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Chulalongkorn hospital is truly a PAD member. Those doctors in Chula hated Thaksin so much because Thaksin made them work hard in the 30BHts campaign. In the Thai society, doctors trend to think that they are super human who must be treated specially. They think they are smarter and more superior than fellow Thai. When the 30Bhts for every diseases campaign came out, most Thai were really happy, specially the poor. But the doctors complaint for having to work harder without any extra earning. Chula Hospital was the hospital which refused to cure the red-shirt when the red-shirt crashed with policemen. If you look into the history of this hospital you could see clearly why this hospital choose to side with this blood soaked government. The building names and the hospital names will tell you exact meaning. No matter how much bloodshed if the government decide to attack, the red-shirt will never be disappeared from the Thai society. They are already the biggest part of the Thai society. They will grow stronger and bigger and nobody will be able to eradicate them from this land. We are here to stay and conquer.

The story begins when the service was a privilege of kings and their subordinates, who transmitted royal edicts from Naypyidaw to government representatives via horse and boat.

say what ???????

The English newspapers offer useless reporting. It’s a lot worse than useless, it’s consonant with government propaganda. The Nation has been off on its binge for years and the Bangkok Post is now publishing the government line as news as well.

I saw reports of ASTV identifying the 5th floor of Chulalongkorn Hospital as the source of the grenades that killed and wounded.

I remember the Chulalongkorn doctors’ refusal to treat police and reds as well.

I read that

On 13 April, a group of about 100 people led by Dr Tul Sitthisomwong, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Medicine, gathered at the Victory Monument. They waved Thai flags, played propaganda songs, and called on silent forces to come out to oppose the red shirts and support the government in not dissolving Parliament. They sang ‘We Fight’, an anti-communist song whose melody was composed by HM the King in 1970s…

Tul Sitthisomwong was appointed by the People’s Alliance for Democracy to sit on the Committee of the Strength of Land, the meaning of HM the King’s name, on 24 July 2008, according to a PAD statement (7/2008)…

On 24 Nov 2008, Tul led a group of Chulalongkorn lecturers and students under the name of Siam Intellect to a rally at the Army Headquarters to call on Gen Anupong and the military to take a leading role in maintaining peace and order in society and maintain loyalty to the monarchy. Soldiers were the hope of the people in the protection of Nation, Religion and the King, he said at the time. Later, he went on to speak on the stage of the PAD, attacking the then Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, saying that a jail sentence was not enough for him, because he who had ordered the killing of other people should also die [Tul referred to the 7 Oct 2008 incident in which the PAD clashed with police after the PAD surrounded and closed the Parliament compound]. Somchai must be severely punished after he was removed from office. Tul went on to say that, speaking as a doctor, love for the country and the king was embedded only in Thais’ DNA, not that of other peoples. It was a pity that many Thais had mutated and did not have the love for the king in their DNA and should not be called Thai, he said.

This Tul character is a real whack job. Vicious and dangerous as well. Thailand’s version of Lysenko.

Living in Thailand now is like living “behind the Iron Curtain” must have been in the days of my youth. There is no news. All there is is government propaganda.

I truly hope that the reds are able to get this de facto regime dissolved and a legitimate government installed by election.

I think they will. I think, I hope, that Maratjp has the inside track on what is going to happen. Not another coup, of course, but an election.

The same is true in the US. Old folks like myself are aghast and against the sickening replay of aggressive warfare, this time the serial aggression against Islamic nations, and see the US political system for what it is – corporate driven and unrepresentative of the people’s desires.

The kids are busy… with other things.

The opposite of what it was like when I was their age.

How about Australia?

It would have been nice if the source of had not chosen to remain anonymous. Still, I agree it’s reasonable to doubt the mainstream account for at least a few reasons.

1. With the campaign to smear government opponents as enemies of the monarchy, the Abhisit administration and the Thai media have moved beyond mere spin to outright fabrication.

2. The news that Chula hospital is now taking care only of the supreme patriarch fits too neatly with the government’s latest front in its propaganda war: the accusation that red shirts are, on top of everything else, enemies of Buddhism (as evidenced by the “revelation” yesterday that the red shirts tried to destroy the temple of the emerald buddha).

3. Chula hospital’s refusal to treat police after the Oct 2008 PAD crackdown exposed it as an institution that places political allegiances above responsibility to patients.

