uh-oh: another rural reeducation campaign in SE asia
[Nope. Still not ready to post on Mumbai. There are, however, dozens of Indian bloggers who are doing an excellent job of covering it, including our dear friend Shruti Rajagopalan. -ed.]
The Thai opposition, which has been staging massive protests in Bangkok since August, and occupied the international airport there last week. They are the frustrated hulk of the opposition that was soundly defeated by exiled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai party. TRT was a centrist-populist party founded by the aforementioned telecom billionaire that married such capitalist ideals as microcredit with socialist ones like free low-level primary care, and earned itself a stranglehold on Thai politics—and the ire of the left and the military elite alike.
After the 2006 coup, Shinawatra’s exile, and the restoration of an elected government made of up Shinawatra loyalists, Thailand has been through a lot. It seems that simply wearing assinine “not my [prime minister]” t-shirts for eight pretentious years isn’t enough for the Thai opposition, though:
If they win what they have dubbed their “final battle,” Bangkok-based People’s Alliance for Democracy members say they will start a campaign to tell “the truth” to the country’s rural majority, which has elected parties linked to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra four times since 2006.
“Rural people have good hearts but they don’t know the truth like we do in Bangkok,” said Noppakoon Lagum, 37, a surgeon helping to occupy the main international airport. “It is our duty to re-educate them.”
There are two words in the English language specifically designed for such a situation: HOLY F*CK. Granted, they probably mean “run out into the fields and make asses of themselves to hack into an overwhelmingly solid voting bloc”, but then we shouldn’t forget the last time crazed leftist groups decided to launch a rural reeducation campaign in Southeast Asia.