Saturday, September 5, 2020

US-backed Mobs in Thailand Vow to use Force

US-backed agitator who visited US ambassador specializing in "the use of non-military instruments in persuasive, inducement, and coercive strategies" vows to seize public areas in Bangkok "by force." 

September 5, 2020 (Tony Cartalucci - ATN) - As easily predicted, the US-backed billionaire-led opposition and so-called "student protests" they have organized have now vowed to use force. 



The Bangkok Post in its article, "Protesters target Sanam Luang occupation at rally," would claim: 

Parit "Penguin" Chivarak, a core member of the Free Youth group, on Friday vowed to lead protesters to forcibly occupy the adjacent Sanam Luang when they gather again for a major rally at Thammasat University's Tha Phrachan campus on Sept 19.
First - it should be noted that Parit "Penguin" Chivarak is the founder of the "Student Union of Thailand" (SUT) and that the "Free Youth" group is simply an umbrella name used to describe what is a network of US-funded and billionaire-led opposition-backed fronts. 



Parit himself has literally been to the US Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand on at least one occasion in 2016 - according to the US Embassy's own official Facebook page - where he met Ambassador Glyn Davies who specifically studied "the use of non-military instruments in persuasive, inducement, and coercive strategies," during his education at the US National War College.


The protest occupation will most certainly violate the law - prompting law enforcement to act and thus resulting in another cycle of the protesters, their political backers, the US government, and the small army of fronts posing as NGOs attempting to portray the mobs as "victims." 



There is also the possibility that these protests - just as they did in 2010 - will resort to armed violence including the use of heavily armed gunmen to target both security officials as well as the protesters themselves in a bid to escalate toward political crisis and attract "international" pressure. 

This attempt to escalate comes as US-funded agitator Anon Nampa and others were arrested and their bail revoked after they openly and blatantly violated their previous bail conditions. The arrest was immediately condemned by "Amnesty International," a fake human rights front regularly used by the US and UK governments to justify foreign interventions. 

The Western media and their partners continue constant coverage of the protests, including their complaints over the repeated arrest of core leaders - despite claiming for months that the protests were "leaderless" - all while making no mention of the protests' foreign financial and local political sponsors. 

Every Aspect of Thai Protests are US-Funded 


The US government through its notorious regime change front, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is funding virtually every aspect of Thailand's current so-called "student protests." 




READ MORE: The Complete Guide: US Government Role in Thailand's "Student Protests"

Despite dishonest claims that this information constitutes "unfounded accusations," the US NED's own official website openly lists many of the organizations at the core of current protests.



This includes Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), Internet Law Reform Dialogue (iLaw), Prachatai (listed as the Foundation for Community Educational Media), The Isaan Record, and the Assembly of the Poor (listed as the Thai Poor Act) - and a quick and simple look at any anti-government protester's account will reveal the vast majority of their social media posts consist of content produced by these admittedly US government-funded fronts.   


The Protest's Core Leaders are US-Funded

Thailand's current protest's core leadership includes the recently arrested Anon Nampa, a lawyer working for Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) funded by the US NED via the Union for Civil Liberty. It was previously listed individually on the NED's website in 2014 - archived here



Not only is a lawyer from TLHR leading the protests, the organization itself promotes the protests, provides its core leadership with free legal assistance, and other forms of material support. 

In addition to funding TLHR the US State Department had awarded another TLHR lawyer - Sirikan “June” Charoensiri the 2018 "International Women of Courage Award" presented by US First Lady Melania Trump.



The US Embassy in Bangkok - now denying any involvement with these groups - would at the time openly praise TLHR in a statement celebrating the award, exclaiming:
The U.S. Embassy in Bangkok is proud of Sirikan “June” Charoensiri’s work as a lawyer and human rights defender, and for being recognized by the Secretary of State as an International Women of Courage award recipient.

Ms. Sirikan is a co-founder of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR), a lawyers’ collective set up to provide pro bono legal services for human rights cases and to document human rights violations.
Thus - an organization carefully cultivated by the US government for years - propped up financially and politically and even awarded for carrying out Washington's agenda in Thailand - is now leading protests aimed at overthrowing the elected government of Thailand. 

