Foreword – Seh Daeng
On May 13th 2010 the Red Shirt protests were at their peak. Thousands of demonstrators had blockaded themselves behind makeshift, yet formidable, barricades in central Bangkok. Shots had already been fired, mass funerals had been held, tanks had been torn apart and para-military reservists called upon. In a few days the Thai state would make their final assault on the Red Shirts encampment, hundreds would be killed in the capital’s streets.
Facing up against The Royal Thai Military from behind the barricades were the Red Shirts, most of the bodies making up the masses were from the rural poor, bussed in from upcountry provinces. The broader Red Shirt movement however, was a composite of an unlikely alliance between a dedicated bloc of elite capitalists and the beleaguered peasantry.
The face of the movement was former President Thaksin Shinawatra, a Northern Thai elite former cop cum businessman, who had won parliament in a landslide on two occasions before being couped out of power in 2006 by the military. Thaksin had formed a wide ranging coalition of fellow elite businessmen, police, peasants and even avowed communists. Offering an effective populist redistribution of wealth and power from the capital and into the outer provinces– evidently too much for the rest of the Thai elite to bear.
The unlikeliness of The Red Shirt Alliance however, could be best summed up not in Thaksin, but in a high ranking police officer nicknamed Seh Daeng (Khattiya Sawasdipol). Seh Daeng, an avowed anti-communist crusader, portrayed himself as something of a real life Tom Clancy. He had served in Thailand’s anti-communist death squads in the 1970s, having taken part in high stakes secret ops with the CIA in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, as well as on Thai soil– at least according to his best selling memoirs. He claimed to have been involved in numerous assassinations of communist cadres, in allying with opium lords such as the Laotian General Vang Pao and had even, supposedly, personally infiltrated Jihadist groups in Malaysia and Indonesia as late as the 1990’s.
During Thaksin’s tenure as prime minister, Seh Daeng had become one his most important allies in the security services, simultaneously holding the ranks of General, Admiral and Air Chief Marshal. Nobody in Thailand publicly embodied violent state power like Seh Daeng.
At the time of the 2006 coup against Thaksin, Seh Daeng was commanding the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), akin to the Thai FBI. Known for his loyalty to Thaksin, following the coup, he was humiliated as he was immediately reassigned as the army’s aerobics instructor. “I have prepared one dance,” he told reporters at the time, “It’s called the ‘Throwing a Hand Grenade Dance’.
From there Seh Daeng was literally on the war path, he began training and arming Red Shirt paramilitaries, publicly boasting of their fighting prowess. He appeared on protest stages, was ever present on the frontlines of the barricades and was repeatedly seen in the media comparing himself to Braveheart and calling government troops “homosexuals”.
On the evening of May 13th 2010 while the Red Shirt protests were at their peak, Seh Daeng decided to hold an impromptu public interview in central Bangkok with the New York Times. During the interview, at 7:20PM, a sniper’s bullet hit Seh Daeng in the head, killing him and putting an end to his personal crusade.
It’s unclear how many people were killed on the streets of Bangkok by sniper fire in May 2010, Wikipedia puts the number at around 80, while Red Shirt activists put it in the 100s. To this day no hearings have been held and nobody has been prosecuted for any of the killings including that of the renegade Seh Daeng.
What we see in the unlikely story of the reactionary super-spook turned people’s champion is a war deep within the heart of the Thai state. The assassination of Seh Daeng was not immediately strategically nor politically necessary. In reality, Seh Daeng posed no real threat, but rather an opportunity to show what happens if you break the pact of the deep state.
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This was not the first time the Thai state had used state violence to set an example. In the following excerpt from Coup of the Forest we explore the early history of the Thai deep state and the political violence that it is capable of wielding.
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Above the Surface – The Neo Mandala
Prior to the centralisation of Siam the Kingdom was maintained under what is known as The Mandala System, this is the vague term given to the overlapping systems of governance in Southeast Asia prior to the colonial era. Whereby, political power was vested in the lords of different cities which in turn administered and collected taxes in the immediate geographical areas around them. Oftentimes, areas would fall under the purview of more than one city lord, in which case, both lords would collect taxes and administer the region, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes in opposition, while other times third-party lords would have to step in to settle the disputes.
To be more specific in the case of Siam’s mandala– and here we’re intentionally writing very vaguely because the specific processes fluctuated over the centuries, Bangkok acted as the central city-state and other city-states paid tribute to the King in Bangkok. Many of these other city-states are today the modern Thai provincial capitals. The same was true of Siams vassals like Patani, Vientiane and Chiang Mai or Lanna. Which were capitals of their respective regions, and administered the land and people through a similar overlapping process.
It was during the reign of Chulalongkorn (1852-1910) and the peak of the European colonial era that Bangkok sought to modernise this system based on the European statehood model with a clearly defined capital, whose rule over the land was to be undisputed. During their reigns, King Mongkut, Chulalongkorn and his son, the British educated Vajiravudh were largely successful in this process of centralising state control and doing away with the ancient Mandala model.
Unlike the European states, however, Siam was unquestionably an absolute monarchy, that is, until 1932, when the king was overthrown by a group of elite commoners known as the Kanat Ratsadorn or Peoples Party.
It was at this moment that this once centralised power scattered. It scattered not geographically, like the mandala system of old, but factionally, into different sections of the elite classes. They were the military, the judiciary, the sangha, the parliament (at times), the monarchy and of course capital. These became the new power centres that would come to administer the Thai state to this day. Like the mandala city-states of old, sometimes their areas of control would be vague and hard to define, sometimes they would cooperate, sometimes they would compete, and sometimes they would go to war.
To more closely examine this system we must go back to 1932 and that moment of fracture, when Thailand was born by coup, fusing the political mechanism of the coup into its young national DNA, when a small alliance of Western-educated military officers and civil society elites known as the People’s Party overthrew the absolute monarchy. While other states of the era had similar “revolutions” Thailand’s was complicated– an outlier. It was not an explicitly colonial territory, there was no major war or collapse of power to ignite the coup and the movement was not a popular front, but a small band of the elite (though non-royal) class. This was an ideological coup by elite consensus, that is to say, enough members of the elite classes agreed that there needed to be a change at the nation’s helm.
Having spent time in continental Europe, factions within the People’s Party (the elite commoners) had become enamoured with different elements of Western republicanism. Generally speaking, the party could be divided in two. The civil society elements were staunch believers of liberal democracy, democratic socialism and even anti-imperialism, while the military officers admired the early fascist movements of Benito Mussolini and Kamal Ataturk. This strange alliance was only made possible by the position of the absolute monarchy as a common enemy.
In Siam, as it was then known, there was no popular mass movement for the coup plotters to organise around. The cities lacked a significant urban proletariat as there was little in the way of industrial development, cities mostly acted as centres for trade and governance. Siam even lacked a well-established language or religion, despite those reformist efforts by the monarchy in the past century to centralise the state.
