Chapter Six - Twilight of Two Reigns in Siam and Thailand

Summary

The term barami refers to the accumulation of goodness.

Royal barami derives from a belief in rebirth.

All humans are considered to be reborn.

Those reborn at a higher status than others are great kings. Therefore, it is believed that great kings possess more barami than anyone else.

This hearkens back to the Traiphum Phra Ruang, a religious and philosophical text describing diverse worlds of Buddhist cosmology, and the way in which karma consigns living beings to one world or another, through a belief in ancestry or making merit from past lives.

We believe that all human beings made merit during past lives. But in Buddhism, this belief is not mandatory. It may be accepted or not. But most Buddhists believe in merit-making during past lives. Those who have done so more than others will achieve a loftier level as great kings, situated above other humans.

However, Buddhism simultaneously advocates that regardless of the merit of their past lives, if great kings fail to act according to the Ten Royal Virtues, their merit vanishes, and they are subject to dethronement or deposition. This is essential to understand.

Sulak Sivaraksa, August 2021

One Coup for the Brother, Another for the Sister

Historical perspectives from the past can clarify events occurring in the present. Although certainly familiar with the phenomenon of coups d’état, many historians and political scientists in Thailand viewed the 22 May 2014 coup staged by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, then Chief of the Army, against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who had been elected to office, as unprecedented.

It arguably differed from the 2006 coup by Army Chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin against her brother Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire businessman who started as a police lieutenant colonel before becoming a politician and being elected to office.

After the Second World War in Thailand, coups against elected governments, usually headed by military or civilian bureaucrats who had turned politicians, had become traditional. These events, it might be pointed out, always involved male politicians, unlike the developments of May 2014.

Before 22 May, Prayut seemed to enjoy a good working relationship with Thailand’s first-ever female Prime Minister. In another first, for just under a year, starting in June 2013, during one of several cabinet reshuffles, Yingluck also concurrently took on the responsibility of serving as Thailand’s first female defence minister in her cabinet, while still holding the prime ministership.