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3 It is the peoples’charge that the government and Thai law are capitalist and tools of the capitalists.The farmers have not been helped and have not received justice.They don’t know who to turn to now. Anonymous editorialist, Thai Niu, 12 August 2517 [1974] I am objecting to a model which concentrates attention upon one dramatic episode—the Revolution—to which all that goes before and after must be related; and which insists upon an ideal type of this Revolution against which all others may be judged. E. P.Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays In mid-August 1974, farmers from seven central Thai provinces threatened to renounce their citizenship and burn their state-issued identity cards. In the months following the end of nearly forty years of dictatorship and the democratic opening inaugurated by the events of 14 October 1973, farmers were one of several politicized groups that took to the streets in Thailand. For months they had beseeched the prime minister to take action to reduce their debt and secure a fair price for rice. Their appeals were ignored; the deputy prime minister refused even to meet with them. With nowhere else to turn, they turned to themselves. Unafraid of creditors and other capitalists, they hoped to win for themselves a new life without oppression. The farmers announced their intention to cease paying taxes and to end their recognition of the Thai state leadership as their own. Instead, they planned to set up an autonomous, liberated zone (khet plotploy). By September 1974, the farmers were standing firm in their threat to secede.If the state used force against them,the farmers promised to respond in kind. Introduction When Revolution Is Interrupted 4 . Introduction With this threat of force, the Thai prime minister, Sanya Thammasak, finally took notice of the farmers. Neither he nor the deputy prime minister, Prakob Hutasingh, wanted to believe the threats were real. In contrast, Police Director General Prachuab Suntharangkul saw in them a real and imminent danger. He cautioned that “the phrase ‘liberated area’ is one that Communists use, perhaps suggesting that the farmers have been incited by the Communists .” He ordered the police to investigate the farmers’ meaning in using the phrase. If the farmers violated the law, he would order their immediate arrest. In threatening to create an autonomous zone, the farmers were placing themselves at the head of a long trajectory of revolt. This tradition of revolt included peasant rebellions in the nineteenth century, and, in the latter half of the twentieth, came to be linked to Cold War fears of an imminent communist takeover. Unlike their predecessors, however, a few days after Police Director General Prachuab gave the order to investigate the possible revolt, the farmers withdrew their threat in favor of continued protest. The specter of revolution seemed to drift out of the Thai picture. Police Director General Prachuab’s concern about the renegade farmers, which echoed the broader panic of Thai and U.S. counterinsurgency specialists , must be seen against the backdrop of communist transitions to power in neighboring Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1975. Despite the fears of elites inside and outside the Thai state, Thailand remained, in the geopolitical language of the day, a “domino” that continued to stand even as its eastern and northern neighbors “fell.” Dissident Thai farmers did not, in Lenin’s articulation of Marx’s idea of revolution, “shatter, break up, blow up . . . the whole state machinery.” The open space of politics created by the 14 October 1973 movement for democracy was destroyed less than three years later by a massacre of unarmed progressive students and activists at Thammasat University on the morning of 6 October 1976. A coup followed on the evening of the massacre. The administration of the Thai state was handed back to the military and bureaucratic elite, and the monarchy was left intact. Although the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) continued to fight a war against the Thai state that it had begun in 1965, by the mid-1980s the CPT had been dissolved. Many of the cadres not killed by Thai military forces during the war surrendered and resumed their lives outside the maquis. Yet to conclude from this series of statements that there was no revolution in mid-1970s Thailand would be to misapprehend both recent Thai history and the meaning of revolution. The triumphant counterinsurgency specialists who congratulated themselves on the successful protection of Thailand from communist revolution were correct...

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