Both factions within the plotting Peoples Party, without question, considered themselves progressive revolutionaries. Having witnessed European state building first-hand, they considered it their duty, as elites, to bring change to what they saw as their backward homeland. Again, this was an ideological coup by elite consensus.
On the day itself, June 24th 1932, the coup was executed flawlessly. The core group of plotters were so effective that many soldiers took part without even realising they were staging a takeover. There was no bloodshed, the only injury sustained was one indignant prince who put up a struggle while being arrested. The civilian section of the party immediately sprang to action, and the nation’s first constitution was signed just three days later, significantly relegating the power of the absolute monarchy, while not totally abolishing it.
The process of this initial coup set the standard for the many coups that were to follow, all of which share remarkably similar characteristics– meticulously organised takeovers with no bloodshed and immediately justified by a legalistic framework. Just under 1 year later came another coup, where the pesky left-leaning civilian elements in the People’s Party were purged, paving the way for the fascistic military policies that would define Siam’s development to Thailand over the next two decades.
Euro-Fascism With Thai Characteristics
The years following the 1933 coup cemented the military wing’s control of the People’s Party and the nation at large. The fascist Field Marshal Plaek Phibun took a firm grip on the party. There were two other failed coup attempts, from factions still loyal to the monarchy and several purges of those seen as sympathetic to the left-leaning civilian wing. By the time WWII came to Asia Phibun was the absolute ruler of the country.
Under his premiership, the country had rapidly modernised in line with the Euro-Fascist policies he had admired in Europe. The name Siam was changed to Thailand, to reflect its new ethnostate status. A militarised Bangkok variant of Thai language and culture was forcibly exported out to other urban areas, and subsequently as far into the periphery as it could push. Minority groups were absorbed into the new Thainess, while those that resisted were harshly penalised or purged and strict anti-communist legislation was introduced. Many of these policies mirror those of Ataturk’s formation of the Turkish state and Mousillinis in Italy– indeed, Phibun fervently tried to create a similar cult of personality for himself.
The economy was also increasingly urbanised through modern central planning, while old feudal patronage networks were redrawn. Wealth poured into Bangkok, though now not into the palace, but the pockets of the Peoples Party’s leaders and their crony capitalist allies.
In the minds of the military, this was a program of progressivism, to remodel Thailand along the lines of the modern European states, and hold the line against the imperial powers on the borders while simultaneously weaning the nation off of the social and spiritual dependency of the monarchy, with many members of the aristocracy now largely jailed or in exile, the latter including the King.
This period saw Bangkok’s ultranationalist military elite and big capitalists in a tight alliance, one that increasingly entrenched and simultaneously reinforced the other. At this top end of the ruling class, distinctions between the state and capital became grey, as families arranged tactical marriages between clans. This was also aided by the displacement of the aristocracy, allowing elite commoners into the highest echelons of the new Thai society. Much like the old aristocracy, Bangkok’s new elite exported their into regional positions of control in the outer provinces, in a bid to prevent any localism from the once-disunited Siam.
What Phibun and his allies were attempting to do was rid Thailand of the vestiges of the monarchical Sakdina feudal system and centralise this new power under the militaristic republican leadership of Bangkok. However, these vestiges, despite being forced into the periphery of power, still remained. Many in the Sangha were still loyal to the feudal Sakdina system, while the monarchy in exile waited patiently for their chance to return.
A Rupture
World War II saw Phibun’s Thailand immediately capitulate in the face of Japanese expansion across Southeast Asia, with Thailand signing a ceasefire after just 5 hours of fighting. Phibun took advantage of the situation to, with Japan’s help, “reclaim” territory that he considered stolen by the European imperialists in Laos, Cambodia and Burma. However, many in The People’s Party were uncomfortable with the arrangement.
During the war anti-Japanese resistance cells were formed with the help of the Western allies, known as the Seri Thai (Free Thai) Movement– another strange alliance, this time between the left-leaning/civil society elements of The People’s Party and ousted royalists. They took part in covert operations on the ground against Phibun’s state and the Japanese occupiers while Allied forces bombed Thailand from above.
Ultimately though, it was the shifting of global tides in the war that started to push the Japanese out. Phibun was delicately removed from office by elite consensus, though he would face no consequences for what many considered to be a treasonous relationship with the Japanese. His replacements quietly orchestrated backchannel diplomatic negotiations with the Allies. Following Japan’s surrender in 1945, the same three major elite factions were set to battle for the future of Thailand. The Monarchy, The Liberal elites and the Republican Military fascists.
Immediately post-war, these three all found themselves in a Bangkok now empty of Japanese occupation. Of course, within all of these constituencies, there existed multiple different factions jockeying for control. Thailand had been like a snow globe, picked up and shaken by the war. Now with no single faction powerful enough to rule outright, the scene needed time to settle, and compromises needed to be made.
Initially, it was unclear how thoroughly Phibun’s republicanism and anti-communist programs had penetrated. The monarchy still retained immense prestige and good relations with overseas powers. Meanwhile, the civil society wing was buoyed by their success in the Seri-Thai resistance as well as the success of left-learning independence movements in the surrounding region.
Beginning in 1944 the snow globe began to settle, there were nine prime ministers over the next 4 years, including 2 more meticulously planned bloodless coups by the military.
The Fourth Pillar & A New Marriage
During the post-war period a fourth pillar emerged, which was, of course, the USA. Neighbouring Britain and France’s empires were in freefall and battle lines for the coming assault on Asian communism were being drawn. The US had strongly backed the royalist wing of the Seri Thai movement during the war but admired Phibun’s anti–communist fascism. And so, it was an uneasy marriage of the two wings which emerged supreme by 1956. Phibun once again took parliament, albeit with an increasingly powerful monarchy entrenching itself in the palace. This alliance was facilitated and reinforced by the USA, which had just intervened in the Korean civil war. Those in Washington and London perceived Southeast Asia as the buffer zone to constrain the spread of communism. As such, Thailand was the perfect bulwark, lacking a clearly defined domestic anti-colonial or communist movement and providing a deeply-entrenched local anti-communist coalition, it was to become the staging ground for the USA’s war on Southeast Asia.
Phibun was back, and the left-liberal wing of the People’s Party was once again purged. His second coming, however, was entirely unlike his first reign, this time he had the monarchy to contend with, specifically the charming young King Bhumibol and his savvy privy council. During this tenure, the monarchy was able to steadily reassert its influence, at first to Bangkok, and gradually out to the periphery. It was clear though that the days of absolute monarchy were over, The People’s Party had, over the course of two decades, irreparably reshaped the kingdom. A different ideology had to be adapted, purpose-built for the new Thailand of the 20th century, one which somehow combined a progressive modernising nation with a bygone feudal monarchy.
During this era, the project of state building and centralisation continued its process of expansion and Thai’ification, only now with the young King Bhumibol as the figurehead. To put it bluntly, regarding policy, there was not a whole lot of difference between Phibun and the newly empowered monarchy. Both were militaristic, expansionist, nationalists who enforced central Thai hegemony, but the figurehead had changed from Phibun to the Monarch.
