Madness, yellow shirts and floods

Thanong Khanthong was one of a bunch of yellow shirt ideologues who hogged the opinion pages of The Nation repeatedly attacking red shirts as a scourge on the nation, going to extreme lengths to paint them as demons bent on destruction. As we have said before, Thanong is a useful measure of yellow-shirted opinion and and thinking.

In The Nation, Thanong tees off once more. The floods are characterized as something rather more than damned heavy rain and human failures with dams and so on. Nope, this amounts to the destruction of Bangkok:

Bangkok is falling, similar to the fall of Ayutthaya in 1765.

It is a great pity that the self-proclaimed nationalist gets the date wrong. We assume he means 1767, when the Burmese lay siege to the capital and sacked it, burning it to the ground.

Thanong says: “It is now too late to save Bangkok from flooding. I could never have imagined that the City of Angels would collapse before my eyes.”

It isn’t clear from his writing, but it seems he thinks there has been an attack on the the guardian spirits of the city:

On Wednesday, a Nation photographer saw a group of people trying to destroy barriers protecting the Grand Palace from floods…. [I]t’s a revelation, illustrating that the tragedy of modern Thailand is a conspiracy. If the Temple of the Emerald Buddha were to be completely underwater, Thais would have been dealt a big shock, losing all morale and strength to fight back. If the Emerald Buddha cannot protect the City of Angels, then the angels would have taken flight and the capital would have fallen.

Blame the damn red shirts:

Let me raise several crucial questions that have to be addressed, because government agencies, ministers, Pheu Thai MPs and red shirts are apparently adopting a passive mode while disasters pile on the Thai people.

This view flies in the face of the determined and almost non-stop activities of many Puea Thai politicians, not least Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, but let’s follow Thanong a bit further into the realms of conspiracy.

Thanong blames the Puea Thai government for not releasing water from the dams. Of course, that decision would have had to have been made earlier than this government’s tenure. But Thanong’s “logic” is that the red-shirted government was taking a decision in the interests of horrid farmers and not the prissy elite in Bangkok. All of the “mayhem” stems from this decision. For a logical and fact-based assessment, see Bangkok Pundit.

He goes on about “Pheu Thai MPs and ministers are not helping flood victims. They are nowhere to be seen. Where are they?” Again, the evidence is otherwise. Even using the yellow shirt claims that nasty Puea Thai MPs have been putting their names on relief supplies would, logically, mean that Thanong is simply making stuff up. Of course, red shirt groups have been remarkably active in relief operations.

In the end, we find out that all of this inactivity is a plot by unnamed bad people:

Yingluck is apparently a puppet prime minister who is dancing to a tune written by those around her. Who are the invisible hands who apparently have a malicious intent for Thailand?

Thanong might feel pleased to be able to concoct weird conspiracy theories, but the question can be turned. Who does his mad theory support?

Amongst the crazy, made up media accounts of recent days, this takes the prize for the most outlandish.

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