Article by Dr Tim Rackett

July 19, 2022

Spoiler alert: this chapter argues that the royal Buddhist kingdom
of Thailand is not a ‘land of smiles’, peaceful and harmonious, but
a deeply divided nation. A violent racist society riven with social,
political, inequalities, divisions and sectarian ethno-religious
conflicts. My hypothesis is the predominant cause of social
division and political conflict in modern Thailand lies in a post-
colonial racist formation of Thai identity fashioned by an elite
Bangkok minority and imposed upon the majority and other
ethno-religious and regional populations. What is meant to unify
– an imagined community of the Thai race and society – actually
divides. Thai national identity, goodness, as we shall see, seems to
need a bad enemy-other within or without. From the state point of
view there is only one way of being Thai and behaving Thai.
Peoples deemed to be un-Thai can, and have been, ‘cancelled’;
treated as lives unworthy of living.

In Thailand citizens must be polite, servile and submissive to

manifest a true authentic civilised Thai identity.[1] To be Thai is
to: worship and unconditionally love the King; love and serve the
nation and Thai race; and be a Buddhist. This is “kwam pen Thai”:
Thai-ness. A person is born Thai and is a Buddhist subject of a
king of ‘pure race from pure blood’ who rules in the name of truth,
goodness, purity and virtue. Above politics and the law, a
supposed ‘god-king’ descended from the heavens, the King is seen
as a sacred incarnation of the nation, drawing on the mystical-
magical authority of Indian Brahmanism and Buddhism. Thailand
is held together as a nation: “based on ethnic and cultural
homogeneity organised around the monarchy. Its nationalism
organised around race as spiritually led by the King”.[2] The Thai
social and political order is a royal theological one with the King
at the apex and its center in Bangkok.
Student and street protests of the last two years reveal an open
contestation of Thai culture and the role played by the military
and monarchy in Thai society. This can be seen as a rebirth of a
subaltern “slow-burn civil war” started by the Red shirts.[3] The
ongoing war in ‘Deep South’ of Thailand is a symptom of royal
racist rule upon Muslims. Conflict in the southern border
provinces from 2004 to April 2022 has claimed 7,356 deaths and
20,898 casualties.[4]

Divisions of skin ethnicity and religion

Elite Bangkokians, mostly wealthier lighter skinned Sino-Thais,
consider people with dark skins as low class, ugly and dirty. Rural
ethnic Khmer Lao and Southern Thais tend to have darker skins
read as a manifestation of ‘inner badness’. Skin colour signifies a
person’s social status and moral worth; this comes from Hindu
and Buddhist beliefs and ideals. Beauty and complexion reflect
merit, moral purity and goodness. Thais call Southern Thais and
Muslims “kaek” – a term that subsumes Southern Asians, Malays
and Arabs-as they all have darker skins. Keyes shows historically
how “kaek” is associated with the Buddhist figure of Evil: ‘Mara’
and dark bearded demons.[5] Thai Muslims and ethnic Malay
Muslims are ‘othered’ by religion and skin colour: un-Thai dark
non-Buddhists. Skin colour and religion are racialised. In Thai
state racism they do not belong and are treated as lesser Thais or
non-authentic Thais.

Likewise, in the body-politic person’s origin in Bangkok, the royal

centre and sacred ‘head’ of Thai civilisation, or far away in the
rural provinces, the dirty ‘feet’, badges them being uncivilised.
Coming from the countryside: the North, the Northeast, or
Thailand’s ‘Deep South’ signifies low status. Dark skinned country
people, people who do not speak Central Thai, especially
Northeasterners, are seen by Bangkok elites as morally inferior,
uneducated, ignorant and vulgar: “kon bannok” or ‘rednecks’.
Predominantly ethnic Lao and Khmer, they are called derogatory
names signifying that they are not Thai and not fully human: “aii
Lao” and “kwai” – meaning water buffalo. Rural people (Burmese
and Cambodian guest workers too) are seen as only fit to be
domestic helpers, sex workers, food vendors and taxi drivers.
Everyone in Thailand must conform to one uniform way to be
Thai in a ‘hierarchical and essentialist model of nationalism
marginalising most of the country’s population as inferior, whilst
Bangkokians see themselves as superior racially’.[6]

