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Are the Red Shirts Commies?

How to you tell a Commie?

If you tell a Commie by a belief in Marxist ideology, a belief that all property should be commonly owned, that the historic march of man passes through feudalism, capitalism, late capitalism, on to socialism, then communism, and the withering away of the state, and all that other “theory”, no, they are not communists.

Thais like to follow a strong leader (puu yai - sometimes translated as VIP, sometimes translated as “big shot”) who will give them things. Thaksin promised to do that for the rural poor, and to some extent he delivered. The entire country runs on patronage — think of the Chicago but with 60 million people.

I’ve seen this time and time again. You catch someone doing something illegal, try to take criminal or civil action against him, and next thing you know you get a call from a Senator, who says he’s the guy’s sister’s aunt’s father, and why are you picking on the guy? So you size the Senator up (I had to rely on my Thai colleagues for this) figure out who he knows, where HIS support comes from, whether you have any friends in common, and if so, who is the senior person in the relationship, and whether you have any friends who are stronger than him, or could “break his rice bowl”, and go from there. It becomes a question of who has the bigger puu yai.

If you can approach the Senator through a mutual friend, you can probably work something out where you get a deal you can live with, no one admits wrongdoing, and everyone saves face.

If you have to resort to muscling the Senator, then you have to do it in a way that makes it look, on the surface, like it was all real friendly-like, just a big misunderstanding, and now everyone sees reason. You can get an idea how this works by watching any good Mafia movie.

This works reasonably well so long as everyone understands the game. However, as happened once, the guy you are after is a member of the Royal Family, and the thing he did that your client did not like was done with the help of a highly placed government official, and your (non-Thai) client’s first step in dealing with the situation was to send off a severe and threatening letter. The you grovel. Luckily we got involved after the letter was sent, so we could not be accused of being involved in it.