• 
• 

If one were to believe every word of our former prime minister's biographical "Thaksin's 24 Hours" - recently released in Hong Kong, but not Thailand - one would weep over the mammoth chip on his shoulder.

Oh, brother, how thou suffer! Look at the crown of thorns piercing thy temple!

As Hollywood producer Robert Evans put it in his own memoir, "There are three sides in every story: my side, your side and the truth."

By that reckoning, one would only be able to find the usual half-truths in Thaksin's seemingly self-sponsored, fleeting account - in his avowals that he represents grassroots democracy and was unfairly framed and ousted by the military.

It's not exactly the warped mirror of truth that grips the reader here, though, but the chance to delve into the psyche of Thailand's best-known politician.

"When [Thaksin] was eight a stranger ventured into his father's coffee shop one day. Upon seeing the little boy the man patted him on his head and said: 'Kid, do you know that you look like a Chinese Buddha idol? You have a bright future ahead of you'."

This encounter becomes a defining moment on a par with baby Moses being discovered by the Pharaoh's daughter or little Adolf Hitler whipped senseless by his abusive father. It's enough to propel this starry-eyed youngster upon his pursuit of money and power. For "he believes".

Yes, Thaksin does believe, though quite exactly in what, nobody knows.

Besides equating Thaksin to Buddha (if only in physique), co-authors Mak Nam, Chang Lim and Chung Kang chose not to use Thaksin's official Chinese press name.

The preferred phonetic concoction means that, while the Chinese pronunciation remains "Tha-sin", the two new ideograms used translate literally as "he believes" - tha meaning "he" and sin meaning "trust" or "believe".

"Thaksin's 24 Hours" takes political spin in Thai politics to a dizzying new height.

Political biographies, authorised or otherwise,of politicians still in office abound, from Vladimir Putin and Condoleezza Rice to, more recently, Gordon Brown.

It would be libellous to say that these people pay for the books to be written, but often the content is nothing but one-dimensionally docile.

Thaksin Shinawatra's book portrays the battle-weary politician as an innocent (fair enough since everyone is innocent until proven guilty in court) who woke up one fine morning in his "presidential suite" at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in the Big Apple to find his mojo stolen by the troops.

On the eve of the coup, he summons his lieutenants and "nervously" tells them of the widespread rumours of a coup in Bangkok that night.

"Not again!" mutters Pansak Vinyaratn.

Silence envelops the room, according to witnesses, until someone bursts out: "They won't succeed."

"Yes, they won't succeed," the premier says.

How nicely things come full circle. Thaksin once said that, upon arriving in the US to study criminal justice, he discovered a country where "opportunities are everywhere".

The book recounts how Thaksin, as an entrepreneur in a police captain's uniform, upon returning to Thailand, sold his beloved car to fund his first venture, a cinema, which then failed miserably.

Thaksin observed: in his life, failure often precedes spectacular success.

As much as he would like to believe in running the country as a corporation, his time as the nation's CEO only brought warped governance. A corporation thrives on meritocracy and accountability, but there was no trace of these in Thaksin's administration.

The telecom tycoon took politics beyond the traditional information media - the newspapers, television, radio and outdoor advertising - and into cyberspace, with websites and blogs and chat forums propagating his version of the "news".

Now he's incorporated some of the accumulated blog and forum comments into his book. Someone called Tutunutnut offers this "online" comment: "Once it's gone, can Thailand really have press freedom?"

A Google search yielded no "Tutunutnut" apart from this contribution to the book, nor a "Gemidise", another alleged Web surfer, who worries in the biography that Thailand's economic high-flying ended with Thaksin's ouster.

The biography includes photos of His Majesty the King sandwiched in between pictures of soldiers in tanks.

Any high-school student would understand what the authors are trying to suggest. But ever the wise prince - in a strictly Machiavellian sense - Thaksin claimed that certain people had been trying to jeopardise his relationship with His Majesty.

George Orwell put it eloquently in his dystopian epic "1984": "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

And we know that if lies are repeated often enough, they become (the authorised version of) the truth.

Ki Nan Tsui

The Nation