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Comment by wraptile | Hacker News Reader

I'm living in Thailand and been following scam centers for years now. It's 100% the scam center fallout mixed with regional politics.

Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.

Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.

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Cambodian people are suffering, no doubt about it, but what you say about the surge in nationalism and entrenching his position is certainly true; the 'leadership' has only gotten stronger.

It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.

The history here is very clear. Hunsen (the current dictator) jumped ship during pol pots cleanse and came back with Vietnamese and got installed as a savior dictator. Cambodia never had freedom of press or education since then and Thailand "stole our culture" has been thought in school curriculum ever since. It's hard to feel anything but pitty towards Cambodians as resisting this amount of authoritarian brain wash is almost impossible.

What is making things worse is rest of the world abandoning Cambodia which justifies scam centers profits as there no other source of income. Cambodia is right next to relatively rich Thailand but has nothing to show - its easy to see how nationalism explodes in such conditions.

Partly true, but let's be clear about who is being indoctrinated about culture.

Khmer culture is basically an offshoot of the original Hindu, and then Buddhist culture from India. The language is the 'latin' of the region and based off sanskrit, and all the temples in the region are modeled on Hindu temples (representations of mount Meru).

Tai people came from SW China and colonized, if not assumed, this extant culture, and also of course intermingled and whatever.

So both populations share a deep and long history and are closely related.

Well said, I actually live on the border province Trat as an expat from Europe and Thai-Cambodian relationship in the real world is actually quite nice. We work and party together and share many aspects of cultural identity going way back as you correctly pointed out.

The bad blood is completely manufactured here and as someone who works in IT the power of information control has never been as apparent as it is today.

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