in front of the main stage: women, old men, kids and grandmas, smiling and looking sincere and harmless. These were the people who were later shoved aside as the violent Red elements took over.
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The poor and under-represented folks from the provinces have always been systematically shut out from economic empowerment by the corrupt Bangkok elites who control all policy. Massive government corruption has always been the rule in Thailand’s history, and the Bangkok elites have always excelled in blocking and exploiting the poor rural majority by their unholy alliance of political power and economics.
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But it has been slowly getting better for the rural poor in the last couple of decades with more opportunity, education and communications. Once these people understood their potentials and the political obstacles to them, they rightfully demanded a voice.
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Their “voice” ended up being a shrewd billionaire opportunist who sought out and harnessed their votes by promising them the moon. Populist rhetoric and government handouts bought their loyalty and votes. Thaksin became an elite of one, adding to his vast wealth through corrupt political means, and he exploited the poor for his own purposes in that they had vast voting numbers – and “democracy” is just a numbers game that can never guarantee justice by itself without a solid constitution that limits arbitrary power. Thaksin became an autocrat and was finally overthrown in a coup.
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I suspect that many of the peaceful Reds have now had cause to be disillusioned a bit, as many of them certainly witnessed firsthand the uglier thuggish behavior of many of their fellow Reds who are more hardcore and violent. Most of them certainly know now that the claims to be a totally “peaceful,” “non-violent” and “unarmed” movement were blatantly contradicted by the armed and violent Reds in their midst that started to dominate the rally toward the end.
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So, for Bangkok it’s back to business, but what about these people who have always been institutionally shut out? The reforms needed are not redistributions of wealth but rather a leveling of political blocks to economic opportunity. Laws, regulations and customs that give economic monopoly advantages to elites – elites who are politicians, or family of or cronies of politicians – must be abolished.
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There must be constitutional changes that separate economic activity from political power – in the same way, and for the same reasons, as the American separation of church and state. Protect property from force or fraud, protect contracts, but no economic advantages should ever be gained from political power.
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It is about fairness, justice and the radical limitation of political power. But it is also a practical concern: if the legitimate grievances of these good people are ignored, the streets will see red again.
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