Authoritarian regimes modelled on Italian Fascism and German Nazism in the interwar period were conspicuous in Europe, but by no means confined to that continent. Asia had its share of emerging political movements and regimes that were attracted to the clarion call of Euro-fascism and the German Nazi phenomena in particular. The nationalist Kuomintang in China had its New Life Movement and the Blue Shirt Society. There was the militaristic, ultranationalist Shōwa Statism associated with the Empire of Japan. In Syria the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, formed with the aim of restoring Syrian independence from its colonial master France, borrowed its ideas and symbols from Nazi ideology.

Another Asian country in the 1930s that was inspired by the Euro-fascist movement to venture down the right-wing authoritarian path was Thailand. Army officer Plaek Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun (or alternately transliterated, Pibul), rode to power on the back of his domination of the military faction of the People’s Party (Khana Ratsadon), becoming prime minister of Siam in 1938. Phibun, one of the most controversial figures in Thailand’s turbulent, coup-prone political history, consolidated his power by establishing a de facto dictatorship during the Second World War. Whether Phibun or his regime was fascist has been a topic of debate by scholars. But before we look at whether the fascist tag sticks to the Thai kingdom in the period of the Phibun ascendancy (1938–1944), we need to hit on a working definition as to what is meant when we refer to a political organisation or movement as “fascist”.

This is far from a straightforward task given the complexity of the concept of fascism, one not helped by the fact that “fascist” is a catch-all word in everyday speech for spontaneously describing in a pejorative fashion any individual or organisation which vexes us even for a fleeting moment. The term is so loaded and problematic that a universally acceptable definition remains elusive…as historian and political theorist Roger Griffin notes, “with the possible exception of ‘ideology’, there can be no term in the human sciences which has generated more conflicting theories about its basic definition than ‘fascism’” [Roger Griffin, ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth. The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’, Library of Social Sciences, (1996), www.libraryofsocialsciences.com]. A broad and simple answer might be that fascism is a totalitarian entity – defining “totalitarianism” as an extreme form of authoritarian rule where the state has complete control over its citizens, using coercion to suppress individual freedoms𝟙. The problem with “totalitarianism” is that it can be applied equally to either extremity of the political spectrum – the far right, fascist regimes like the Nazis and the Italian Fascists, and to systems on the far left, ie, to the Marxist communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Red China, and to contemporary North Korea under the Kim dynasty.

Reductionist heuristics: A short search through the pages of Google will quickly confirm the nigh-on impossible challenge of pinning down a broad consensus as to an acceptable definition of this hyper-complex term. So perhaps enumerating the essential elements or characteristics that constitute fascism might prove a more fruitful exercise? I am somewhat taken by Griffin’s approach to the definition conundrum, seeking to identify “what all permutations of fascism have in common – what he terms the “fascist minimum”, reducing the slippery concept to its bare essentials. Griffin actually condenses his take on “fascism” to a single basic sentence, viz. “a genus of political ideology whose mythical core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth’). This brief statement requires some fleshing out. Griffin identifies three elements that are central to the ideology of fascism: the first is the idea of palingenesis (national revival) which all genuine fascist movements carry in their baggage. This entails the perpetuation of a utopian urban myth which exalts “the regenerative national community which is destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society”𝟚. Through emphasising the societal decadence of the status quo (the second idea), the fascist can isolate and vilify the supposed enemies of society (eg, Jews, communists, Gypsies). The evoking of this palingenetic myth allowed fascist movements to attract large masses of voters who have lost faith in traditional parties and religion with their glittering promises. The third element, populist ultra-nationalism, “arises from seeing modern nation-states as living organisms which are directly akin to physical people because they can decay, grow, and die, and additionally, they can experience rebirth” [‘Ultranationalism’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. This palingenetic– ultranationalism fusion is what distinguishes Griffin’s “true fascism” from para-fascism and other authoritarian, nationalist ideologies [Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (1991)].

A fascist or para-fascist checklist?: There are other characteristics evident in the praxis of fascist organisations and movements, including an opposition to or emasculation of parliamentary democracy; the leader’s cult of personality𝟛; (a revolutionary movement with a) belief in a natural hierarchical social order; an inordinately dominant or influential role played by the military in the state’s governance and in society as a whole; victimhood, suppression of targeted minorities in society (be it ethnic or religious); anti-communism; the all-powerful, all-seeing party as the vanguard of the fascist movement; a “cult of action for action’s sake” (Umberto Eco)…the square peg here is that these characteristics are not the exclusive domain of fascism or fascist politics as they feature in far-right authoritarian rulerships and sometimes in communist ones as well𝟜.

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If we turn now to look at Thailand at the end of the 1930s we see that Phibun consolidated his position as prime minister before embarking on the road to dictatorship. Moving quickly to neutralise political opponents, he had his chief army rival Phraya Song’s supporters eliminated and Phraya himself exiled, while curtailing the already restricted royal power. Parliament was reduced to a rubber stamp chamber, press censorship was rigorously imposed. With other parties outlawed, the principal opposition Phibun faced came from within his ruling People’s Party in the form of Pridi Phanomyong (Banomyong) who headed up the civilian faction of the party. Phibun expressed admiration for the major right-extremist powers, Nazi German, Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan. Militarisation of Thai society was a major focus for Phibun, borrowing extensively from the fascist template he copied the Nazi Jugend (Hitler Youth) with his Thai youth organisations, Yuwachon for boys and Yuwanari for girls. Phibun also relied on propagandist techniques through his right-hand man Wichit Wathakan who acted as party ideologue and propagandist to the extent that he was known in some circles as the “Pocket Goebbels” [REYNOLDS, E. B. (2004). PHIBUN SONGKHRAM AND THAI NATIONALISM IN THE FASCIST ERA. European Journal of East Asian Studies, 3(1), 99–134. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23615170].

