ABSTRACT
In the decades after the Second World War, it was virtually de rigueur for any political initiative or plan in much of Southeast Asia to adopt the epithet of 'revolutionary'. No doubt this was partly due to the fact that anticolonial politics involved in its very nature opposition and upheaval; it also reflected the fact that the challenges of modernization and development that the region faced necessitated deep-rooted change - social, political or cultural - not mere 'reform'. The inevitable consequence of this rhetorical tendency, however, was that the ideologies supporting regimes that were conservative in tendency, such as that of Ngo Dinh Diem, also described themselves as 'revolutionary'. This was even true of the frankly patriarchal and traditionalist regime of Field-Marshal Sarit Thanarat in Thailand in the period 1957-1963, even though the dominant post-war political trends of Thailand - like those in the Malayan region - had always been deliberately insulated from the revolutionary politics of the surrounding regions.