Shifts in Lived Exploitation of The Peasantry
The history of these elite institutions is far from a people’s history, but it is nonetheless necessary to examine the elites ideological and practical developments. But during the post-war settlement, what was developing out in the periphery? Here we find increased discontent quietly brewing, which lacking any representation in Bangkok, would seemingly spontaneously erupt.
To briefly return to the turn of the century then, during the time of the absolute monarchy, there had been land reforms and the supposed abolition of the Saktina feudal system. Following the system’s supposed abolition by King Chulalongkorn in the late 19th century there were significant land reforms and some peasant land ownership had taken place. Here though, we must dust of our copy of The Real Face of Thai Feudalism by Jit Phumisak, Thailand’s preeminent Marxist historian, and find Jit’s reading of this supposed transition from the Saktina system to Capitalism.
Jit describes how, during the early development of the capitalist bourgeois class, both the Feudal lords and the bourgeoisie would use the peasants as pawns to fight one another for their own class interests.
Jit writes:
“Once the development of saktina society reached the stage when the capitalist mode of production had emerged and the middle class had risen up to struggle against the saktina class, the peasant class usually followed the middle class’s leadership. The peasant struggle at this time joined with the middle-class’s struggle in the cities, and the middle class always took advantage of the peasant disturbances for its own purposes.
One clear indication of the attitude of the middle class was compromise, i.e., the compromise it made with the Land-Lords once it had been victorious in its struggle. The reason for this was that once it had established its liberal trade-and-industrial system, its fundamental conflict with the saktina over the means of production was eliminated. This enabled people in the two classes to join forces for a further period, and thus it was that the saktina class could continue its exploitation of the peasantry as of old. Those who gained from these peasant disturbances therefore were not the peasants themselves but the middle class which was engaged in establishing the capitalist system of production.
Those in the middle-class struggling against the saktina class did not do so alone but in alliance with the brutally repressed and exploited agricultural slave class. This gave the middle-class tremendous power, and eventually, with the support of the People as a whole, it destroyed saktina political power and established a middle-class state in its place. This was the end of saktina political power. We should observe, nonetheless, that this demise of the saktina system affected by the middle class was in terms of political power alone. In terms of production in agri- culture, decayed remnants of the saktina continue to be fully exploitative and represssive. As no land reform has taken place, land of means of production-remains completely in the hands of the saktina class as before. What the saktina class has lost, therefore, is no more than an institution, the committee allocating and looking after its profits. The decayed remnants of the saktina continue in a prolonged and stubborn struggle for power through political institutions.
Essentially, what Jit appears to be saying here, is that while there was a development of a bourgeois or middle class, the experience of labour extraction of the peasantry remained effectively the same during the development of market relations and the emergence of that bourgeois class.
Skipping ahead chronologically, in every region of Thailand, living conditions for the peasantry worsened during those chaotic years after the Second World War. Just as before the war, the dominating factor was the rapid spread of market relations and commercialization of land, as the country was more rapidly integrated into the global capitalist economy. Chemical-intensive fertilisers and other “Green Revolution” technologies began reaching farmers, increasing their surplus, however, despite this supposed modernisation antiquated systems of taxation of landless peasants prevailed, and any additional profit gained from that surplus, went to the elite landlord class, while breaking down the communal elements of agrarian life.
Conditions were not easy for tenant farmers, with rents in central Thailand rising from over a quarter of the crop in pre-war days to half or more in the post-war period, in the Northern region, the situation was yet more bleak, with reports of landlords regularly demanding two-thirds of the harvest as payment for rent.
While in the Northeastern region, exposure to booms and busts of the international market for rice and cash crops like sugarcane and cassava led to widespread indebtedness, forcing farmers to sell their land and become tenant farmers or landless workers on land they had formerly owned.
Across the Kingdom, these issues were exacerbated by the decrease of forest land and the loss of any legal common access to it. These forests had not only been a relatively non taxable source of medicine and food, but also a common land for natural farming, which was often nontaxable.
Between 1945 and 1975, forest cover in Thailand declined drastically, from 61% to 34% of the country’s land area. Unlike the heady colonial era days of mass teak extraction, this 20th-century foresting was intensified by universal markets and its modern industrial machinery, clearing the land of any trees and resources that could be commodified, much of this cleared land was then turned into farmland and orchards or timber plantations, yet more geographic space to practise the labour extraction of the peasantry.
The deteriorating conditions in rural areas contributed to an increasing tension between the peasantry and their landlords. However, due to the geographic and social conditions of the countryside, much of these antagonisms were highly localised and thus lacked a united voice. In a similar vein, the conditions in the countryside were almost entirely overlooked by the elites in Bangkok.
For example, in the late 50’s, when a famine ravaged the northeastern Isaan region, thousands of drought refugees flooded into Bangkok, reports emerged of the starving masses resorting to eating small house lizards and rats. The minister of agriculture, a former military general, flew over the region by helicopter. He reported back that everything was fine, that there was no crisis and that it is the normal condition for the peasants to eat house lizards.
Field Marshal Phibun would eventually be deposed in 1957 via a coup led by royalist General Sarit Tanarat and his successor Thanom Kittikachorn. Sarit’s rule was brutal and repressive, extraordinarily corrupt, fanatically anti-worker and anti-communist, as was that of his protege Thanom. This was the new great architecture of the major provinces, the monarchy, the military, the sangha, the judiciary and, of course, capital, all of which stood united against the poor.
Red Barrels
To expand on the critique of Sarit and Thanom’s rule being brutal and repressive, extraordinarily corrupt, fanatically anti-worker and anti-communist, the often cited example is the Red Barrel killings/ massacres of the early 70s. A campaign of state orchestrated murders that killed thousands of villagers in rural Phatthalung Province. This was not a sudden moment of sporadic violence but an intense prolonged massacre which took place over 2-3 years.
The campaign was led by the intelligence services which coordinated and executed the massacre with local state backed paramilitaries. Estimates of the number of victims vary wildly; the contemporary Thai state recognises 80 deaths, while other investigations have come out with as much as 3000.
To contextualise the massacre, in 1971, US troop numbers in Vietnam were significantly winding down, while organising against the American presence in Thailand and their lackeys in the ruling junta was mounting. It was within this climate that Field Marshal Praphat Jarusathien, one of the top 3 military elites in the junta, claimed that within six months all traces of communists and communism would be eradicated from the kingdom. The violence that emerged in Phatthalung the next year was not so much a response to genuine communist threat, but a frenzied act of mass killing by reactionary actors, who could see that their power was beginning to slip away.
