“For this no-confidence debate, don’t blink! I will shift the blame. We will battle it out on the truth, but you will need to be patient. We didn’t intend to kill protesters. We did not use the force of the police and soldiers to disperse the protest, but they died as they ran into [bullets],”

So said Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban at a recent Democrat Party meeting with the title “Principles of the Democrats”.

Except he didn’t say the bit about ‘bullets’. There is no word in the Thai original remotely corresponding to that. It has to be ‘understood’, say the pundits, since in the Thai, the verb (actually a string of verbs) has no overt object.

And if something’s not there, different people may arrive at different ‘understandings’ of what is missing. A number of Thai speakers (with no great love of Thep Thaug atallatall) think that ‘bullets’ is a far-fetched construction. They say it is more likely that the missing object is something from earlier in the sentence (a common reason for omitting something to avoid unnecessary repetition). The obvious candidates would be ‘police and soldiers’ or ‘us’ – either way, it’s a reference to the government side. So the last sentence would mean something like ‘but they died because they ran at us [the government side represented by police and soldiers]’.

But even if we remove the contentious reading of ‘bullets’, the statement is a paragon of Thai political thinking. The Democrat Party must be congratulated for expounding so clearly the principles not only of their own party, but of virtually all politicians.

First, note the emphasis on shifting the blame. This is the hallmark of any Thai politician worth his salt. It doesn’t matter much if you do wrong, just as long as you can avoid being blamed for doing wrong. All this fuss about ‘face’ can be reduced to a determination not to accept blame.

This is in fact a common feature of Thai society. Or at least Thai male society.

The traffic was jammed solid at a level crossing. The bell dinged and the lights flashed for a long, long time, but that didn’t stop a taxi from insisting on inching forward. The boom came down anyway, putting a dent in his roof and his passenger into a fit.

The car in front hadn’t moved. The crossing official hadn’t waited for him to get out of the way. Trains shouldn’t be crossing the road at this time of day. That red light way down there had been on too long. It was an impressive sequence of excuses that the taxi driver came out with.

But at no point did he accept that any of this was his fault. He was as blameless as he was temporarily taxi-less.

Now the truly superior Thai politician acts as if there could be no possibility whatsoever of being blamed for anything. The Prime Minister has this teflon quality. Deputy PM Suthep is a bit more rough and ready (and probably has a lot more to be rough and ready about). The fact that he keeps trying to ‘explain’ things only leads to the conclusion that there must be something to explain.

Note next the reference to ‘truth’. This, as Sir Humphrey Appleby found, is an extremely difficult concept for a politician to grasp. It normally means ‘whatever we can persuade people to believe.’ And any similarity to the facts on the ground is entirely coincidental.

The crux of the political polarization in this country is the existence of two quite distinct red and yellow narratives or story-lines. Both tend to float off away from the facts and in the direction of myth. One claims the government killed everybody and the other that the government killed no one. And each narrative is, in the eyes of its adherents, ‘the truth’, as is proved by the relentlessly one-sided propaganda that each side feeds itself.

And finally, since not even Suthep can deny that bullets were flying round last April and May and a fair few were coming out of gun barrels owned and operated by the military, we have to apportion blame. Onto someone other than ourselves, of course. And we have here a classic ‘blame the victim’ ploy.

If women earn less than men and don’t win promotions, it’s because they are lazy, emotional or distracted by family responsibilities.

If students fail exams, it’s because they didn’t revise hard enough.

If people fall into a debt trap, it’s because of their feckless spending habits.

And if protestors (and media people and medics) get killed, then it’s because their reckless actions gave us no alternative, yeronner.

Oh and by the way, and if you don’t like these columns, it’s because you don’t know how to read them properly.