“Thailand and Cambodia have,” according to BBC News, “reached a ceasefire after a week of fighting along a disputed border …. Both countries said the truce was struck following talks between the two militaries.” The border between the two countries has been contested for years, and “nationalist sentiment” has continued to give rise to intermittent violence. In the past, elections have enkindled the ongoing, if sometimes dormant, dispute, and the latest skirmish comes with elections looming in Thailand.
The language of statism has a remarkable capacity for transforming a turf war between two gangs of thugs into an all-embracing conflict between two nations. The notion that the disputed land “belongs” to either state, that a government could possess rights in any legitimate sense, reveals the derisible assumption underlying the power of all ruling classes.
Because the state is simply systemized aggression, it cannot so much as exist without violating rights. Any claim of right it asserts, then, is an invasion, a trespass against true freedom, and — in the case of land — a theft. Through confrontations like the one between Thailand and Cambodia, crimes are ennobled as matters of national pride.
Politics is necessarily and inevitably divisive. Since political solutions are, perforce, coercive, they are not solutions at all, merely subjecting some to the will of others in violation of the latter group’s autonomy. The common man, the worker who goes about his life peacefully, producing and trading to fill his needs, should not at all identify his interests with those of his government. Appeals to patriotism are the gilding used by the political class to garner popular support for conflicts for power, stemming from power, with no mind to the woes of the productive class.
Rather than a specific implication of the same sort of pride one feels with regard to her familial group or community, patriotism stands opposed to the kinds of friendly ties that bind human beings. It asks Cambodians and Thai to hate one another because they stand on the opposite side of a line on a map, one that has been drawn arbitrarily by members of a ruling class that have no interest but to plunder the societies that exists within their own borders.
Besides its more obvious uses, war is of service to the elite in that it obscures the alignment of interests — across all national, cultural, religious and language divides — between all those who would use only nonviolent, voluntary means in their relations with others. Market anarchism, in advocating mutual respect for individuals’ rights and consensual exchange, does not prescribe a fixed or predetermined vision for society without the vulturine impositions of the state.
It asks only that the ruling class be forbidden from using the artifices of the legal structure, ultimately enforced at the point of a gun, to gain from the constructive achievements of others. Renouncing the hope that the state “could be made an instrument in the hands of the oppressed to alleviate their sufferings,” Lucy Parsons understood that governments are always a vehicle for “the machinations of the scheming few.” And those few do not stand in for the people of Thailand or Cambodia, for the land itself, for separate individuals, or for society at large.
The absurd nationalism at the heart of the Cambodia-Thailand clash, a needless waste of life for the elevation of governments — not people, displays the vile reality of statism. Thailand and Cambodia alike would be better off without their respective states, without a few malefactors exploiting people who could get along just fine without them.
Citations to this article:
- David D'Amato, The crimes of national pride, Seoul, Republic of Korea JoongAng Ilbo, 06/10/11
- David D'Amato, The crimes of national pride, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 05/03/11
As between Thailand and Cambodia, that is the wrong set of analytical tools to use. It really isn’t merely something at a politician/elite/state level that catches up Thais and Cambodians. The underlying reality has been obscured by layers of history, first colonial control and then post-colonial nation-state constructs. Before that, there were centuries of Thai tribal infiltration from the north overthrowing the Khmer Empire piecemeal and adopting its own forms (e.g. creating the Thai national dance tradition by raiding and carrying off the Khmer dance troupes, the way Japan built its mediaeval swordsmith tradition using kidnapped Koreans), so creating a Thai monarchy out of earlier Thai tribes – much more like what happened between the barbarians and the Western Roman Empire.
Cambodians still know this history and fear its resumption (just as the Thais attempted when the French protectorate of Cambodia was weak under Vichy, just before the Japanese attacks); on the other hand, Thais still have a sense almost of manifest destiny and an unfinished job, as the Turks had about Byzantium during the latter’s brief rally between the decline of the Seljuk Turks and the rise of the Ottoman Turks. So, whatever the political forms and entrenched vested interests, there is still a shapeless collision felt and driven at the popular level, and the constructs aren’t sweeping the two peoples up, they are tapping into the forces the peoples contain. Where there are Thai populations outside Thailand – as there were around Dien Bien Phu, providing a pro-French group of locals that would have prevented guerilla activity there as the French planned if they hadn’t promptly got swamped by Viet-Minh from elsewhere – this isn’t a background fact that is being over-ridden by nation-state constructs or whatever, it’s a transitional fact on the ground created by infiltration or counter-infiltration at the people and tribal level, to which the constructs are adapting or on which they are relying (the Viet-Minh were a nationalist group vis a vis the French, but a tribal one vis a vis tribes like those non-state Thais).
Think Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, or Arabs and Jews in the Palestinian Mandate going on Israel, where people made facts on the ground and other people changed them, sometimes back and forth over a prior history of centuries. There are indeed users of the situations and of their pressures, but they aren’t/weren’t just doing that for some other agenda and spending their strength on it, they are/were drawing their strength via it from the people – which is why the elites are/were into it.