Scholar Tyrel Habberkorn provides the following insight Praphats anti-communist declaration from her paper Getting Away With Murder:
“One particularly proactive response to this (Phraphats declaration) statement came from a teacher and Village Defense Volunteer from Khaochaison district in Phatthalung, Yongyut Dusithamo. Teacher Yongyut recruited a group of young men and instructed them to re-create the appearance of having fought with communists. Thirteen young men were given five guns and twenty bullets per night. After 9 P.M. every evening, they shot the guns into the air and ran through the rice fields, trampling the stalks and destroying the rice. Teacher Yongyut also provided chickens for them to kill to create blood-laced messy evidence of their encounters with the communists. This nightly killing of a chicken was necessary since the alleged communists were not real. With the chicken blood as evidence of their presence, the young men could report that the communists always fled. After using their allotted bullets, the young men ran to tell the nearest village headman in a given area that they had fought the communists, but the communists had escaped. Teacher Yongyut and his fellow Village Defense Volunteers used similar strategies to produce a logic in which there was both a formidable communist presence in Phatthalung as well as a need for their increased financial support. Through their nightly fights with a chicken, his volunteers produced an idea of communists so fierce that they always escaped, unstoppable even when wounded.”
Phatthalung is a province in the south of Thailand where the Communist Party was indeed active, though in 72 it was far from a stronghold, as Tyrel Habberkorn puts it, “the boundary between Communist and Villager seemed almost entirely arbitrary”.
Villagers were rounded up by local police or military officers one-by-one, some were taken from their homes or workplaces, others picked up off of the street. They were brought to military bases, interrogated, tortured and finally executed. Their bodies were burned to ash in oil drums, often red coloured, entirely disposing of their remains. The families were not notified, in essence disappearing the villagers entirely.
There are glaring similarities between Phatthalung, Jakarta, Santiago and other sites of mass disappearances by reactionary forces across the world. All touched by the invisible hand of the CIA– as we will go on to detail, but we highlight the Red Barrel Killings here, not to gawk at the horror, but to convey the depths of the repressive state apparatus that the Thai peasantry were facing by the 1970s. A repressive state apparatus that initiates a counterinsurgency program against a nearly non-existent insurgency, just so as to justify its own need for being.
1973
On April 29th 1973 a helicopter flew over the dense forests of Kanchanaburi spraying bullets into the trees. Inside was a group of military cronies including Narong Kittikachorn, the son of dictator Thanon Kittikachorn. In sporting fashion, the group had been hunting forest animals with military-grade weapons from the air. Fortunately, however, there was a malfunction and the helicopter crashed. Unfortunately, they all survived, although if they were looking for signs the crash really ought to have been interpreted as one.
The incident was eventually made public. After decades of brutal military rule the vast majority of the Thai population were sick and tired of the barbaric oafs who had such a firm grip on the Kingdom. The streets of Bangkok were soon flooded with protestors.
By the 14th of October 1973, central Bangkok’s streets were filled with protestors. Students, workers and peasant activists had been occupying the old town for over a week. By mid-morning the crowd and the authorities had become restless, it’s not quite clear what started it, but violence erupted. Tanks and soldiers surrounded the area. From above, a helicopter circled firing wildly down into the crowd, aboard the helicopter, the very same Narong Kittikachorn.
77 people lost their lives, while many hundreds more were injured. As buildings burnt in central Bangkok the crowd swelled to half a million. The military withdrew and crowds surrounded police headquarters. The next day King Bhumiphol announced that the military government had resigned and that the Kittikachorns had fled the country.
For the first time in decades, a civilian government would sit in an elected parliament, a brief window of potential change had been opened again, albeit one with a parliament filled with bourgeois reformists, a judiciary overrun by reactionaries, a military in the thralls of anti-communist fervour and a monarchy which XXXXXXX. While the ministerial offices were no longer staffed by military generals, their deep seated power remained.
While most narratives of Thai political history focus on those events in Bangkok and the chaos of the next 3 years which would result in the massacre at Thammasat University, we’re going to leave the capital and return back to the agrarian periphery, because it would be under these conditions that an organised class conscious peasant movement finally erupted.
Below The Surface – The Strategies of Tension
To quote Tyrel Haberkorn’s book Revolution Interrupted (2011):
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 (het 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.
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.
While cadres from the communist party were certainly in contact with the organised peasant’s movement, the formation of the Farmers Federation of Thailand in 1974 was, by all accounts, largely a grassroots affair. Having said that, the role of leftwing university students was also an essential element to the rapid growth of the movement, the students provided much-needed technical and organisational support on a national level, but this was very different from the approach of the vanguardist underground cadres of the communist party.
The role of the students was more focused on connecting the formerly disparate peasants and helping to form a national structure for the movement, which historically had been fought only in a highly localised setting. The Farmers Federation served to bring together issues, concerns, and demands from different regions and different sectors of the Thai peasantry, not all of whom had experienced the same problems or suffered from them to the same degree.
Some demanded immediate aid such as cash injections for coming planting seasons, suspension of court cases involving farmers and help for flood or famine victims. Others held longer-term ambitions, such as mass land reform, the abolition of indebtedness, and interest rates.
This sudden upsurge in politicised peasant organising struck fear into the land-owning class and their crony enforcers within the military. In no small part due to development overseas, specifically the peasant vanguardist tendencies within the Chinese communist revolution.
The peasantry had long been seen as targets of “communist subversion” and hunger, being the prime symptom of that supposed vulnerability. As such, Habberkorn writes that, ironically, the peasants were actually seen by the Thai elite as one of the key guarantors against communist insurgency. The thinking went that, when people go hungry they are more likely to revolt, as such, a stable and cheap food supply was essential for stemming any revolutionary ambitions and a cheap food supply can be guaranteed by a highly productive peasantry.
Habberkorn writes in Revolution Interrupted:
“As growers of rice, the staple grain in Thailand, farmers could prevent hunger. As long as people were not hungry, the official line went, they would not want to topple the existing system.”
“The Bangkok Post ran a front-page headline that read “Anti-Communist Success Said Dependent on Rice.” Not only would bellies full of Thai rice be a great protection against the spread of communism but “the supply of rice and the price have great political significance.”” The consumers of rice were clearly addressed here, but what about the growers of rice? What about the farmers?
One answer to this question came over a year later in a Bangkok Post editorial titled “On Land Reform.”” The editorial was about a conference on land tenure convened by (UNESCO) and held from 8 October to 20 November 1951 in Madison, Wisconsin.” The author predicted that when the Thai delegates returned they would”
“”bring back with them suggestions for land reform which should be organized into a national blueprint for a system of land tenure incorporating the best features of landownership and tenancy methods of free countries in all parts of the world. This is the best answer to Communist claims about land reform. Soviet propagandists have dangled promises of great changes to impoverished and hungry people in other lands…. [T]he peasants of Eastern Europe, like the peasants of Russia, have learned that Soviet “collectivization,” or land reforms imposed from the top, brings worse oppression than before. Confiscation of property and liquidation of landowners as practiced in Russia, Eastern Europe and now in China have not done anything to improve the lot of the farmer. All that “collectivization” has accomplished is to make a tool out of man for the state.””
