Commies, kings, ISIS and a history of fear
He’s the world’s longestserving head of state, the only monarch born in the U.S. and a multi-billionaire painter, photographer and jazz saxophonist.
He’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, the 86-year-old King of Thailand, and he had much to say one day in 1963 that seems distinctly relevant to our current times, according to just-declassified U.S. government records held by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston and made available to the Daily News for the first time.
“You preach democracy as though it were a fixation,” he told the U.S. ambassador on March 25, 1963. “You want every country to be your kind of democracy.”
Michael V. Forrestal, a top National Security Council staff member, brought the chat to the attention of President Kennedy.
“I attach a memorandum of conversation between the King of Thailand and our Ambassador, Ken Young,” he writes Kennedy in a memo stamped “SECRET” on April 16, 1963. “It does not make for joyous reading.”
On March 25, Young had gone to see the king at his palace so he could bid farewell to our top military official in Thailand, and meet his successor.
The king, who was born in Cambridge, Mass., while his father was taking public health courses at Harvard, thanked the Americans for various civic and other actions by U.S. troops in Thailand.
The man who’d assumed the throne in 1946 then launched into an acidic critique of the world, Communist intentions and America that seems to speak to the world now, more than 50 years later.
For starters, substitute “Islamic extremists” for “communists” as he says the following, according to Young’s summary that places the king’s words in the first person though it isn’t actually a transcript:
“The communists are inflexibly convinced that the Free World is so enslaved and impoverished that it is their duty to liberate it. Nothing will change their minds.”
But they had to be taken seriously, the king said, be it Russian progress in space at the time, “a better standard of living (and) even cultural interests on the part of some communist countries.”
“Of course there are many things about communism that I do not like and that our people will never accept. Communism has two phases. In the first phase it is kill, kill, kill. In the second phase they enjoy prosperity.
“The whole business between the East and West is not a game. It is no joke. It is deadly serious,” he says. He then talks about us.
“We see grave difficulties in your system — confusion and turmoil, graft and corruption. You have interminable elections all the time. Your press is uncontrolled, and your Congressmen and newspapermen say things that hurt us very much.”
He goes on, “It is a good idea to choose friends, and nations, carefully. It is a good idea to have an accurate view of people who are not your friends. Sometimes you and we do not have an accurate view of how the communists are progressing or how they want to hurt us. They, of course, have wrong ideas about you and us.”
Now, consider the role of social media today, including its effective use by ISIS fighters and supporters and many other extremists.
Fifty-one years ago, the king says that our enemies “are turning to a new kind of warfare — the warfare of propaganda, culture and ideas. This is mental warfare. It is the most dangerous and difficult kind of all.”
“It’s more effective and more modern than the guerrilla warfare you talk about. If fighting were left to soldiers, we would not be in such difficulty. ”
“I respect you and I respect your soldiers because that kind of warfare is clear-cut. But today the other side is going to the minds of kings and people,” he says, with the ambassador parenthetically noting that the king then pointed to his own head.
“You must realize this change and you must find ways to do much better,” says the king. “We must do the same thing.”
The more things change. . . .
Long-ago talk of the new mental warfare