BBC News - Profile: Thailand's reds and yellows
Thailand's increasingly tense political stand-off between the red-shirted United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) and their yellow-clad Peoples' Alliance for Democracy (PAD) has overtones of some the European political upheavals of a former era.
The two constituencies - the reds primarily a coalition of students, farmers and urban radicals, and the yellows a collective of monarchists and the urban middle classes - resonates with numerous phases of European political history in the C17 and C18.
I'm reminded even of the origins of the English Civil War with its two increasingly polarised camps. In a sense, even the American War of Independence had elements of these traditional class-based and rural-urban divisions, with the added complexity of a long-standing traditional monarchy thrown into the mix.
The BBC's photo essay on the current stand-off is illuminating.
Thailand's increasingly tense political stand-off between the red-shirted United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) and their yellow-clad Peoples' Alliance for Democracy (PAD) has overtones of some the European political upheavals of a former era.
The two constituencies - the reds primarily a coalition of students, farmers and urban radicals, and the yellows a collective of monarchists and the urban middle classes - resonates with numerous phases of European political history in the C17 and C18.
I'm reminded even of the origins of the English Civil War with its two increasingly polarised camps. In a sense, even the American War of Independence had elements of these traditional class-based and rural-urban divisions, with the added complexity of a long-standing traditional monarchy thrown into the mix.
The BBC's photo essay on the current stand-off is illuminating.
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