Also see: Coups Within Coups
This is a true peoples movement, readers, and it is not U.S-backed. The phony coup our agents engineered obviously didn't take with the Thai people.
Would that Americans had such spirit.
"Thailand protests hit police headquarters; Airport and rail services disrupted" by Pracha Hariraksapitak, Reuters | August 30, 2008
BANGKOK - Protesters trying to overthrow Thailand's government attacked Bangkok's police headquarters yesterday as demonstrations against Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej spread from the capital, disrupting air and rail services.
About 30 people were injured after police repelled a crowd of about 2,000 on a fourth day of protests. The demonstrations have raised fears of major violence and military intervention less than two years after a coup in September 2006.
Television footage showed tear-gas canisters exploding among the protesters, but police denied using them, saying they had only fired rubber bullets.
Protesters also invaded runways or blocked roads at three southern airports, including the tourist island of Phuket, leaving scores of passengers stranded as flights were suspended. Striking rail workers halted 30 percent of services nationwide, and unionized airline and port workers were urged by their leaders to take sick leave.
Yeah, the AmeriKan MSM is definitely not in favot of these protesters,otherwise they wouldn't have used that kind of language. This is in the paper because they can't ignore it!
In Bangkok, where about 30,000 protesters have occupied the prime minister's compound since Tuesday, some of Samak's advisers are calling on him to impose emergency rule, two government sources said.
Samak, who leads a shaky coalition government elected in December, declined to get tough with the protesters ahead of a royal event today, but did not rule out such action if the rioting worsens.
"I have several tools at my disposal, but I am not using any of them because I want to keep things calm," he told reporters after meeting top military and police officers. "I will not quit. If you want me out, do it by law, not by force." Samak added.
Imposing a state of emergency would allow Samak to deploy soldiers to disperse the protesters, although army chief Anupong Paochinda said the situation did not warrant it.
"A coup would not solve anything. It will hurt the country's image and worsen the country's situation," he said, nearly two years after the coup that removed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra but failed to heal the divisions in Thai society.
Translation: The army wants to live anotther day and be accepted by the people once these jackass globalist tools are deposed!
And the reason the coup didn't change things is because it was a FAKE COUP!!!! A SHOW COUP to FOOL!!!!
Sompop Manarungsan, an analyst at Chulalongkorn University, said Samak had few options but to resign or call an early election. "If he doesn't quit over the next two days, it is very likely that we will see a bloodbath," Sompop said.
The protests are led by the People's Alliance for Democracy, a group of businessmen, academics, and activists who accuse Samak of being an illegitimate proxy of Thaksin, now in exile in London. Samak denies the accusation.
The group proclaims itself to be a defender of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej against a supposed Thaksin plan to turn Thailand into a republic, a charge vehemently denied by both Thaksin and the government.
Thai shares have fallen 23 percent since the group's street campaign began in May amid fears of policy paralysis at a time of stuttering economic growth and soaring inflation.
The group's assault on police headquarters came hours after riot officers tried to deliver an eviction order and clashed with demonstrators inside the prime minister's compound.
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So what to make of this?
Maybe this will help explain things a bit:
"Former Left-Right Alliance against Globalization and America
28 July 2008
Article
Almost all Thai rightists I interviewed for my recent research perceived that the threats to Thailand today are capitalism and America. Even lifelong anti-communist ‘Phor’, an alias used for this research, who has tenaciously held the idea of national security being under threat from two strands of communism, sees that Thailand has to be cautious of the CIA interfering and agitating groups of Thai people to the point of being a threat to security. Of course, they were well aware that the threats from capitalism and America are not one and the same as the communist threat.
The rightists’ discourse of capitalist threat obviously differs from the leftists’ Maoist anti-capitalist discourse of 30 years ago. These rightists speak pretty much the same anti-neo-liberalism and anti-globalization language which Thai intellectuals and activists have adopted since after Oct 6, 1976.
Although all the interviews were done years after the 1997 economic crisis, the pain caused by the capitalist crisis was still alive in their memories. Their discourse on the cause of the crisis turned out to be nationalist and against ‘farang’ or western capitalism, pointing to western capitalist giants led by the US bullying emergent smaller capitalist nations. For the ease of digestion and propagation, it was made a story of conspiracy among a handful of global political and financial figures, often including George Soros in particular. The ‘Washington Consensus’ was understood simply as a plot by western capitalist neo-conservatives to destroy smaller states. With the calamity besetting Thai nationalist capital which had eagerly embraced globalization over a decade earlier, globalization has become undesirable. Their discourse against western capitalism was therefore not of a socialist bent, but was outright nationalist, against those ugly farangs abusing decent Thais.
Most of the interviews were done during the years of Thaksin administration which was seen as representing the evil western capitalism, subsequently labelled as ‘vicious or immoral capital’. The exasperation against Thaksin and globalization and the global anti-American sentiment fed into one another. Among the rightists I interviewed then, only one person liked the Thaksin government, and the rest were suspicious of Thaksin because he was pushing the agenda of globalization.
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