US-Funded Groups Target Thailand's Constitution for "Rewriting" 

US meddling is not limited to supplying the protests with leaders and legal aid.

It is also funding fronts organizing a nationwide petition to rewrite Thailand's constitution.

One front - iLaw - is listed on the US NED's official website as, "Internet Law Reform Dialogue," and has been aggressively promoting both the protests and its petition with iLaw booths set up at virtually every rally - big or small - across the country. 

iLaw also admits on its own website that it is funded by the US government via the US NED as well as convicted financial criminal George Soros' Open Society Foundation.  


Another group, ConLab (Constitution Lab) works in conjunction with iLaw in a bid to rewrite Thailand's constitution and held a recent event at at the US Embassy's "American Corner" at Chiang Mai University.

US-funded "Media" Promotes Protests 

The US also funds a number of media platforms promoting protests, advertising the locations, times, and dates of protests, advising protesters how to dress and what gear to bring, as well as provide one-sided reporting on the protest's activities while condemning any action taken by the Thai government to hold them accountable including for acts of violence. 

These include Prachatai, The Isaan Record, Benar News, and The 101 Percent. 


Prachatai - listed on NED's website as the Foundation for Community Educational Media - in particular has been funded by the US government for years. Its "executive director" Chiranuch Premchaiporn is also listed on the NED's website as an "NED Fellow."  

The vast majority of content shared by "activists" on US-based social media giants like Facebook and Twitter is produced by US-funded media fronts like Prachatai. 

The US is funding and supporting a small army of media platforms specifically to promote ongoing protests as well as other "interests" of the US inside of Thailand - merely dressed up as "pro-democracy" "student protests."  

US-Funded Group Regularly Fills Protest Ranks Up with Members 

Even the protests themselves including the number of people showing up is aided by US government funding. 


One organization calling itself "Assembly of the Poor" regularly mobilizes its members to help fill the ranks of current ongoing protests. Its leader, Baramee Chaiyarat, has openly thrown his and his organization's support behind the rallies - as reported in The Nation's article, "Assembly of Poor backs young protesters, slams govt ‘intimidation.’"

The official NED website lists Assembly of the Poor under "Thai Poor Act" with Thai Poor Act being registered under Baramee Chaiyarat's name as "manager" and with Thai Poor Act's Facebook and YouTube accounts clearly using the name "Thai Poor Act" and "Assembly of the Poor" interchangeably. 

US-funded Mobs Always Turn Violent 

The US NED - according to its own official website - funds similarly dishonest and disruptive groups in virtually every nation on Earth outside Washington's direct influence. Its website's financial disclosures are divided into several categories including, Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America and Caribbean, and the Middle East and Northern Africa. 


It was organizations like the NED and subversive fronts it funded that deliberately triggered the so-called "Arab Spring" in 2011 - creating violence the US would eventually leverage to carry out military interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen killing tens of thousands, displacing millions, and leaving all three nations in constant chaos since. 


The New York Times itself in its  article, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," would admit the role of organizations like NED in training, equipping, and funding protests that eventually led to regional death, despair, irreversible economic destruction, and enduring destabilization. 

The NYT would admit (emphasis added):
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
It also noted: 
The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.
While the NYT claims this money was spent "promoting democracy" it clearly served as cover for what was in reality a violent campaign of US-backed regime change which culminated in multiple direct US military interventions, the destruction of Libya, and the near destruction of Syria. 

One thing that never materialized in the wake of the "Arab Spring" was "democracy." 


The US NED was similarly involved in the 2014 US-backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government - as leaked audio would eventually prove according to Reuters - as well as ongoing unrest in Hong Kong with so-called "student protest" leaders there having literally flown to Washington D.C. to lobby for - and receive - aid in their attempts to reassert Western dominion over the former British colony. 

In both instances terrible violence inevitably erupted with the protesters representing a loud, violent but nonetheless unpopular minority - but with immense foreign backing. 