4. Even if the patient move really did start after the red “storming”, it needs to be better explained. Doctors and nurses say they were scared, but did the red shirts actually threaten employees or patients? Who decided that the danger caused by red shirts outweighed the danger of moving ill patients? And why was a non-violent (though certainly intimidating) incursion by some red shirts considered sufficient reason to move patients immediately, while a grenade battle ten days earlier and the prospect of a violent crackdown taking place meters away was not?

The young are at home going to school and taking care of the farms and farm animals while the adults are away in Bangkok protesting. There is now a political consciousness amongst the adult population that did not exist a decade ago when it only existed amongst University age children. Whole villages now flock around red shirt T.V., rallies and meetings involving everyone but mostly the adults. It has been afterall the intent of previous governments to lift the educational and economic level of all members of society was it not? So, now you have it and no one should be surprised at this new awareness.

Mass education, mass transportation, expanded road and rail systems , radio, t.v. and the internet have all conspired to bring the rural poor and working classes together as a mobile mass movement. It’s going to take some adjustment amongst the rest of Thai society to come to this acceptance. Mao Tse Dong solved the problem of maintaining control in China by providing just the opposite for his people. He drove everyone out of the cities , restricted travel, restricted education and restricted access to the means of communication. What is taking place in Thailand is inevitable and a direct result of those things I have mentioned above. The current government must understand that it cannot go back or force those with whom it disagrees to go back to the way they were either like Mao did in China. I have the feeling that this simply has not yet sunk in. Which is unfortunate because if the current goverment were to realize these shifts that have taken place they would be better able to negotiate the future.

You can’t keep them down on the farm anymore as the old saying goes.

Jabalaba

I don’t understand your account. If the patients were already taken out the day before, then where did all the pictures come from of patients being wheeled out on the day the reds entered?

Jotman (#3) raises a good point but then – given his own words “For the Red Shirts, this incident appears to be nothing short of a complete and utter disaster from a public relations perspective” – it’s understandable that Weng would jump to defuse the issue as effectively and quickly as possible.

An immediate and full-on apology arguably does that better than trying to win a convoluted “he said/she said” argument about what was or wasn’t happening at the hospital in terms of patients already being moved out prior to the UDD search and/or soldiers moving in. One side can call on all the exalted status of the medical profession*, a plentiful supply of emotive pictures of ailing patients being wheeled out and tearful testimony from anguished relatives. Needless to say, Thai (but also other) media will milk those images for all they’re worth.

On the other side, UDD has only a brokered agreement gone wrong (reportedly five UDD + media finally approved to enter but 200 UDD push their way in) and what they claim to have seen that prompted the request to search in the first place. Eye-witness reports on blogs aren’t going to even register on the meter of public opinion. In any event, any outsider’s view of the picture is inevitably fragmentary and even Weng may well not have had access to all of it before going for the apology route.

* Chulalongkorn’s at best mixed record – which includes reportedly refusing to treat police injured in PAD protests and UDD protesters now – is also unlikely to figure in the public’s perception of events.

Did this account get reported in the media? Of course not! And why? I suggest that it’s because the story is pure fantasy dreamed up by a pro-red farang.

And why did I say so? I have been a frequent visitor to NM in the past few months. I also read widely and that includes many pro-red media. (I do miss the now inaccessible Prachathai online.) I found NM articles interesting and often times enlightening. I also found NM posters to be intellectual and highly knowledgeable. But I’m sorry to say that I found most people here extremely biased against the Thai government and so pro-red that most of what they say here is vastly misguided and sometimes ridiculous.

A lot of people here seem to believe that the Thai government has complete control over all the mainstream Thai media as suggested by the above article. I suggest otherwise and would invite you to read the daily Matichon and the daily Thairath (or ask someone to read them for you if you can’t read Thai) to see evidence of my suggestion.

(1). Those young reds, they used to come before the 10 April incident, but after the crackdown at Phan Fa, they are forbidden from their parents not to join the protest. However, some joined with their family.

(2). Many teachers in Thai schools, universities, they “brain-wash” their students that the Red movement is to topple the monarchy and only for Thaksin.

(3). It’s interesting to see that the PAD use “networking strategy” by keep forwarding emails with rumors, via Facebook, emails etc. So you can see a group called “Facebook group” among the multicolors or pro-government group (a.k.a . PAD’s avatar)