It takes strong effort on the part of the people to remove a bad Government. We have seen a variety of examples in what is called The Arab Spring with some examples going better than others. Whether this is the true beginning of a Thai Spring is yet to be established, but the goals remain the same in that a Government is a servant of the people, and not the other way around.
To shutdown a city the size of Bangkok it takes a lot of people, and thanks to Thaksin doing wrong to so many Thais, there is no shortage. Bangkok and New York City are roughly the same size with about 8 million people. So seeing that a recent past protest had about 4 million people in the streets blowing whistles and waving the Thai flag, getting the numbers of people to shut down Bangkok is not a dream too far to achieve.
With the goal being getting the Thaksin proxy Government to step down, it is expected to be a long drawn out battle. But seeing that Thaksin has already decided to ignore the protests and continue on as if all was just fine, it will be the loss of tax revenue and tourism income that will hurt most.
If there is not sufficient revenue, many of the grandiose spending plans will lack the water to germinate. But then again this is a sacrifice the Thais are willing to accept to get Thaksin’s influence out of Thailand.
What will happen and where will this go is a general question on everyone’s mind and with good reason. Connecting the Dots along with others sees the hiring of third parties to cause conflicts and violence in and around the protests. That will be the excuse needed to upgrade to a State of Emergency allowing the military to come on line to deal with the problem. However as the military has a bad taste in it’s mouth from the Red Shirt riots of 2010, we see a different tactical approach.
In 2010 the entire Red Shirt mob was the target as seemingly all of them were making threats. However the Thais that will contribute their efforts to shutting down Bangkok are of a different breed, and for the most part violence is only used in defense and not offence. This allows the military to target only the offending trouble makers, and that should properly anger the Government as they wanted to have a wholesale cleanup of the protesters.
At that point the Government must conclude they have lost. If the military is not in their court, there are no other muscle cards that can be played. But that will not sit well with Thaksin and he will just bring in many more third party trouble makers in an attempt to erode the entire group. Most likely they will be from the Red Shirt camp, but it we are not sure if they will be wearing Red Shirts.
However on the point of the Red Shirts, many of them have switched sides because of the Amnesty bill debacle. When Thaksin showed that the Amnesty bill was about him and he could care less about them, that was the motivation for many Red Shirts to abandon him and that is why the number of anti Government protesters is in the millions. So it is just more of Thaksin being his own worst enemy. It takes special skills to be able to get millions of people angry at him one by one.
