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OZ - 60 Minutes - Seeing Red


Sporty

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It's OK but he's definitely taking the David and Goliath line. Much more complicated than that IMO.

 

Did you watch it all the way through? At about the 1/3 point he switches his perspective and starts pulling back the red propaganda line to expose that it's Thaksin probably funding this and that they're indeed violent. He interviews Weng and gets the line that it's a peaceful protest, then cuts to shots of reds engaged in violent confrontations with machine guns, molotovs, grenade launchers, etc. Not sure why he chose to make the intro sound like a standard pro-red setup like that, but he def changed his tune partway through.

 

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Lets take a step back here - I thought the Aussie he interviewed in the street said pretty much what many here have been saying for months : Thailand has to come to grips with the fact that it is a democracy in name only. Until that happens, how can we expect things to simply go back to 'normal' ? He was no wide-eyed idealist, but it sounded a lot more coherent than some of the reports we've had on Aussie TV.

 

No question that there are extremists/anarchists/wackos in the Red Shirt ranks, and I'm not naive enough to think that Thaksin hasn't been pulling strings from afar, but they did say that in the report. I thought it was one of 60 Minutes better efforts - they could have spent a lot more time focussing on the bodies in the streets and making veiled references to the role of that-which-we-do-not-speak, but they didnt. The cutting room floor stuff may well have been deemed too hot for a commercial channel.

 

Given the ABC's 'Foreign Correspondent' episode only weeks earlier, I'm amazed that any Aussie journo was allowed into the city, much less the zone. If there was a lighter moment, its the Channel 7 ad showing their man in the thick of the action at Silom, then cutting to footage of the Channel 9 guy in the carpark outside the studio. 'Nein' did get someone on a plane, but I suspect that it had dragged on for so long that they didnt think anything 'newsworthy' would happen.

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... Thailand has to come to grips with the fact that it is a democracy in name only. ...

 

This is classic big lie, repeat it enough and often enough and it becomes a fact.

 

That seems to be the basis for you entire analysis.

 

The real fact is that The Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) monitored the December 2007 election and though they made several recommendations, their report (look it up on their web site) in no way said the results was not democratic.

 

Name me one Member of Parliament that was not elected then you can say Thailand is a democracy in name only.

 

The fact is these same MP’s , plus the ones 29 constituency and 14 Party list MP’s elected to replace the banned executives of the PPP and Chart Thai, are still sitting in Parliament and elected Abhsist PM.

 

TH

 

 

 

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TH as you probably have noticed here, I'm against the reds. But I still think we have to acknowledge the whole dissolution of an entire political party is a bit off the map of any model of democracy we know of. Also making a coalition govt that excludes the leading vote-getting party from power -- that could be done in one of our countries, but it'd be seen as a govt teetering from the get-go. This is all before we even get to there being a military coup. Anyway, even while being anti-red, myself I feel like I have to say that calling what exists in Thailand a perfectly legit democracy is ... not exactly sincere. Let's face it, it's f&^%'d.

 

I just don't see handing Thaksin back the reins is gonna be a step forward in any way, more of a big step backward, and likely for a whole generation to come -- he's a guy who wants to be top dog until he dies, and doesn't care a scratch about anything else.

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... Thailand has to come to grips with the fact that it is a democracy in name only. ...

 

This is classic big lie' date=' repeat it enough and often enough and it becomes a fact.

 

That seems to be the basis for you entire analysis.

 

The real fact is that The Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) monitored the December 2007 election and though they made several recommendations, their report (look it up on their web site) in no way said the results was not democratic.

 

Name me one Member of Parliament that was not elected then you can say Thailand is a democracy in name only.

 

The fact is these same MP’s , plus the ones 29 constituency and 14 Party list MP’s elected to replace the banned executives of the PPP and Chart Thai, are still sitting in Parliament and elected Abhsist PM.

 

TH[/quote']

TH, elections alone don't make a democracy, in the general acceptation of the term in the modern

world. It's just the starting point.

It is generally admitted that, beyond free elections and rights of political association, there are fundamental criteria that are required to qualify the level of democracy in a given country, among those, not exhaustively:

- Free speech,

- Free press,

- separation of powers,

- independent judiciary system,

- equality before the law...

and a lot more.

For many various reasons, we all know that all those concepts are practically nonexistent in Thailand today.

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So tell me where they do exist in SE Asia? Which country would you prefer to live in? :hmmm:

 

And why do people insist on holding Thailand to a higher standard than the rest of SE Asia ... or all of Asia, for that matter?

 

:stirthepo

 

 

Sure, it's not the worst place by a long shot. I can think of some much better variety of Asian democracy in:

 

Taiwan

India

Japan

South Korea

 

Probably could find more, that's just off top of my head. I know, you said SEA. But why? I think a more sensible question is why shouldn't we compare Thailand to some model worth aspiring towards? I mean, they all keep saying they want real democracy, on both sides. Not gonna find that in Myanmar obviously, or even in Singapore or Malaysia. That said, pretty sure Thaksin sees Malaysia and Singapore as splendid models to aim for, with him perched at the top for the rest of his life, and only his hand-picked successor to follow.

 

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Thaksin's hero has long been Lee Kwan Yew. He even started making Bangkok look like Singapore, with the landscaping under the expressways, topiaries etc. Takky's problem was that Singapore is a fairly small island. Thailand is many times larger and more diverse.

 

p.s. I don't know if I'd put India on your list. India has had some pretty corrupt politics, and assassination is too frequent a way to get rid of opposing politicians. :hmmm:

 

 

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