Here, it’s almost too easy to point out the ironies of this anti-communist thinking. The last sentence, to “make a tool out of man for the state” is explicitly what the reactionary powers intended to do with the peasants, almost in their own words earlier in the text. To go back again to Habberkorn’s question: “The consumers of rice were clearly addressed here, but what about the growers of rice? What about the farmers?“
The answer was, as she later puts it:
“Farmers had to solve the problem of hunger without ever being hungry themselves.”
In Habberkorn’s book, she goes on to detail how farmers were not considered political actors by the Thai elite or the American backers of the Thai state. It was in fact, the revolutionary organising of the Farmers Federation which began to build political agency for the peasantry. Habberkorn’s assessment is that the farmer’s assertion of their rights as citizens was in and of itself revolutionary. As previously they had been something of an almost passive, invisible mass of surplus grain producers. As such, any such challenge to that status quo was a revolutionary act, and even an act of insurgency.
In early 1974 mobilised peasants increasingly took to the streets of provincial capitals, demanding reforms from the new civilian government. The movement snowballed, as through their collective mobilisation, they fostered increasing class consciousness and group solidarity.
By March the first mass peasant protest took place in central Bangkok outside of the royal palace, when around a thousand farmers assembled demanding the government to guarantee the price of rice. By June another protest of around 10,000 farmers occupied the palace square for 5 days. There, they were joined in solidarity by a range of groups such as students and labour unions.
In response to the protests, the government did eventually agree to implement the Land Rent Control act, which standardised and lowered the level of rents on rice land outside of the central region, however, in reality for many rural areas, this was seldom enforced. Back in the outer-provinces tensions between local landlords and their tenant farmers were breaking out into violence. Haberkorn’s details one such encounter:
Eiakiew Chalermsuphakul, a landowner in Lamphun, met with fifteen farmers who rented land from him to divide the year’s harvest. When he sat down with his tenants, he demanded half the rice harvest. This group of farmers had rented from him for many years, and he expected the usual rental amount of one-half. But the farmers only offered one-third of the harvest (already above the 10-¢hang ceiling that they were now legally required to pay).
Eiakiew and the farmers argued for many hours, but they were unable to come to an agreement. Eiakiew began to feel displeased with the situation. He pulled out a gun and fired four shots. Luckily, the bullets did not hit anyone.
Immediately, the farmers left the meeting and went to the police station to report his actions. Eiakiew was called to the police station, where he confessed that he had shot his gun four times into the ground. He was charged with three offenses: intimidating and frightening people, carrying a gun in a community, and discharging a gun in a community. He paid a fine of sixteen hundred baht and then left the police station.’ Having failed to frighten the farmers, Eiakiew also found himself on the wrong side of the law.
For farmers, incidents like this, where the law actually acted on their side, was for many their first experience of having any kind of political agency on the local level, which then transferred to their perceived agency on the national level. This momentum saw the movement’s rapid growth, as these new emboldened citizens went from village to village, door to door, building and extending their shared class consciousness.
The protests continued, with increasing solidarity being shown from the aforementioned allied groups, the rhetoric and threats from the farmers became increasingly radical. They vowed to burn their ID cards, stop paying taxes, burn their crops and liberate the land into autonomous zones if the government continued their policy of inaction and empty promises. This was insurgency talk.
It was at this point when open solidarity was beginning to foster amongst these disparate members of the working class that the response from the neo-mandala powers began to grow more aggressive. As deputy Prime-minister Prakob Hutasingh put it ”this was going too far.”
While working-class solidarity was being cemented in protest, so too was the class solidarity of the elites, who began to see the Farmers, the students, the urban workers and the nascent communist insurgency in the distant hills as an existential threat, and so began the Thai Strategy of Tension.
The Genesis of Tension
By the 1970s different provinces within the neo-mandala system had already built a large force of reactionary paramilitaries, which we could very easily call the Thai-Gladio units– for lack of a better word. Some had already cut their teeth in combat, serving in Laos, Vietnam and the border regions as volunteers, or as enforcers in the upcountry opium markets.
The story of how these experienced paramilitaries came to be can be traced directly back to the early days of the CIA, in particular the input of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the CIA’s founding father. Donovan’s political connections stretched across the whole breadth of the American elite, right the way to the president. Following his pivotal role in the establishment of the CIA, he was appointed as Ambassador to Thailand in 1953.
American plans for the utilisation of Thailand as an anticommunist bulwark in Southeast Asia began to take shape in early 1953. The National Security Council began to look into what could be done by way of psychological warfare with Thailand as a base. President Eisenhower approved the proposal, and the Psychological Strategy Board drafted detailed plans for psychological warfare based in Thailand.
The draft proposal, called d-23, displayed a new fascination with Thai ethnology. To quote The United States and Military Government in Thailand By Daniel Fineman (1997):
“The report drew heavily on “impression” and, apparently, anthropological theories in vogue at the time describing Thailand as a “loosely structured society.” The report began its analysis of Thai ethnography with a set of sweeping generalizations of the Thai “national character.”
Thais, the report explained, are “incorrigible individualists.” “Gentle and light-minded,” the document continued, Thais are “not given to ponderous philosophic thought nor to great warlike and military ambitions.”Because of such attributes, “Thai character and cultural institutions are better suited to guerrilla activities than to the development on a largescale of conventional military forces.” “
A two stage plan was proposed. In the first stage the US would implement strategies to strengthen the Thai state itself, utilising propaganda programs, strengthening of business and diplomatic ties to the US and developing Thai infrastructure. The second stage was to be the development of the Thai military and paramilitaries. The report stated the intention to “develop, expand, and accelerate to the greatest extent sound programs for the creation and employment of indigenous guerrilla and paramilitary forces”. These forces would initially be used for self-defence, but were intended to be deployed in neighbouring states in the longer term. As the draft put it “extend programs for guerrilla and paramilitary forces composed of Thai and related groups (into Indochina)”.
Donovan
The deployment of CIA founder and master spook Donovan demonstrates how important the US considered their Thailand plans to be. Donovan’s mission was to implement the two stage plan, as the Defence Department described it “to prepare a plan for the intensification and increased efficiency of the [psychological warfare] activities . . . for the purpose of building a bastion in Thailand from which various operations can be initiated into adjoining areas.” In short, to make Thailand the U.S’s bulwark of anti-communism in Southeast Asia.
Donovan immediately got to work, with the establishment of Thailand’s new intelligence organisation the Krom Pramuan Ratchakan Phaen-din and the soon to be infamous Border Patrol Police. The US trained them not as policemen but as military units, a camp was established in Korat province and by 1954 a core of 5000 had already graduated along with an additional elite aerial unit known as PARU.
