Small Arms, Romance, and Crime and Violence in Post WW I I Thai Society

Abstract

During World War II and the immediate postwar years, essentially because of the proliferation of modern small arms, law and order in Thai society were increasingly and seriously threatened. The spread of crime and violence in both urban and rural Thai society during the postwar years was phenomenal. This failure of law and order was well evidenced, among others, in the parliamentary debates towards the end of the War and during the postwar years. Such challenge to the state authority, and to the principles of law and order, was also strongly presence in the new, more or less unique, and highly popular postwar Thai literary genre--the "crime and violence" romance. The surge of crime and violence in both urban and rural Thailand during the 1950s became a pretext of the military coup led by Sarit in 1958 which eventually ushered in the infamous "Sarit Regime."