It seems to me that no matter what goes wrong in this country the Thai people (not all of them of course) tend to immediately point the finger at their most hated neighbor, the Burmese. From the time that I have spent working in the public school system I see that this hatred stems from events that occurred nearly 300 years ago and it still taught in schools in quite a vicious manner.
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There were multiple wars between the Thais and Burmese even though neither country was called that at the time. They seemed to do a tit-for-tat back and forth of invasion on multiple occasions and I'm not going to pretend to know the details. During the occupation of the then capitol of Thailand the Burmese desecrated the religious sites of Ayutthaya including cutting the heads off of the Buddha statues at many of the temples. Obviously this is something that is going to upset the primarily Buddhist country and these atrocities are still focused upon heavily in schools when kids are in elementary (primary) school. While I did not understand what the teacher was saying that I was watching give this presentation to the children, I could tell that she was trying to instill a great sense of fear and/or hatred in their neighbors to the North-West.
In the several years that I have lived in Thailand I have seen all manner of things that go wrong in the country and the fingers almost always get pointed at the Burmese regardless of what the problem is.
I suppose this isn't so unusual because it seems that most countries have a neighbor that is the subject of their ire and my own home country is not an exception. Unemployment in the United States has been blamed on Mexico basically as long as I have been alive and I suspect this will continue long after I am dead.
Whether or not any of this is actually true doesn't really seem to matter but the xenophobia and sense of superiority over one's neighbors really doesn't help anyone now does it?
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At the beginning of every year from late Jan to around late March the air pollution levels in the North of Thailand are off the charts. Last year there were multiple days that the Air Quality Index (AQI) was the worst in the world and it was very noticeable. We basically can't see the sun at all for 3 months.
This problem is in many situation blamed almost entirely on the Burmese burning things and the winds blowing it into Thailand where it gets trapped by the mountainous regions of Chiang Mai. It is truly ignorant to listen to this propaganda though, because all one has to do is open your friggin eyes at night and you can see that it is in fact the Thai's that are burning everything and if you take a road trip to get away from Chiang Mai's air pollution to the East (great motorcycle roads there) you will see the same thing extend for hundreds of miles. This is the crop burning time of year and although this is technically illegal, the government is aware of the fact that there is nothing they can do about it since the poor farmers have no other way of clearing their fields for the next year's crops.
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I was up close and personal with this when I joined an outdoors running club and we would routinely encounter scorched earth in the jungles, some of which were actually currently on fire. It is right there for the locals to see, it is in their own communities, yet the popular consensus among a lot of Thais is that this is a problem intentional put upon them by their "evil neighbors to the west."
More recently, a resurgence of Covid has been happening in Thailand that I for one do not believe is actually real. Instead I believe it is the Prime Minister fabricating these numbers for the sake of having a reason to put a stop to the growing protests against his administration that is pulling in HUGE numbers in Bangkok and other cities such as Chiang Mai, where I live.
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The media in this country pretends (as many countries' media does) to be impartial, but they do everything in their power to blame this resurgence on Burmese migrant workers. There are a lot of migrant workers from Myanmar in Thailand because they will work for far lower wages and are generally considered more reliable. consequently, this opinion does not come from any prejudice of my own but rather from a friend who owns a construction firm that has said precisely that.
So I was talking to some of my Thai friends about Covid in separate chat windows and ALL of them blame the resurgence on the Burmese. Even the newspapers are doing the same thing. In a recent episode that may or may not have even happened, some people jumped the border from Myanmar into Thailand and bypassed quarantine - then traveled all over the country. However, if you dig a bit deeper beyond the mass media that is largely state controlled, you will find that these workers were actually Thai prostitutes working in Myanmar that didn't want to go through quarantine. Yet every newspaper will refer to them as migrant workers traveling from Burma - which I suppose isn't technically a lie but is very misleading.
I guess you could say that I find it is a bit depressing that whenever a country has any sort of difficulties that the government is able to convince the population that they themselves, and their government representatives are not to blame but rather, it is just the invading evil horde to the west that makes all of this happen.
I thought that maybe the average person was smart enough to not believe this bullhicky, but after my conversations with my Thai friends today I can say with some level of confidence that the government's propaganda actually works on the people. Unite everyone by creating a common enemy right? Whether or not that target is actually guilty of what they are accused of doesn't seem to matter.