Where’s apartheid when we need it? | 2.03.06

The Nation’s courageous disdain for the “attention-deficient, politically apathetic masses” is a breath of fresh air. Long implied by frequent citing of its coded opposites — “The middle class”, “Bangkok residents”, and “the educated” — this contemptible beast has now been explicitly identified thanks to Thailand’s Independent Newspaper™. Building on that spirit of truth and recrimination, we conscionable urban sophisticates should now refer to the lesser people with a term that Marx so aptly and succinctly employed in the Communist Manifesto — “social scum”:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Reactionary intrigue, as the covered-up top-secret birth certificate will attest, is Thaksin Shinawatra’s middle name.

Of course, communism is so passé — a bogeyman conjured up by past dictators in cahoots with imperialists to further oppress and exploit downtrodden Thais. The Cold War was no more than a venal spat between two evil empires, the United States and America, both of which fittingly lost.

Still, Thaksin has to be stopped. Noblesse oblige won’t let us stand by while his education reform, privatization, and free-trade pacts role forward the wheel of history. Reaction, in our view, is just as bad as populism and nationalism.

PS Top-notch educated middle-class Bangkokians get their news from the Nation Group, of course. Some examples from Nation Channel and Krungthep Turakij.

00:32 ▪ politics

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