[Tlc] albritton response to jerryson

[justinm at ucr.edu]

My God, if government corruption were the issue, we should
have had a 
coup in the US long ago. Think about the billions of dollars
ripped 
off by Haliburton or the corruption of the legislative and
executive 
process by Abramoff, and involving the US in a massive war on 
spurious grounds, etc., etc., etc. - just to mention the most
recent 
problems. Thai governments have been pikers when it comes to
this, 
but we accept a democratically elected government because that is 
what democracy is.

I get very tired of hearing Thais claim some specialized form of 
democracy without ever specifying what it is. What it
definitely is 
not is the overthrow of democratically elected governments by 
unconstitutional means. We should no longer tolerate the claim to 
some unique form of democracy without some clear specification of 
what it entails. Finally, as scholars, we have every right to 
evaluate whether any system is democratic or not, regardless
of what 
Thais claim. (Remember the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea?)

We should not feed into this by deferring to Thai elites who
want to 
be able to seize and run the country to prevent the overthrow of 
traditional society by mass democracy. Remember that the best
analyst 
of American democracy for over a century was a Frenchman, not an 
American. Furthermore, the American Revolution was against 
colonialism, not against the old canard of "corruption in 
government." Please refer to Thongchai's characterization of
this as 
a "Royalist coup."
RBA

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu