Democracy Monument - Dictatorship

Dictatorship

The story represented by these sculptures was a considerable distortion of the truth. In fact the 1932 coup was planned and executed almost without bloodshed by a small group of officers and some civilian collaborators, while the king was on holiday at the seaside (see History of Thailand (1768-1932)). The coup was followed by the promulgation of Thailand's first constitution, but this was far from fully democratic. In the mid 1930s there was an attempt to progress to full democracy, but this broke down amid a split between the military and civilian elements of the government, and by 1939, when the Democracy Monument was built, Thailand was in effect a military dictatorship.

The most striking absence from the iconography of the Monument is the monarchy, which today is at the centre of Thai national life and political culture. The fact that the 1932 coup was staged against King Prajadhipok (Rama VII), uncle of the present King, and that he went into exile and eventually abdicated rather than accept the country's degeneration into a military dictatorship, is today seldom mentioned. Although the military regime paid lip service to the monarchy, its political ideology (an ultimately incompatible mix of European liberal constitutionalism and military Bonapartism) was essentially republican. Prajadhipok's successor, Ananda Mahidol (Rama VIII) was at the time a schoolboy in Switzerland. Now that Thailand is (ostensibly) a democracy, very few Thais are aware of the propaganda content of the sculptural works at the base of the Democracy Monument; because the enormous growth in the volume of Bangkok's traffic, and the fact that pedestrian access to the traffic island on which it stands is all but impossible during periods of heavy traffic, it is difficult to observe the details of the Monument up close. There are now plans to build a tunnel under the roadway to allow better access (as has been done at the Berlin Victory Column, which is similarly located).