PARU and the Border Patrol would develop into the kingdom’s most effective guerilla and anti-guerilla force, particularly active in the upcountry border regions around Laos and Burma. Conducting on the ground operations and establishing networks of local informants based on patronage chains. The supplies and salaries for these units were all paid for by the CIA, US AID and the State Department. As well as these explicitly military forces, the CIA also developed civilian-based unconventional forces. The first of these were the Volunteer Defense Corps, which armed and trained 120,000 trusted loyal civilians.
The first stage of the two-stage plan, to strengthen Thailand domestically, was considered a rapid accomplishment, so much so, that the second part of the plan, to expand the program beyond Thailand’s borders, was already underway within the first year.
This began with a program to create paramilitary units out of roughly “two hundred thousand non-Thai hill tribesmen”, made up of the ethnic minorities found in the kingdom’s northern hills and along the border regions. As early as 1954, plans were made to send these units into Laos to fight the Vietminh, with famed C.I.A operative Edward Lansdale running the program.
To quote Daniel Fineman again:
The Border Patrol Police, again with CIA funding and equipment, began establishing sometime after the summer of 1954 a permanent presence in hill-tribe villages in the north. Openly, the BPP set up schools and clinics and improved village infrastructure. Secretly, it armed and trained tribesmen in guerrilla warfare.
The United States hoped eventually to deploy these roving tribesmen, with their ethnic connections in neighbouring countries, in Laos. Although providing no uniforms and little organization to the new fighters, the CIA devoted a large proportion—possibly most—of its resources to the program.
Though Donovan’s time in Thailand was relatively brief, he continued his work for 7 more years as a registered agent for the Kingdom of Thailand in Washington after his departure. His immediate replacement, John Peurifoy, had just come from Guatemala, having engineered an anti-leftist coup on behalf of the American United Fruits Company. Previously too Peurifoy had served as ambassador to Greece, where he helped organise the violent para-military anti-communist campaign against the country’s democracy movement. His involvement was so great that to this day a foreigner who attempts to interfere with Greece’s politics is called a “Peurifoy”.
The Opium War
During this period of the supposed Cold War, which was more of a regular war in Southeast Asia, opium was the lubricant which oiled the joint mechanisms of state and capital against the spread of communism in Thailand. This began when, following the Chinese communist revolution in 1949, vast swaths of reactionary Kuomintang (KMT) units fled mostly to the island of Taiwan and, most importantly to our narrative, the hills of Shan State in Northern Burma. The KMT divisions that entered the Shan hills found a densely forested mountainous range, far from the reach of Rangoon and Beijing. There they embedded with, or forced out, local elites, and established themselves in the nascent opium trade, supposedly to finance their re-taking of the Chinese mainland.
They were aided by the newly established CIA, based in Thailand, who supported them with food, equipment and weaponry. After two failed assaults back into Yunnan in the early 50s, and a prolonged battle with the Red Army and the Burmese military, the KMT were pushed yet further south along the Thai, Burma, and Laos border region, beginning what we now call The Golden Triangle Era.
The elites of the neo-mandala welcomed the KMT into Thailand’s northern border reaches. Envisioning them as an elite, well experienced, vehemently anti-communist and largely unaccountable guardians of their border, the other side of which was turning increasingly red. Furthermore, the opium grown in the Shan hills trickled down the valleys into Thailand, providing a unique opportunity for enrichment for the various neo-mandala provinces. This sparked an intense rivalry as to which arm of the state was to oversee the trade. To quote The Politics of Heroin by Alfred W. McCoy (1972) on the role of opium in Thailand’s political settlement of the 1950’s:
From 1947 to 1957 Thai politics was dominated by an intense rivalry between two powerful cliques: one led by Gen. Phao Sriyanonda, who resembled a cherub with a Cheshire cat smile, and the other by Marshal Sarit Thanarat. Both were catapulted upward by the November 1947 coup, which restored Thailand’s wartime leader, Marshal Phibun Songkhram, to power. Too weak to execute the coup himself, Marshal Phibun had recruited two powerful army cliques. One of these was composed mainly of ambitious young army officers led by Sarit; the other was led by the commander in chief of the army, General Phin, and sparked by his aggressive son-in-law, Col. Phao Sriyanonda. Soon after the triumvirate took power, the two army cliques began to argue over division of the spoils. Military power was divided without too much rancor when Phao became deputy director-general of the National Police. (Phao became director-general in 1951, and his forty thousand police officers were adequate insurance against Sarit’s control over the forty-five thousand-man army. And many of the bureaucratic and commercial spoils were divided with equal harmony. However, an exceptionally bitter struggle developed over control of the opium traffic.
The illicit opium trade had only recently emerged as one of the country’s most important economic assets. Its sudden economic significance may have served to upset the delicate balance of power between the Phao and Sarit cliques.
The “opium war” between Phao and Sarit was a hidden one, with almost all the battles concealed by a cloak of official secrecy. The most comical exception occurred in 1950 as one of General Sarit’s army convoys approached the railhead at Lampang is northern Thailand with a load of opium. Phao’s police surrounded the convoy and demanded that the army surrender the opium since anti narcotics work was the exclusive responsibility of the police. When the army refused and threatened to shoot its way through to the railway, the police brought up heavy machine guns and dug in for a fire-fight. A nervous standoff continued for two days until Phao and Sarit themselves arrived in Lampang, took possession of the opium, and escorted it jointly to Bangkok, where it quietly disappeared.
Behind the scenes General Phao gradually rested the bulk of control over the opium trade, thanks in large part to his close relationship with Bill Donovan. As we saw in Daniel Fineman’s text, much of the military aid from the US didn’t go to the military, but rather the highly militarised police force. The police even maintained an air force, a vast maritime unit, an armoured division and the aforementioned paratrooper unit.
General Phao and the institutions that surrounded him became the main conduit for sending supplies from the CIA and Taipei north to the KMT, providing Phao with the necessary contacts to build a monopoly on opium exports, tipping the balance of power in the Neo-Mandala to favour his police force over Sarit’s military. By the early 50s Phao was considered the most powerful man in Thailand, albeit on ground still shaking after the earthquake of the WWII years, with his police force acting as the largest opium trafficking syndicate in Thailand, able to vertically integrate the opium market, from the remote northern hills in Chiang Mai to the ports in Bangkok.
Of course, Phao himself publicly posed as a crusader against opium, as McCoy puts it:
“theatrical considerations came to the fore, with police border patrols staging elaborate shoot-outs with the KMT smugglers near the Burma-Thailand frontier. Invariably the KMT guerrillas would drop the opium and flee, while the police heroes brought the opium to Bangkok and collected a reward worth one eighth the retail value. The opium subsequently disappeared. Phao himself delighted in posing as the leader in the crusade against opium smuggling, and often made hurried, dramatic departures to the northern frontier, where he personally led his men in these desperate gun battles with the ruthless smugglers.
