I want you to join this rally
By Frank and Stingray, this blog political and national security journalist
Preliminary reports indicates the Red Shirts are planning a protest, with the target of 1 million Thais joining the protest, towards the start of December.
The move confirms the Red Shirt intentions to forge ahead, putting aside earlier reports of caution. It is yet to be seen however, how firm the Red Shirt will carry-through this mass rally.
The government had been using the Yellow Shirt to head-off this Red Shirt gathering, originally planned for this month, by building nationalism and extreme royalism that accumulated into a Yellow Shirt rally just days ago.
While attracting some 20,000 rally goers, mostly bused in from the government stronghold of Southern Thailand, Thai political analyst said the rally was a “Total Failure” given the level of nationalism and exterme royalism being hype up by the government.
The Yellow Shirt, very much like the Red Shirt now, said before that 20,000 show rally, said it would get about 1 million Thais.
The Red Shirt move, comes after a long running battle at the grassroots level in Thailand. Much of the Red Shirt support are from the grassroots.
Earlier intelligence reports, as reported by the blog, reported that the Thai government have instructed the Thai’s army psychological warfare specialist to make contact with the grassroots. This blog have earlier report on this movement, but the summarize, about 20,000 villages were visited by the psychological warfare specialist, and spent the government allocated about 2 billion baht.
It appears now, if the Red Shirt succeeds with the gathering, that the combination of government economics policy targeting to the grassroots and the psychoilogical warfare efforts, may have not worked.
The grassroots continues to see Taksin, a leader of the Red Shirt, as the symbol of hope and prosperity.
The Red Shirt move comes on-top of a fund-raising gathering that intelligence source told this blog, have exceeded targets.
The Intelligence source told this blog the Red Shirt have been building support at the grassroots level for the past three months, in an attempt to counter the military moves.
The source said the target may appear lofty, however, the Red Shirt have demonstrated the ability to call a convergence of 100,000 supporters, within a few days, and a with a long running campaign such as it had been doing, the target 1 million may be achievable.
If that many Thais join in the rally, it would be second to only to the 16 th of October revolution that toppled the Thanom, dictatorship. The numbers of protest in subsequent protest that topplled other dictators have never been estimated and confirmed.
The source said the objective appears to be to topple the current government, and election called.
While nationalism and extreme royalism, is rampant in Thailand currently, the Red Shirt, in this action to topple the government, may indicate the Red Shirt are confident of winning an election.
Thai Intelligent News 