What Thailand’s PAD protesters are really about | Asia News – Politics, Media, Education | Asian Correspondent

What Thailand’s PAD protesters are really about | Asia News – Politics, Media, Education | Asian Correspondent
Andrew Spooner Jun 03, 2012 

The political agenda of Thailand’s PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy) yellow shirt movement has always been explicit – fascism. In fact, they’ve publicly screamed their profoundly anti-democratic agenda so many times it would need a willful and deliberate act to ignore the explicit neo-fascism of the PAD. From wanting to “destroy democracy” through to “shutting down the country” to “cleansing Thailand of our enemies,” the PAD’s agenda is very clear and has been since at least 2008.

PAD thugs want dictatorship to replace democracy

So what kind of person or group would refuse to accurately describe the PAD as what they are?

First of all, it wasn’t the Hong Kong-based, entirely independent and highly respected Asian Human Rights Commission. This is what they said about the PAD when they shut down Bangkok’s airports a few years ago -

They spring from a far-right ideology that has for decades driven successive military-bureaucratic administrations in Thailand, which dramatic changes to political and social life of the last two decades [aka democracy] have increasingly threatened.

Some commentators and opponents of the alliance [PAD] have described its agenda as fascist. This is not an exaggeration.

Nor was it Mithran Somasundrum in The Guardian who wrote a piece entitled “Shuffling towards fascism”. In this article Mithran examines comments by Thanong Khantong, the Nation’s editor, who supported the PAD’s 2008 protests and which Mithran feels exemplify the PAD’s political programme.

Thanong writes – “I don’t see Thailand backtracking against the democratic process … It is a joke to believe that the rural voters love or have a better understanding of democracy than the Bangkok middle class … The foreign media and foreign experts must stop distorting Thai politics with their convenient definition of democracy,” From earlier in the article: “A country can survive without democracy but it can’t survive without law” … “The politicians are the main problem and a liability in our democracy.”

The last two quotes are what I mean by fascism, since I don’t know what else you’d call it.

It is not possible to have contempt for democracy without first having contempt for people, since democracy is, after all, meant to deliver the people’s will. Likewise, contempt for people, or at least for a significant section of a country’s population, will eventually lead to a corroding of democracy. That corrosion is occurring now, and, here, at this moment in time, is what contempt gets you.

So there we have it – one of the region’s leading human rights groups calling the PAD fascist and one of the planet’s leading English-language newspapers joining in. Furthermore, we should never forget the very words that spill so readily from the PAD’s own lips.

Yet, strangely, in the last few days, as the PAD attempt to storm the Thai Parliament, once again threatening extreme violence in their avowed agenda to destroy Thailand’s struggling democracy, some people have chosen to completely ignore the evidence and stick to turning a blind eye to fascism.

Enter, of course, the usual suspects – the Bangkok-based international media.

Reuters, AP and, of course, journalists using twitter, such as Al Jazeera’s Bangkok correspondent (who, rather strangely, has retweeted the PAD supporting Thanong Khantong’s comments), routinely refer to the PAD using benign terms such as “anti-government” protesters and “yellow shirts”. These reports and tweets whilst not even naming the PAD’s political agenda as fascistic fail to even utter the PAD’s own words and commitment to “destroy democracy” and “cleanse Thailand”.

When asked directly about their refusal to accurately portray the PAD’s politics Bangkok’s international media corps hide behind their usual supine excuses of “impartiality” or “its too complex.”

Forget the truth, forget the facts and forget accuracy.

Instead, in their place, we have a collusion to misrepresent the situation and a willingness to allow an openly fascistic and violent political group to impose their anti-democratic extremism on an entire nation without even mentioning what they’re actually up to.

For me, such willful misrepresentation is as good as lying.