Nakhon Phanom is a red shirt stronghold, so the Army and other royalists continue to try to wrest ideological control from them.
The latest account of this effort, reported at The Nation, suggests that the royalists continue to live in a past where royalist propaganda was a dominant means of winning hearts and minds. Of course, when that failed, having the state do a bit of killing of the “disloyal” also helped the royalist side.
The Nakhon Phanom Provincial Administrative Organization is reported to have:
approved funding in its fiscal year 2013 budget for 24 more homes for local families living in extreme poverty…. This will enable the home-building project, which aims to make merit for His Majesty the King, to build a total of 99 homes for 99 poor families.
This is exceptionally old-fashioned thinking in a political world now dominated by voters who expect parties to deliver social goods and economic gains for the poor rather than have a few “righteous” ones provide limited charity.
The “Army’s participation in the project, which is funded by the PAO and built by the battalion’s soldiers, was in line with Army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s policy that soldiers should help the public.”
Prayuth would be better to instil an ideology amongst the brass that it is not their right to intervene in politics, that the Army should belong to the people rather than owe its allegiance to a relic of the past with ideas from a bygone era, and develop a code that holds officers responsible when their soldiers kill citizens.
