Eve of Thai Elections: Gunfights and Explosions

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Wounded lying in the streets. 

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After only two or three hours since last consulting it, my Twitter feed (@Northwindhermit) alerted me to 87 unread Tweets!  That signifies that news is happening fast on the streets.  Folks in the wrong place at the wrong time are being shot or pinned down by gunfire.  Literally, it’s bloody awful.  Violence goons from both sides of the divide are getting in their trigger time. 

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Tomorrow is a national election day in Thailand, albeit a highly disputed and controversial election that will most probably solve nothing in this fractured land that is on the brink of cultural civil war.  The political idiocy will just go on and on. 

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What is needed?  In my opinion it is the complete “death of politics,” as Karl Hess advocated over 45 years ago.  That is, greatly needed is a constitutional system that limits any and all governmental power.  There is just too much power to be had here, even by electoral means.  Checks and balances on all power are needed.  Extreme and radical limitations.  Decentralization of power, federalism, rule of law, strong independent courts that can check the tyranny of either majorities or elites.  As F.A. Hayek observed 70 years ago, when a political system allows great power to be had in the hands of any government – even an elected one such as the 1933 German one – it will be the gangsters, the wolves, who lust for and successfully take that power. 

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We are hunkered down in our home and will not venture too far out tomorrow.  But we are not worried about ourselves.  I have enough beer stocked up, we have enough water and food, and the cats’ food is ample.  Bangkok is a huge sprawled-out city, so the places where violence rages are usually safely spread out and far away, as we are on the outer fringes.  But we would like to see peace someday. 

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-Zenwind.

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