Revolution in Siam

Last Friday a successful revolution was achieved in Siam by the officers—or a clique among the officers—of the naval and military forces. The heir to the throne and the chief of police were placed under arrest; and the King, who was not in Bangkok when the coup was carried out, returned to the capital and accepted the fait accompli. The only casualty seems to have one high military officer, who was shot and wounded in the act of resisting arrest; and this sole victim is happily expected to recover. The revolutionaries deprecate the application of the term “revolution” to their work; but a revolution does not cease to be a revolution when it is accomplished without loss of life; and this Siamese specimen is not difficult to classify and pigeon-hole. Like the recent alarums and excursions in Chile, the present upheaval in Siam is evidently a political expression of the malaise produced by the pressure of the economic crisis. But the crisis has caught Siam in a different stage of social development from some of these other countries; and accordingly, this Siamese revolution had taken rather a different form. While our Latin-American revolutionaries move in an endless cycle from one dictator or one junta to another, and while the Japanese Fascists are moving backwards from a pseudo-constitutional regime towards a one-party tyranny, the Siamese revolutionaries are moving in the opposite direction—from absolute monarchy towards self-government. This Siamese affair is a movement, engineered by military officers, for securing a parliamentary constitution; and the nearest obvious modern analogy is the Turkish revolution of 1908. In Siam, as in Turkey, the military officers are the political radicals because they are the element in the country which has been the most deeply imbued with Western ideas. The economic crisis brought the political movement in Siam to a dénouement by imposing the necessity for an increase in taxation—an increase which the late Government attempted to provide for by imposing a tax on salaries. The Siamese peasantry, whose minds are hardly touched yet by Westernisation, and whose taxes have actually been lightened, seem to have been passive spectators. It remains to be see how these peasant masses will get on with the small and rather exotic Westernised intelligentsia if the intelligentsia now comes into effective power through the curious semi-democratic constitution to which the King has now agreed.