Bangkok, May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand

7. The Ineffable Rightness of Conspiracy: Thailand’s Democrat-ministered State and the Negation of Red Shirt Politics

Marc Askew 72 7 The Ineffable RIghTness of ConspIRaCy Thailand’s Democrat-ministered state and the negation of Red shirt politics Marc Askew Thailand’s Democrat Party-led administration under the leadership of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva emerged victorious following the dramatic and ultimately bloody confrontations with the Red Shirt movement during March-May 2010. But this victory was achieved at the expense of persistent, in fact exacerbated, political polarization. This is so because the Red Shirts’ second messianic attempt to force political change by mass action was suppressed not simply by legally sanctioned military power — the state’s reaction was legitimized by the application of two potent conspiracy discourses, namely “terrorism” and the overthrow of the monarchy. The former is newly devised, but the latter is old; I describe it here as Thailand’s “Primary Conspiracy Theory”. There is not the space here to elaborate at length on the 07 BangkokIT.indd 72 3/22/12 3:05 PM The Ineffable Rightness of Conspiracy 73 historical genesis and various mutations of the Primary Conspiracy Theory and its formal and informal institutional supports (the former exemplified in the manipulation of Thailand’s lesè majesté law). Suffice it to say that the increasingly hysterical claim since late 2005 that the “monarchy is in danger” from evil plotters is a vital dimension of hyperroyalist Thai popular nationalism and an institutionalized discourse embraced and deployed by key palace-aligned conservative actors (notably Privy Council President Prem Tinsulanon), the now dominant Queen’s Guard faction of the military and the Democrat Party. This trend has certainly not been discouraged by the palace, exemplified by the queen’s attendance of and utterances at funerals of members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) in 2008. Deployed by the PAD as a vital weapon to mobilize popular middle-class opposition to then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and by the military command as a crucial justification for the 2006 coup against him, the imperative to “protect the monarchy” has become the key pre-emptive ideological buttress for conservative rule in the name of “Democracy with the King as Head of State.” The Primary Conspiracy Theory has long lurked in Thai conservative discourse, both as a central anxiety and a political weapon, reflecting the revival (and re-sacralization) of the monarchy in post-1945 Thailand. At times of system strain, such as the Cold War period, and currently in the anxious closing years of the ninth reign, it has been openly deployed as a mechanism to silence dissent and critique. Viewed from a historical perspective, Democrat leaders’ pious declarations in April 2010 that the Red Shirt movement was intent on toppling the monarchy (officially recognizing long-standing PAD accusations and popular gossip) underlined the widely recognized techniques of a party that undermined political enemies by spreading scandal and rumour — famously exemplified in 1946 in the claims by Democrat Party members that their political arch-enemy Prime Minister Pridi Phanomyong was behind the death of the young King Ananda Mahidol. The symbolic overkill harnessed by the Democrat administration in April–May 2010 was an indicator of just how threatening the Red Shirt challenge had become. Directed principally at the Red Shirt leadership and former Prime Minister Thaksin, these demonizing efforts assumed somehow that ordinary Red Shirt followers would not also take them to heart as a negation of their political ideals and identity by an intransigent 07 BangkokIT.indd 73 3/22/12 3:05 PM Marc Askew 74 establishment. But the stoking of moral panic and condemnation only managed to convince those Thais who were already opposed to the Red Shirt movement and Thaksin, leaving Red Shirt supporters and many others alienated from Thailand’s increasingly repressive post-2006 political dispensation. Following the convergence of unprecedented numbers of protestors on Bangkok from 12 March 2010, the government struggled to manoeuvre for political space against the Red Shirt demand for the unconditional dissolution of parliament. As the demonstrations proceeded with no let-up during March and into April (interspersed with mysterious bombing attacks), Abhisit’s government faced the challenge of managing the meaning of events as they unfolded before both a domestic and an international audience. It was imperative in the international arena, as it was domestically, for the government to affirm its legitimacy as an administration with a legal and moral mandate to preserve that version of constrained parliamentary democracy endorsed by the coup of...