CHIANG MAI, THAILAND
I’m back in Thailand (though there are still a few more India posts) and everything completely hit the fan last week. The protesters’ rogue military commander was assassinated and Bangkok turned into a warzone for nearly a week – all told, 52 people died, 407 were injured and 34 buildings were burned, including the stock exchange, a major news channel and the second largest mall in SE Asia. On Wednesday the violence spread and three major city halls were burned in the Northeast.

Chiang Mai is a little tamer than the rest of Thailand in most aspects, but there were still a bunch of drunk rioters camping out on a bridge. They set up a barricade, destroyed a police box, burned a pile of tires and eventually blew up two fire trucks while taunting the police line on the other side of the river. The fuzz made a few attempts to drive into the camp, but they never got closer than about two hundred meters thanks to one crazy motherfucker with a fire extinguisher. Two dipshit foreigners destroyed street signs and threw tires on the fire, after which I hope they were arrested and summarily executed. After a few hours the military marched in with machine guns and stood there until everybody left. I heard some buildings on the other side of town were burned too, but nearest I can tell no one was injured.

It’s all over now. Nothing was solved. I could complain at length about how the Thai establishment asked for this, how the red shirt leaders let their legitimate political grievances take a backseat to rhetoric and senseless rioting, and above all how the international media completely misrepresented the situation and jacked themselves off over a fantasy about class warfare and “Democracy”, but in the end I’m not sure anybody really wants to hear it. Thais, expats, the media and the rest of the world already know what they think.