It is so useful when you can bank on your country’s ignorance of its own history.

The beautiful young Nurse Edith Cavell was cruelly executed by firing squad by the barbarous Germans during World War I and the propaganda milked from her death helped impel the US into the war on the French and British side.

Except she was 2 months shy of 50, looked nowhere near as fetching as the propaganda pictures, and was guilty by her own admission of the crime she was charged with (helping allied prisoners of war escape).  She acted in full knowledge of the penalty she was risking and the British decided against appealing for a commutation of sentence which the Americans offered to support.  Not to mention the fact that the allied side executed 2 German nurses for exactly the same offence.

Back in May the newspapers were carrying triumphalist reminiscences on the 65^th anniversary of the Dambuster raids on Germany in the Second World War.  British technical know-how, combined with valiant derring-do, pulled off a master stroke that crippled the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr.

Except that 40% of the crews involved were killed or captured, one plane attacked the wrong dam (and missed), and most of the at least 1,650 people killed in the flooding caused by the breaching of the dams were allied prisoners of war or forced labourers mostly from the Soviet Union, including at least 526 women.  And German industrial output suffered only a minor hiccup and was back in full swing inside a couple of months.

On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol boats wantonly opened fire on the USS Maddox which was cruising peaceably in international waters, and repeated the unprovoked attack 2 days later.  This act of naked aggression helped President Lyndon Johnson to obtain from Congress the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave him carte blanche to pursue whatever military action he chose to protect American interests.  And he happened to choose what became the Vietnam War.

Except that the Maddox fired first on patrol boats that were probably out there because South Vietnamese commandos were raiding a nearby North Vietnamese island in an obvious violation of the Geneva Accords, and that the second attack never even happened.

And now our ignorance of Thailand’s history is threatening relations with Cambodia. 

We’ve seen this before.  In 2003, in the run up to Cambodian elections, actress Suvanant Kongying was falsely reported in the Cambodian press (possibly by a rival company to the Mistine cosmetics she was fronting for) as saying that Angkor Wat should be given back to Thailand.  ‘Given back’, because it had been stolen from Thailand by the Cambodians. 

The Khmers, whose schoolbooks seem to be as nationalistically one-sided as everyone else’s, got understandably irate about this.  But so did the Thais.  When the news was breaking I was told by 2 Thais who had the benefit of a university education, that Suvanant’s alleged statement was so obviously untrue it must have been fabricated.  I asked what they meant.  Cambodia couldn’t have ‘stolen’ Angkor Wat from Thailand, they explained, because Thailand had never occupied it.

I responded that my understanding of WWII history was that Thailand had exploited the Japanese victory over French colonial forces to march in and occupy part of Cambodia, including Angkor Wat, and Thai forces had been withdrawn only when the Japanese surrendered in 1946.  So Thailand had occupied Angkor Wat, and within living memory (and had sacked it more than once in more distant history).

I got a very pained look in return.  Either this friendly farang is making up slanders for no obvious personal gain, or Thai society has carefully structured a dangerous ignorance among its educated elite.  I managed to produce the evidence to show them where the truth lay.

And we’re here again.  Being a clever clogs, I pointed out to some Thais that discussions in the Thai press about the Preah Vihear case had subtly shifted the discourse.  Early on, the reports called it a ‘Khmer’ temple.  That’s now changed, even in sympathetic pieces, and it’s often referred to as a ‘Hindu’ temple.  I interpreted this as an attempt to frame the debate in a pro-Thai way.

Ah, no, I have been told.  Preah Vihear, like Angkor Wat and all those other ‘Khmer’ temples, aren’t really Khmer or Cambodian.  They were built by an entirely different people called the Khom, who unfortunately are no longer with us and have been replaced by a people who call themselves Cambodians and lay spurious claim to someone else’s heritage.  Trouble is, it’s only Thai history that seems to know about these Khom.

If you swallow the complete nationalist rhetoric on this, you might be inclined to quote Luang Vichit Vadhakan’s contention that modern Cambodians are in fact 90% Thai.  I mean, just look at the vocabulary they’ve got that is really Thai, and the similarities of customs and traditions.  Where else could they have got all this from if not the superior culture next door?

And the myth goes on.  The Thais come from the Altai mountains, Thai kings performed miraculous deeds (the more miraculous the farther you go back) and the Ramkhamhaeng Stone testifies to a golden age that may be as valid as the Stone itself. 

Flanders and Swan years ago wrote a Song of Patriotic Prejudice, ‘calculated to offend practically everybody’.  The words include: ‘The English are moral, the English are good, and clever and modest and misunderstood’.

It was a joke.  Replace ‘English’ with any nationality you like.  It’s still a joke.