Ironically, it was opium that led to Phao’s eventual demise. In July of 1955, another supposed raid on a KMT caravan saw Phao’s men “seize” 20 tons of opium and escort it to Bangkok. For some reason that still remains unclear to this day, Phao seemed to become anxious over the haul. He wrote a request for a $1,200,000 reward and sent it to the Finance Ministry. Oddly enough, Phao was also acting deputy finance minister at the time. Rather than waiting for the chief minister’s approval, he then rushed across town to sign his own request. Even for the corruption hardened Thai public, this was a particularly bold move, leading to rumblings in the neo-mandala against Phao. The media moguls began a campaign against him, while Sarit plotted a move against Phao in the background.
In August, Phao was removed as deputy finance minister and left for a tour of Japan and the US. While he was gone, the increasingly unstable Primeminister Phibun released the press from police censorship, and assumed ultimate control over the police’s paramilitary forces. Essentially a factional internal deep state coup. On Phao’s return he found his standing to be significantly diminished and his character being attacked from all sides, the embattled General, who had once been the most powerful man in the kingdom, somehow managed to hang on for two more years.
To read again from The Politics of Heroin:
On September 16, 1957, tanks and infantry from Sarit’s old First Division moved into Bangkok’s traditional coup positions. Phao flew off to his numbered bank accounts in Switzerland.
Sarit’s only major worry was the possibility of a countercoup by the younger colonels and lieutenant colonels whose loyalty to the regime was in doubt. Sarit and his fellow generals grappled for a solution. They agreed that a coup could be prevented if they recruited the majority of the colonels into their faction by paying them large initial bonuses and regular supplemental salaries. But the new group faced the immediate problem of rapidly assembling millions of baht for the large initial bonuses. Obviously, the fastest way to amass this amount of money was to reorganize General Phao’s opium trade.
They dispatched army and air force officers to Hong Kong and Singapore to arrange large opium deals; police and military officers were sent into northern Thailand to alert mountain traders that there would be a market for all they could buy. As the 1959 spring opium harvest came to an end, the army staged its annual dry-season war games in the north to maximize opium collection. Every available aircraft, truck, and automobile was pressed into service, and the hills of northern Thailand and Burma were picked clean. Soon after the opium had been shipped from Bangkok to prearranged foreign buyers and the flickering flames of the countercoup were doused with opium money.
Opium and Anti-Communism
The CIA of the 50s and 60s were by no means all-powerful, the agency was still young, having been officially founded in 47, they were still under scrutiny from civilian members of the US government, and while they had a substantial budget, they couldn’t be seen to directly throw cash and weapons at their proxies overseas, particularly on the Chinese border. This was not the mono-polar world of today, but a far more chaotic multi-polar world which was still settling from the upheaval of WWII. As such the global political situation necessitated a certain amount of canniness when it came to such matters of overseas proxy war.
For the CIA, this meant the establishment of front companies to do the dirty work that the US state couldn’t be seen to be engaging in. Front companies could be started by “retired” agents or assets and run entirely under the auspices of the agency. The most famous of these companies in our narrative is, without a doubt, Air America. This was the airline that the CIA founded as a front to aid the KMT inside of China during the civil war but quickly pivoted to Southeast Asia once the Red Army took full control of the mainland.
The company owned a fleet of military-grade aircraft, listed as civilian planes, and acted as the covert airforce of the CIA, moving around whatever was asked of them, such as Thai paramilitary units, royalist Laos soldiers, KMT units, US special forces and later, of course, opium.
This became the model of the CIA’s fusion of private capital and state intelligence in their crusade against communism. After the assassination of President Kennedy 1963 the chains were off, as the CIA were able to operate with complete impunity in the region– literally moving and selling opium for their reactionary death-squads, which they continued to develop as a powerful force against communism on behalf of the west and the Thai state.
Groups like The Border Patrol Police, PARU and The Volunteer Defense Corps were embedded into a broad patronage network system. With state institutions, like the Border Patrol Police, establishing civilian para-militaries beneath them to avoid any potential accountability for abuses or atrocities, while reporting up to the elites in the police, military, crown and intelligence state.
The influence of the opium market would continue to play a significant role in Thailand’s internal para-politics throughout the cold war. By the 1970’s it had facilitated an intricate web of reactionary forces, they had cut their teeth and tested their methods in places like Laos, Chiang Rai and Phatthalung, now they were waiting to be deployed in full against the progressive wave sweeping the kingdom.
1973-1976
The popular ousting of Thanon Kittikachorn and his cronies in 1973 birthed the height of Thailand’s strategy of tension, during which there were 3 particularly prominent Paramilitary groups that had developed from the aforementioned patronage networks.
The first was Krathing Daeng, which had been organised by military elites, it was centred around Colonel Sutsai, to the point where it was described as his own private army. Sutsai had previously been in charge of the aforementioned “hill tribe army” in the north, overseen by the Communist Suppression Operations Command centre in Bangkok– another CIA venture founded after Donovan’s time. Krathing Daeng foot soldiers were drawn largely from former soldiers and petty gangsters who would benefit from the military’s protection. There were also members from those ethnic minority armies in the north that Sutsai had helped establish. Krathing Daeng members were paid well, and rewarded for their loyalty with all paid for drinking sprees and brothel passes.
Another was the Village Scouts, this was a more rural based group for landowning farmers and rural ultra-royalists. The scouts were funded by the monarchy and swore an allegiance to protect the crown. After undergoing something akin to military training, they served as intelligence assets to the landowning class, documenting the activities of rural peasant organisers. By 1974, the scouts numbered in the 10s of thousands. It was in 74 that the ISOC, which was the prominent state intelligence agency at the time, took control of the movement, developing it into an organisation that extended from the fields into the cities. Behind the expansion was Border Patrol Police leader General Suraphon, a long time ally of King Bhumiphol. During the expansion membership swelled incorporating urbaners like minor businessmen, low-ranking civil servants, and the wives of government officials, as well as military and police officers and palace staffers.
The final group to mention is Nawaphon, which was organised by wealthy capitalists and operated closely with the most reactionary elements of the Buddhist Sangha. One of the big players was the monk Kittiwuttho Bhikkhu, who famously said that killing communists was not a sin, but an act to make good merit. Unlike the other two groups previously mentioned, Nawaphon were certainly not street thugs. They were the elites of the bureaucracy, the armed services, business, the sangha and the palace. There’s also a widely held theory that Nawaphon were something of a phantom group, who had no ordinary on-the-ground members but were in fact an arm of the Thai intelligence state disguised as a “typical right-wing paramilitary”. It is also believed that Nawaphon were behind the more high-level assassinations and false flag operations of the era.
In his book, Counterrevolution (2019), the writer Walden Bello describes the paramilitaries as such, quote:
“Despite the importance of ideology in the social struggle, force and repression were the principal means by which the threatened elites sought to protect their privileges.