Thai politics works by both assimilating everyone and dividing

people against others. People are either: good or bad people,
friend or foe. Are you one of us or one of them? An un-Thai
enemy-other? Dissent from Thai-ness is not tolerated and can be
met with murder in the name of defending the monarchy and Thai
society against dangerous and ungovernable others. Others within
national borders but outside the boundaries of Thai-ness. Thai
national identity relationally needs an enemy – other to fight in
order to be itself.[7] The ‘enemy’ can be inside or outside the
nation’s body politic, or, can even be an in ‘inner enemy’ nesting
in the very heart of the self. What is specific about Thai
nationalism is its reactive negative identification placing Thai’s
‘over and above’ and ‘set apart’ from others. The chief
determination of what is Thai identity is negative difference: it is
not Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Burmese, Malay, Farang, or Khaek.
These signify negative attributes, so that only Thai-ness can
possesses a full, positive identity and attributes.[8]

Historically, after anti-monarchists, it was communists who were

seen as the number one enemy of Thai-ness undermining
‘national security, the institutions of religion and monarchy’. The
state passed a law in 1969 making it a crime “to encourage any
other person to lose their faith in religion, or any act that destroys
the customs and traditions of the Thai race”.[9] People in
Thailand are offered the choice: ‘Turn Thai or disappear!’ Many
have been disappeared. Political refugee Red shirt activists and
government critics; Lese majeste fugitive Surachai ‘Sae Dan’ is
feared to have been murdered along with two other men whose
bodies were washed up from the Mekong River on 29th December
2019. Prominent Muslim lawyer, Somchai Neelapaijit, critic of
martial law in Thailand’s southern provinces, was disappeared in
Bangkok on the evening of 12th March 2004. Wanchalearm, a pro-
democracy activist, fled to Cambodia after the May 2014 military
coup in Thailand. He was abducted by unidentified armed men in
Phnom Penh on 4th June 2020.

Thai ‘internal racism of permanent purification’[10]

For a Buddhist nation, Thailand has a tragic history of violence.
Rather than non-violent peace making and reconciliation,
Thailand’s tradition is of ‘serial massacres’ of individuals and
populations and their erasure from social memory. A ‘Thanato-
politics’ of extermination of un-Thai others within: in 1972 3,000
communist suspects are believed to have been killed by being
burned alive in 200-litre oil drums (while the bodies were
burning, truck engines were revved to mask the screams of those
who were being murdered;[11] ‘hill tribes’ in the North of
Thailand napalmed for alleged communist sympathies and drug-
related activities; anti-military dictator demonstrators in Black
May 1992 murdered by right wing paramilitary group; Buddhist
soldiers killed more than a 100 ethnic Malay Thai Muslims in the
siege of the ‘Kru Ze’ mosque in Patani Southern Thailand; and at
Tak Bai, Narathiwat on 25th October 2004, over 78 unarmed
protestors died, mainly from suffocation in the back of army
trucks.35 Or, as a high ranking ex-Thaksin government official I
interviewed claimed, their execution was ordered. In April-May
2010, over 90 ‘Red Shirt’ anti-coup unarmed demonstrators were
killed by soldiers on the streets of Bangkok in a ‘live fire zone’.

The Thai state protects the superiority and purity of the Thai race
by killing in the defence of society and race against impure
inhuman, animal, and others.[12] Killing, with impunity, in the
name of Thai-ness, those badged with being un-Thai are seen as
impurities in need of cleansing. In the modern Thai Buddhist
state it is racial purity that justifies murder: “the death of the
other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race…is something
that will make life heathier: healthier and purer”.[13] Below we
shall see a non-Western form of ‘colonising genocide’ of others
within.[14]

To make sense of the notion of a Thai race and Thai racism we

have to visit a myth concerning the colonial encounter in
19th Century Siam royal absolutism, Bangkok elites, and state
hierarchical racial formations of identity, which deny ethnic
diversity and erase differences.

