THAILAND'S MOMENT OF TRUTH - ZENJOURNALIST

The leaked U.S. cables do not have to resort to enigmatic innuendo about hidden hands and spooky
inexplicable influences. They were written by American diplomats doing their best to explain events in
Thailand to the State Department in Washington. They were intended to be secret, made public only when
the events they described were distant history and the people involved were long dead. Those who wrote
them did not have to fear the threat of social ostracism or lengthy jail sentences if they simply tried to
give a clear explanation of the most important issues facing the people of Thailand at a momentous time
in their history at the start of the 21st century.
The account they give of Thailand's ongoing political crisis may not always be correct: like everybody
else struggling to unravel the truth, senior U.S. diplomats had to rely on sources who were by no
means always honest and who often gave a partial or even deliberately misleading picture. John
explicitly concedes this point in one of the most remarkable of all the cables, from November 2009,
entitled "CIRCLES OF INFLUENCE INSIDE THE INSTITUTION OF THE MONARCHY IN KING
BHUMIBOL'S TWILIGHT":
The Thai institution of monarchy remains an opaque institution, full truths about which are
difficult to fix with any certainty...
We offer this "royal primer" mindful of the opaque nature of the institution, the difficulty in
establishing absolute truths about public yet very remote royal figures, and the inherent biases of
inside players, even those we have known for years (several of whom recently repeated a Thai
aphorism about the institution: "those who know aren't talking, and those who are talking aren't in
the know").
The cables also reflect the biases of their authors: like many Western observers of Thailand, Boyce and
John were always uneasy with Thaksin's demagoguery and corruption, and were much more comfortable
dealing with the refined, patrician, British-born and educated Abhisit, described by John as "a photogenic,
eloquent 44-year old Oxford graduate who generally has progressive instincts and says the right things
about basic freedoms, social inequities, policy towards Burma, and how to address the troubled deep
south”. John seems to have only realized rather late that Abhisit's instincts may not have been as
progressive as they appeared, and that while he may say the right things, that does not mean that he does
them.
No other country has been so inextricably involved with Thailand over the past century as the United
States, and this adds even more value to what the cables have to say. America’s influence has had a
transformative impact on Thailand - and on the life and reign of U.S.-born King Rama IX. And just like
the palace’s critical but secret role in shaping Thailand’s destiny, the central part played by the United
States is often obscured and denied. As Christine Gray wrote in her remarkable 1986 PhD dissertation,
Thailand: The Soteriological State in the 1970s:
Any study of contemporary Thai society must account for the U.S. influence on that polity and
the mutual denial of that influence. Thailand's relationship with the United States is complex,
heavily disguised and, in many instances, actively denied by the leaders of both countries...