Phibun in power projected the image of a “charismatic national savour”, presenting himself as the Thai people’s one great hope to lift the country out of the straitjacket of its weak and subordinate global position and achieve modernisation and a strong national position. And he built a form of personality cult for himself…pictures of himself were ubiquitous; awarding himself a raft of high offices and titles (including field marshal of the army). Another manifestation of this was how the Thai people celebrated Phibun’s birthday as the nation’s phunam (leader), venerated his auspicious birth-colour (green) and his birth sign, etc (Reynolds). Phibun even named a province after himself, comprising Cambodian territory wrestled from the French.

”Thaification”, Phibun’s territorial expansion ambitions: Was Griffin’s core “palingenetic myth” an element of Phibun’s political ideology for Thailand? Phibun and those other Thais who espoused nationalist sentiments subscribed to a genuine belief in Thai exceptionalism which derived from the pride of Siam having been the only state in Southeast Asia to have retained its independence in the wave of European colonisation of the region, an exceptionalism which Thais presented as a heroic tale in promoting nationalism. The Thai situation seems however to lack a homegrown urban myth in which the phoenix of national revival arises out of a state of decadence, instead the prevailing ideology had an irredentist component which has been called Pan-Thaiism. [‘Thaification: from ethnicity to nationality”, Marcus Tao Mox Lim, Identity Hunters, 05-Dec-2020, www.identityhunters.org].

Ditching “Siam” for “Thailand”: Phibun pursued an expansionist foreign policy by which he hoped to reunite ethnically-related peoples under a “greater Thai race-based nation” (Tao Mox Lim). The name change from Siam to Thailand in 1939 had a dual function for Phibun – an intent to modernise the country and the creation of a new national identity𝟝. The name “Thailand” (Prathet Thai) symbolised a departure from the multi-ethnic identity of Siam, a device to assimilate other ethnic minorities (including the Chinese, a very significant minority in Siam𝟞) into a new construct, a national (homogenised) Thai identity – what Tao Mox Lim calls a “reimagining of a ‘Thai race’”. This was all a precondition to Phibun’s irredentist aspirations, allowing him to stake a claim on lost territories, mainly in French Indochina (Reynolds).  

Under Phibun’s heavy authoritarian hand democratic rights and freedoms were restricted and the populace subjected to a series of cultural mandates dictating the modes of dress and behaviour to be adopted. The earlier pluralism of Thai society was squashed but the degree of coercive control over aspects of citizens’ lives never got close to the Orwellian “big brother” levels in totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and in some Cold War Eastern Block countries. Phibun did not secure a totalitarian hold over the Thai population during his six-year long regime𝟟 and Thailand didn’t experience the ideological journey of national destruction/rebirth process as prescribed by Griffin.

The unravelling of a SE Asian dictator: As autocratic as Phibun was in running the country, the elephant in the room was his wartime relationship with Japan. Having steered Thailand to a neutral stance in the world war, he switched positions, committing to an alliance with the Japanese under the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere in the hope of realising his long-held goal of Thai territorial expansion. Unfortunately, the alliance proved to be very unequal and heavily in Japan’s favour. The Japanese with its occupying forces in Thailand wouldn’t allow the Thai army to participate in its invasion of Burma and the Thais were forced to hand back the limited territorial concessions it received from France at the war’s end. By 1944 Phibun—with Japan’s military fortunes on the slide and seen as its increasingly unpopular collaborator—was forced out of the prime ministership in which some describe as a parliamentary coup masterminded by his rival Pridi [‘The Fall of the Phibun Government, 1944’, Benjamin A. Batson, www.thesiamsociety.org].

𝟙 as Mussolini summed up the function of totalitario…”all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state“

𝟚 having sold the masses on the notion of the regenerative national community utopia, the masses convinced of its efficacy must (unquestioningly) follow its creator, the (fascist) leader, sowing the seeds for the leadership cult to develop

𝟛 ample examples exist of leaders who were not fascists who cultivated a personality cult, eg, authoritarian populist Juan Peron and communist supremo Stalin

𝟜 it’s quite plausible for authoritarian regimes to practice even extreme fascist tactics, but this of itself doesn’t necessarily make the political system a fascist one

𝟝 the word “Thai” means “free” in the Tai tongue (thus “land of the free”) which resonates with the idea of the country never having been colonised

𝟞 Phibun’s imposition of the Central Thai language on all citizens promoted Thai ethnocentricity after 1939, which together with the introduction of harsh laws had the outcome of lessening the inordinate economic impact of the Chinese community (Reynolds)

𝟟 Phibun in his second stint as PM (1948–57) was preoccupied with “trying to reinvent himself as a democrat” (Reynolds) and surviving several coup attempts before his ultimate removal and exile to Japan