When retired General Boonlert Kaewprasert, leader of the ultra-royalist, anti-government Pitak Siam, abruptly ended the group's protest last month after less than 10 hours and after two clashes with police, he said his loss was to "evil" politicians.
The evocation of the black-and-white idea of good versus evil is so common in Thai politics and society - particularly over the past seven years or so.
However, it hardly enables Thais to grasp the complex reality accurately and adequately, as it assumes that one side is absolutely right.
Absolutism has given the world so many heart-breaking lessons: the genocide under Nazi Germany and in Rwanda, the Catholic Inquisition during the Dark Ages, class annihilation under the Khmer Rouge, the madness of the Cultural Revolution in China, and at home here in Thailand, the October 6, 1976 massacre of leftist students.
Just hours before Boonlert announced the surprising end to the anti-government protest that he led, a number of pro-Yingluck Shinawatra red shirts were adamant that the use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) to deal with protesters was justified as they regarded coup-calling Pitak Siam protesters a bunch of fascists. The red-shirts' sense of self-righteousness was no less real.
It didn't seem to matter to them that, ironically, the ISA was created by the National Legislative Assembly, which was appointed by the Council for National Security. The council staged the coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra - whom the red shirts support.
One red shirt even argued with this writer, saying, the government needed to use special laws like the Internal Security Act because Thailand was not a developed democracy, unlike countries in the West. I told him I thought it sounded ironic as similar logic was also employed by people to defend the military coup and the lese majeste law.
The late American black-and-white photographer Ansel Adams, who achieved global fame through his capturing of the grandeur of scenic awe-inspiring views of Yosemite National Park in his photographs once wrote: "Our lives at times seem a study in contrast… love and hate, birth and death, right and wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black and white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth and meaning to the starkness of those extremes."
It is in the absolutes of black-and-white that we become capable of dehumanising others and justifying cruel and unjust actions in the name of goodness.
The black-and-white view of politics fails to account for the existence of people who are not red shirts but opposed the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin; people who are royalists but disapprove of the draconian lese majeste law. There are people on both sides of the political divide who can justify the use of any means to crush their enemies because they claim to be on the good side - white-versus-black, so to speak.
In this black-and-white worldview, people who deviate even slightly from the hegemonic discourse of "us against them" are often vilified and pushed into the opposite camp.
To demagogues, people who don't fit the black-and-white rubric are an inconvenience and must be vilified. Some now even vilify attempts by people who hold differing political opinions to even hold a civil dialogue, saying the only way out is to crush the enemies by all means without speaking to them.
Too much is at stake to allow these people to hijack Thai society down the path of self-righteous absolutism.
Black and white may be nice and timeless for interior decoration, but for politics and society, a black-and-white view of things is too simplistic and starkly inadequate. It is likely to drag Thailand into the dark abyss, no matter how "white", "holy" or "good" the people holding such views may claim to be.
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Source: http://www.news.thethailandlinks.com/2012/12/05/in-politics-look-to-the-grey-not-the-absolutes/
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