Thai race and racism in a nationalist myth

The myth is that Siam was a global unique exception in never
being colonised by the West due to its special civilisational
characteristics: a superior ‘master race’ presided over by semi-
divine monarch who outwitted the French and British in the
19th Century. This is a fiction. Not only that, it is a dangerous
illusion as it creates a ‘theology of Thai exceptionalism’, which
renders Thais ‘ignorant and narcissistic’.[15] The myth of non-
colonisation incites racist views towards other Southeast Asian
countries seen as being colonised because they were inferior to
Siam.
The colonial encounter and the invention of a Thai race
Absolute power was gained by Siamese ruling elites’ ‘self-
colonisation’ to meet the bourgeois standards norms, moral and
values of Western civilisation. This was ‘achieved by developing
an intense form of internal tyranny, namely, racism subjugating
the local populations’.[16] The belief in the Thai as superior race,
with other races as inferior, masks Siamese Imperialism and its
violent ‘internal colonisation’ of ethno-religious populations who
were not Thai. Rama V visited colonies of Singapore, Malaya,
Burma, India and Java in 1871-2 with a vision ‘to turn his
kingdom into a miniature European colony without the
Europeans, making it a modern ‘civilised’ Asian
state’.[17] Populations were enslaved by the Siamese elites’ self-
colonisation as they felt inferior to the west but superior to local
‘barbarians’ ethno-religious subalterns who they needed to make
Siam civilised.

King Chulalongkorn adopted the French’s 1893 conquest of the

Siamese royal palace by gunboat, by sending a navy warship to the
Patani River in Southern Thailand and imprisoned its last Malay
Sultan. Siam’s rule over ‘Malay states became a showcase to
demonstrate Siam’s ability to modernise/colonise’ because they
are a superior race and civilisation that could modernise
itself.[18] Siam wished to compete as an equal with the British
colonies. It did this by using law to efficiently rule the native
populations-displacing Islamic authority in the South. The Malay
savages needed Thai-ifying by Bangkok civility. Siam conducted a
racialising ‘inner-colonisation’ of ‘savage jungle others’ outside
Bangkok. The Thai race to be civilised needs uncivilised bad and
inferior enemy-others in order to be good and superior in the
name of the ‘protection of the security of the whole from internal
dangers’.[19]
Streckfuss’ analysis shows the birth of the notion of a Thai
race.[20] The Siamese royal ruling class in resisting the French
used and creatively adapted a Western anthropological not
biological concept of race against the French to create a new
identity of being Thai, and a territorial state, which would become
Thailand.[21] French colonialists saw the Siamese as a lesser race,
a ‘mixed and tainted’ minority within Siam vis-à-vis others
Chinese, Malay, Lao, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and tribal
peoples.[22] For French Indo-Chinese rule the non-Siamese
should be under the protection of the French as they were racially
oppressed by a “Siamese Lilliputian oligarchy”.[23] The Siamese
could only rule the lands with Siamese subjects, but this limited
Siam to the Chaopraya River basin. The French 1893 treaty laid
claim to their ethnic protégés in an ‘annexation by stealth’ of what
used to be Lao and Khmer zones in Siam. The French counted Lao
and Cambodians as theirs, entitled to French protection. For the
ruling Siamese elite the Lao were seen as the same Thai race, but
not the Khmer race who the Siamese ruled. The French using race
tried to ‘define the racial Siamese minority out of Siam’, whilst the
Siamese responded by inventing a Thai race.[24] The kingdom of
Siam became the nation-race or Empire of Thai-land. Race –
“chaat” was used to form national identity and belonging as Thai,
replacing a Siamese identity.[25] Thai royalty extended racial
boundaries to existing territorial limits so that the entire
population of the country became Thai subjects. Prince Damrong,
Minister of the Interior, stated his aim to “make all the people
Thais, not Lao, nor Malay at all”. Others were absorbed and
assimilated into the Thai race: a Thai-ification. No more Lao
provinces and people, as the Bangkok ruling elite “began to erase
the Lao-ethnically, historically, and demographically-from
Siam”.[26] A myth of a great Thai race was born. Thai as the same
race, but different from: Shans, Lao, Peguans, Annamese,
Chinese, and “especially Burmese, Malay and Cambodians
originally prisoners of war”. Race and nationality fused together
‘subsumed all the people of Thailand into an imagined “Thai-
ness”.[27]