(Following the uprising of 1973) “the authority of the legal powerholders evaporated, and the question of power came increasingly to be dominated by the battles in the streets, with the advantage gained by those who could deploy superior resources in organization, ideology, and, most important, firepower. The sacking of Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj’s residence by uniformed policemen who were drunk and calling for respect for law on August 20, 1975, was a sign that real power had passed to the counterrevolutionary forces.”
In the North, regional Farmers Federation president Intha Sribunruang had repeatedly reported being threatened. Indeed, Intha anticipated his own assassination, but this didn’t stop his organising. On the morning of the 30th July 1975 Intha was home alone tending to the small village shop he ran with his wife. His five children were all at school. Two men pulled up in front of the house on a red Yamaha motorbike. The driver remained on the bike while his passenger got off and asked Intha for some cigarettes. As Intha was returning the change, he was shot point-blank in the head eleven times. The assassin used a pistol with a silencer. Intha died instantly.
To quote again from Tyrel Haberkorn:
Major federation leaders were targeted one by one across the country. Between March 1974 and September 1979, thirty-three were assassinated, eight were seriously injured, and five “disappeared.”* At the height of the violence, between March and August 1975, twenty-one federation leaders were killed. The assassinations were particularly concentrated in Chiang Mai province, where eight federation leaders were assassinated in the two months between June and August 1975, including the northern president and national vice president, Intha Sribunruang, on 30 July 1975.’ The assassinations of FFT leaders created pervasive fear throughout the countryside and put an end to the FFT’s efforts at legal organizing.
Emboldened by their success in the countryside, reactionary forces set their sights on the weak reformist parliamentary government in Bangkok. The events of 1975 had struck fear into the hearts of the elite, the rapid succession of capitals cities falling to revolutions, namely Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane made the domino theory a very real possibility in the eyes of those reactionary forces. The military, the police, the sangha, the bureaucracy, and the ultraconservative royalist elite worked with the country’s economic elites to regain control of parliament from the bourgeois reformists via extra-parliamentary means.
On the 6th of October 1976, protesting students at Thammasat University were massacred by a coalition of paramilitaries from the Village Scouts, the Kratin Daeng and Nawaphon, as well as national police and military units. The death toll was in the hundreds, but we will never know the true number. That evening a coup was launched by the military, returning Thailand to the same dictatorial system of three years prior. As we argued in the Ghosts Of The Red Soil series, this violence, both the massacre at Thammasat and the assassinations of the peasant organisers, was utilised by the neo-mandala system as a very public proof of concept. To show the activists, to show the nation, that they’re willing to pull the trigger if political organising strays outside of the acceptable parameters.
Seh Daeng Supplemental
In Ghosts of the Red Soil, we argued that in Thailand, social movements are cyclical. From the holy peasant rebellions of the early 20th century to the Farmers Federation and the communist insurgency to the Red Shirts.
Professor and activist Ajarn Kengkij described the collective struggle within the redshirt camp as having grown out of its initial confines of a kind of Thaksin defence squad and developing its own class character and consciousness, building class solidarity in doing so. To quote his 2010 article in Prachatai: The Red Shirts’ struggle over the past several years has been a class conflict, a struggle between the proletariat and the feudal/ capitalist classes.
The majority of the Red Shirt are the working class– those who don’t own the means of production. Even if some may have some means of production, they are so small that they relatively have no power to control their own means of production or labour.
Those red shirts from Bangkok and other urbanised areas are made up of the lower classes who work as labourers in both the formal and informal economy. There are industrial workers, taxi and motorcycle taxi drivers, service sector workers, etc.
Those from the rural area are the lower classes who may be relatives or parents to the urban proletariat, most of whom largely depend on income sent home to the countryside from the urban workers. These rural people are also agricultural workers.
As such class structure in the key sociological dimension of the Red Shirt masses.
“Phrai” here is a class identity created in the midst of struggle (in action) to convey class antagonisms.
–The word Phrai can mean different things depending on the interpretation. In the original definition from the Saktina feudal era it usually translates as slave, it could also mean serf, peasant, poor person or even subaltern depending on the context–
Continuing here:
Inequality, oppression, exploitation and injustice is the lived experience that the majority of the country has faced. The issue of whether Thaksin is a Lord or a Phrai is not important.
What’s interesting is that the more the Red Shirt masses define or associate themselves as “Phrai” the clearer it becomes that the struggle of the Red Shirt masses has moved beyond the individual. As now promoting a proletarian identity is not a weakness, but a point of strength, which leads to the development of class consciousness that has occurred through the means of struggle of the past several years.”
Throughout Thai political history, there is a pattern of social movements that have been lured by the carrot and crushed by the stick. That is to say, these movements have won concessions typically in the form of state welfare and progressive legislation, while simultaneously being assaulted by state violence.
However, somewhat counterintuitively to the donkey metaphor, in Thailand the stick leads while the carrot follows. We’ve seen that in response to social movements, the state almost immediately cracks down hard, with violent repression, assassinations, massacres, and so on. Often this stick approach does little to actually break a movement, so they concede a little, give a little infrastructure, welfare, civic rights, or land and so on. It is then this combination of state violence, followed by concessions, with the continuation or even just threat of further violence, that breaks a movement.
There are a lot of ironies of the assassination of Seh Daeng in 2010. Not least, that he was directly involved in much of the political violence detailed above, yet he became a leader of the subsequent parallel movement. From its inception after WWII, the Thai deep state alliance has held firm. The only threat it ever really faced was that of The Farmers Federation in the 70s and the Red Shirts in the 00s, both movements drew their bodies from similar demographics– up country peasants, while the counter-movement by the deep state followed a remarkably similar playbook in both instances.
Seh Daeng was also not the only Red Shirt victim of targeted assassination, so too was Surachai Danwattananusorn, Chatchan Boonphawal, Kraidet Luelert, Wanchalerm Satsaksit, Siam Theerawut, Chucheep Chivasut, Kritsana Thapthai, Ittipon Sukpaen, Wuthipong Kachathamakul and scores more. There are currently 82 unsolved enforced disappearances in Thailand recorded by the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances since 1980.
Today, post-Red Shirts and post-Farmers Federation, that reactionary formation of the deep state neo-mandala remains largely unchallenged. This does not mean, however, that the deep state is always walking in unison, as evidenced by the rise of Thaksin and Seh Daeng assassination. Much like the constant shuffling of the earth’s tectonic plates outside of our vision, there are shifts deep within the capitalo-parliamentary system that, on occasion, surface as political earthquakes. The Red Shirts, Thaksin and Seh Daeng were outcomes of one of those earthquakes, as were The Peoples Party, The Farmers Federation and the death squads of the 70s.
Seismologists often shy away from predictions, likewise here, what the next earthquake will bring is near impossible to foresee. Not to disavow us of any agency, but when standing back and witnessing the scale and depth of these reactionary formations it can be daunting to imagine anything else. The Red Shirts imagined something else, as did the peasants of the Farmers Federation. What’s important is to recognise this near invisible yet ubiquitous power of reactionary violence, so as to brace ourselves for the inevitable.