Mobs in Hong Kong burned down infrastructure, physically attacked the persons and property of anyone criticizing their activities including one elderly man lit on fire. 


It is disturbing that not only are the Thai protesters today openly funded by the very same US government organizations responsible for violent protests and even destructive wars in other nations - but that these same Thai protesters have literally flown to Hong Kong to meet with US-funded agitators there - as well as openly express solidarity and cooperation with US-funded agitators in Hong Kong. 

This "cooperation" between US-funded mobs - including its online manifestation as the so-called "Milk Tea Alliance" - helps further illustrate the artificial, foreign-funded nature of Thailand's protests - but also helps illustrate the true purpose of these protests - to attack governments in the region friendly with China and eventually surround China with US-backed client regimes that will roll back economic, financial, and even military ties with Beijing. 

It should be noted that China is Thailand's most important trade partner, investor, largest source of tourism, and a key partner in several crucial infrastructure projects including a high-speed rail link that will connect China, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore together. China has also replaced the US as Thailand's primary military arms provider. 

The US-backed billionaire-led opposition behind current "student protests" had not only vowed as recently as December of last year to "bring people onto the streets" as ThaiPBS would report - but has openly vowed to roll back Thai-Chinese relations if in power.  

Billionaire opposition leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit would literally tour the US before Thailand's 2019 general election to lobby for support and vow to make Thailand "more like America." He also vowed to cancel Thai-Chinese projects including the already-under-construction high-speed rail link.

Image: Thanathorn ran in 2019 on a platform that included cancelling Thai-Chinese rail projects in favor of the nonexistent "hyperloop." It was a proposed policy that would have served only Washington's interests at Thailand and China's expense. 

Articles like Bloomberg's "Thailand needs hyperloop, not China-built high-speed rail: Thanathorn," illustrates clearly the agenda US-backed political parties and leaders like Thanathorn represent - particularly in rolling back Thai-Chinese relations. The article would note:
A tycoon turned politician who opposes Thailand’s military government has criticised its US$5.6 billion high-speed rail project with China because hyperloop technology offers a more modern alternative.
It should be noted that not only does the "hyperloop" exist only as crude prototypes versus China's high-speed rail technology already moving billions of people a year - the Thai-Chinese high-speed rail line is already under construction with a new grand station nearing completion built specifically to serve as, among other things, a terminal for Chinese-built high-speed trains.  .

Image: Thailand's massive Bang Sue Grand Station nears completion and will serve as a terminal for Chinese-built high-speed trains.

Thus - Thanathorn's proposed "alternative" would mean cancelling actual ongoing construction and waiting years if not indefinitely for theoretical "hyperloop" technology to be developed let alone deployed. In other words - Thanathorn would cancel an important infrastructure project that would greatly expand the movement of goods and people across Asia, just to spite China on Washington's behalf and leave Thailand with absolutely nothing except PowerPoint presentations as an alternative.  

He has also openly criticized Thailand's attempts to modernize its military via arms deals with China, with his party co-founder even defending proposed military budget cuts by claiming," "in today's world, no one engages in wars any more."

Violence is Inevitable 

US-backed mobs - whether in the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Hong Kong, or Thailand - exist solely to project US power and interests into heart of a targeted nation and will stop at nothing short of either regime change or the permanent destabilization of a country - thus denying its economic and military partnership to rivals like Russia or China. 

Because of this - and the fact that so-called "demands" made by Thailand's protests are simply window dressing for this ultimate goal - violence will eventually break out. It should be noted that since the original "3 demands" were made at the beginning of the protests - they have quickly expanded and have become increasingly unreasonable specifically so that they cannot be met and the crisis escalates. 

Exposing who is really behind these protests, and exposing who these interests are sheds light on foreign meddling that - to be successful - requires a certain amount of secrecy. While violence may still be inevitable - it could be limited as it was in Hong Kong, China before the US-funded agitators were finally brought to justice - rather than allowed to spiral out of  control as seen in other nations targeted by US "soft power" intervention.