The Thai-ification of the Lao population was a key part of a racist

process of assimilating and negating differences, changing
Siamese heterogeneous multi-ethnic populations into Thai mono-
ethnicity and mono-culture.[28] In the early 20th Century in Siam
one fifth of the population spoke non- Thai languages and over 50
per cent were ethnic Lao. Government administrators were not
allowed to call people in North and Northeastern Thailand Lao,
these regions were to be integrated and must speak central Thai.
Regional identities and ethnic affiliations were erased in an
unequal hierarchy. The Lao-Northeasterners have been ‘ethnically
negated and socially marginalised’ in an ethnic cleansing of Thai
history: erasing the Lao, as if only the Thai race ever existed.[29]

Faith becomes fate: Race and primordial religiosity

Southern Thailand with its Muslim majority population has a long
history of resistance to Bangkok’s rule amidst a struggle for
autonomy. The provinces of Patanni, Yala and Narathiwat, were a
sultanate subjected to internal colonisation into Siam in 1905. The
Thai state violently suppressed the Dusun-Nyor revolt by Malay
Muslims in 1948 and the Islamic teacher Haji Sulong was
disappeared in 1954. Since the massacres of 2004, it appears as a
clash of Thai/Buddhist and Muslim groups is occurring in the
Deep South.

The work of Michael K. Jerryson and McCargo shows that people

learn how to be a Buddhist or a Muslim in southern Thailand in
particular ways.[30] Individuals’ ethno-religious identifications
and displays of loyalty and affiliation have been constructed as a
national security issue by the Thai state and as a means of
righteous insurrection by Muslim militants. Mobilising religion
transforms security forces into “moral guardians, sacred avengers
of the nation, not mere State servants, whose sacred duty is to
uphold and protect the integrity of Thai Buddhism.”[31]

Buddhist nationalism incites fury and violence in the

South.[32] Malay Muslim insurgents incite hatred and murderous
violence against Thais constructed as ‘kafir’ unbelievers,
mirroring Thai racism against (Malay) Muslims. Both Thai
Buddhists and Malay Muslims construct Manichean worlds, each
other as incarnations of goodness and badness, in constant
negation of a tradition of amicable inter-faith and inter-ethnic
community relations. Malay Muslims racist marginalisation and
ethno-religious exclusion from Thai-ness drives militants to turn
amity into enmity. Islamic religion, like Buddhism, has been
politicised to justify killing both Malays, as traitors and
collaborators, as well as Thais-as Buddhist oppressors. Southern
insurgents resist and rebel as Muslims, their religion is an ethnic
marker.[33] Insurgents fight a ‘Patani jihad’ to impose only one
way to be Malay-Muslim. Ironically, this is an inversion of the
state enforced version of Thai-ness.

McCargo argues that the significance of the southern violent

insurgency challenges the legitimacy of the Thai state and “the
microcosm of a potentially wide ranging civil conflict in the
country”.[34] Solving the conflict, Jerryson argues, will require
the “reworking of Thailand’s concept of racial formations,” which
act to “displace minority identities by measuring their ethnic and
religious identities against the norm of Thai Buddhism.”[35]

