Has Thailand Got The Government It Deserves?

[soi41]

This is not a thread about pro/anti Thaksin/Abhisit. But living here and following the news, IMO there is no doubt, that the present government is doing an extremely bad job. So bad that they are actually risking the future of the country.

You can say, as a farang living here, it is none of our business, but it still makes me sad, to see my country of residence going down the drain.

Why isn't the opposition screaming from the mountaintops??

As for the voters, who put this government in power, are they ignorant, not knowing or simply don't care?

I am not saying, a government lead by the democrats, would be any better. But if it was just as bad, what about the future for this lovely country?

Keep the education poor and the lao kao cheap, and you can get away with anything??

[somtampet]

Thailand has got the government they voted for,and because u cant vote,except it

[boosta]

Traditional Thai culture very much still dominates the hearts and minds of the ordinary people - rural poor - of Thailand.

Society is hierarchical, what many foreigners label "feudal" from their own history a few centuries back.

The junior/lower members defer to those above them, and the senior/upper strata have an obligation to return the favor to their support network but of course reap the lion's share of the arrangement.

The idea that common ordinary citizens have the right to assert themselves and consciously select those that will rule over them is a very foreign one and hasn't really taken hold in the hearts and minds of enough of the population.

The lower classes generally vote in blocks as directed by their puyai baan or employer or elders in the village, and it's not unusual for them to receive a direct payment - not that they'd vote differently, just to symbolize the you scratch my back I'll scratch yours.

Schemes like 30-baht health care and price supports for rice are just more grandiose and systematic reflections of the historic norm.

So it will take a long time for the mentality of the common people here to evolve to support true democracy, and of course education is a bit part of that, and some say the elite here keep the public schools system so bad on purpose for that reason.

The other side of the coin is that the idea of "noblesse oblige" and true public service, taking on government employment as a sacrifice in order to serve the public good has also been very rarely part of the normal culture here, except of course at the very very very top of true nobility.

Finally, we have to recognize that few of our own back-home countries are truly democracies, and in fact I think have become less and less so in recent decades and things don't look good for the future that way either.

In fact national governments themselves are becoming less relevant, the real power in the world will continue to transfer to international corporate networks of power who in fact pull most of the strings behind the scenes, or for those who think this a paranoid view "will continue to grow in undue influence".

[Rimmer]

Please see the pinned notice regarding Political topics in the General Forum, thank you

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