PAD Runs Amok

*Image captured from Thai PBS showing PAD thugs threatening to kill a motorbike taxi driver on Vibhavadi road today: November 25, 2008.*

From earlier in the week I commented on how apt Professor Thongchai Winichakul's description of the thoroughly anti-democratic People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) was:

" the PAD is now like a cult, with hard-core followers who think and speak alike close-mindedly, and becomes increasingly militant. As they claim political righteousness, they defied laws, dehumanized critics and opponents and intimidated them too, and [they are] armed."

Now that they have been filmed, among their other violence, hunting down taxi drivers and other motorists and shooting four on a busy Bangkok road, it is time, again, to call them what they are.

They are an ugly mob of thugs who are running amok. A mob is a mob, nothing more and everything less than democracy.

And as Thailand is without a functional government, that has serious implications.

Particularly if one understands that the quintessential social-contract type element of an organized state being that the state alone commands and exercises its sole legitimate use of martial force.

If the police cant control them through legitimate martial force, PAD has enough power to take down the state.