Happy endings?
Violence in Southern Thailand: Tolerance and truce making?
The challenge of coexistence is how well people can they live with
‘otherness’ instead of seeking to convert or integrate the ‘others’?
Tolerance of different faiths, histories, cultures and identities is
needed in Thailand. Grahame Thompson’s audacious argument is
that truce seeking is more important than truth seeking in the
pursuit of peace.[36] A fixation on justice will lead to an attitude
of attributing blame, whereas a truce situation moderates two
parties where there is no winner or loser. Thus, political conflict
can be moderated by cultivating a style of conduct “that embodies
a studied indifference towards difference.”[37] Buddhist or
Muslim absolute and cosmic differences become insignificant: de-
escalating violent conflict and depolarising identities among social
combatants to attempt to secure social peace. Enduring peace is
possible if people can relate to each other in shared common
humanity, not as symbols of ethnic and religious communities
badged with un-Thai otherness. The Thai state would have to
govern through equanimity: ceasing to support royal Buddhist
nationalism, the King as God, which excludes Muslims and
Malays from being ‘true’ Thais and citizens.

The meaning of Thaksin and the Red Shirt Movement for

inclusion
Following Ferrara’s astute analysis PM Thaksin and the Red Shirt
movement populism arose from addressing social divisions in the
North and Northeast embracing those marginalised by the
state.[38] Thaksin was deposed by a military coup in 2006 for
becoming more charismatic and popular than King Bhumibol (the
King already tried to assassinate Thaksin). The subaltern rebellion
by the anti-military populist Red shirts against royalist
conservative Yellow shirts threatened a ‘slow burn civil war’
because Thaksin’s policies championed diversity and inclusion.
Thaksin’s pro-poor rural policies lifted people out being fixed in
their place as racially unequal. His power came from below, by
popular mandate of the people not an elite imposed from above.
Unlike the royal Bangkok elite, Thaksin asked for people’s loyalty
not by stressing the virtues of hierarchy, or their duty to accept
their station in life, but rather by promising greater equality and
opportunity for social and economic mobility. Thaksin’s support
was not bound or defined by ethnicity, racist exclusion of ‘less
than perfectly Thai’ ethno-regional local identities marginalised
by the state. What Thaksin offered was “an affirmation of their
ethno-regional pride and yearning for recognition” as equal Thai
citizens, not racially inferior subjects.[39] What remains to be
delineated is the spiritual modality of Thai racism and purification
politics to exit being governed in the name of Thai culture.

Tim Rackett read Sociology at Essex University and studied

under Ernesto Laclau, and Paul Hirst at Birkbeck College. His
doctorate “Transcultural Psychiatry and the Truth of Racism” is
an investigation into the relations between reason, power and
truth-telling concerning culture and madness in colonial and
post-colonial metropolitan racist situations. Tim, for the last 26
years in Southeast Asia, has explored non-Western politics of
purification and truth; the rights of ethno-religious minorities-
Malay Muslims in Southern Thailand, Kachin refugees in
Malaysia; Thai Buddhist nationalism and racism. Tim’s
publications include: ‘No ‘Me’’, Mine’, or Religion: Buddhdasa’s
Cosmopolitan Planetary Life’ “in ‘Asian-Arab Philosophical
Dialogue on Culture of Peace and Human Dignity’ UNESCO
Bangkok 2011; ‘States of Mind and Exception: Enactments of
Buddhist ontological Truth and purification in Thai religious
nationalism in the mid-20th and early 21st centuries’, Journal of
Religion and Violence 2014, and ‘Thailand: Exception to the rule
or rule by exception?’ Constellations of Southeast Asia ed. Jan
Nederveen Pieterse et al. 2017). Currently Tim is working on
mapping Khmer Studies.
[1] Jory, Patrick. 2021. A History of Manners and Civility in
Thailand. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Streckfuss, David. An ‘ethnic’ reading of ‘Thai’ history in the
twilight of the century-old official ‘Thai’ national model. South
East Asia Research 20, no. 3, (2012): 419–441.
[3] Montesano, Michael J., Chachavalpongpun, Pavin and
Chongvilaivan, Aekapol. 2012. Bangkok, May 2010: Perspectives
on a Divided Thailand. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
[4] Srisompop Jitpiromsri, Southern Border/Patani 2004-2021:
Stepping into the Nineteenth Year Where will peace go in 2022?,
DeepSouthWatch, January
2022, https://deepsouthwatch.org/th/node/12816
[5] Keyes, Charles. Muslim ‘Others’ in Buddhist
Thailand. Thammasat Review 13, no. 1, (2009).
[6] Streckfuss, David. An ‘ethnic’ reading of ‘Thai’ history in the
twilight of the century-old official ‘Thai’ national model. South
East Asia Research 20, no. 3, (2012): 419–441.
[7] Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped. Chiang Mai,
Thailand: Silkworm Books.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Streckfuss, David. 2011. Truth on Trial in Thailand. London,
UK :Routledge.
[10] Foucault, Michel. 2020. Society Must Be Defended. Penguin
Classics.
[11] Haberkorn, Tyrell. 2013. Getting Away with Murder in
Thailand: State Violence and Impunity in Phatthalung. In State
Violence in East Asia, eds. N. Ganesan and Sung Chull Kim.
Lexington, US: University Press of Kentucky, 185-208.
[12] Foucault, Michel. 2020. Society Must Be Defended. Penguin
Classics; Thongchai Winichakul. The “germs”: The reds’ infection
of the Thai political body, New Mandala, May
2010, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/05/03/th
ongchai-winichakul-on-the-red-germs/#more-9382
[13] Foucault, Michel. 2020. Society Must Be Defended. Penguin
Classics.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Thongchai Winichakul, 2011 “Siam’s Colonial Conditions and
the Birth of Thai History”, https://bit.ly/3yR1ovc
[16] Jackson, Peter A. The Performative State: Semi-coloniality
and the Tyranny of Images in Modern Thailand. Sojourn 19, no. 2,
(2004): 219-53
[17] Jackson, Peter A. The Performative State: Semi-coloniality
and the Tyranny of Images in Modern Thailand. Sojourn 19, no. 2,
(2004): 219-53
[18] Loos, Tamara. 2002. Subject Siam: Family Law and
Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm
Books Cornell University.
[19] Foucault, Michel. 2020. Society Must Be Defended. Penguin
Classics.
[20] Streckfuss, David. 1993. The mixed colonial legacy in Siam:
origins of Thai racialist thought, in Sears, L. J. (ed.), Autonomous
Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honor of John R. W. Smail.
Madison, US: University of Wisconsin
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Jerryson, Michael K. 2011. Buddhist Fury: Religion and
Violence in Southern Thailand. New York, US: Oxford University
Press; McCargo, Duncan. 2009. Tearing Apart the
Land. Singapore: NUS Press; McCargo, Duncan. 2012. Mapping
National Anxieties. Denmark: NIAS.
[31] Jerryson, Michael K. 2011. Buddhist Fury: Religion and
Violence in Southern Thailand. New York, US: Oxford University
Press.
[32] Ibid.; Rackett, Tim. States of Mind and Exception:
Enactments of Buddhist ontological Truth and purification in
Thai religious nationalism in the mid-20th and early 21st
Centuries. .Journal of Religion and Violence 2, no. 1, (2014 a.);
Rackett, Tim. Review of Buddhist Fury M. K. Jerryson. Journal of
Religion and Violence 2, no. 3, (2014 b).
[33] Askew, Marc. Fighting with Ghosts: Querying Thailand’s
“Southern Fire”. Contemporary Southeast Asia 32, no. 2, (2010):
117-155
[34] McCargo, Duncan. 2012. Mapping National
Anxieties. Denmark: NIAS.
[35] Jerryson, Michael K. 2011. Buddhist Fury: Religion and
Violence in Southern Thailand. New York, US: Oxford University
Press.
[36] Thompson, Grahame F. 2005. Toleration and the Art of
International Governance: How is it Possible to ‘Live Together’ in
a Fragmenting International System?, in Habitus: A Sense of
Place. Milton Park, UK: Routledge.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ferrara, Frederico. 2015. The Political Developoment of
Modern Thailand. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
[39] Ibid.
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