Spending yet more time looking around in the US National Archives through the Online Public Access portal, I came across some other good examples of American Cold War propaganda.
This time it was aimed at Thailand, in an effort to protect the “land of the free” from becoming Communist.
“Communism or Freedom” – you take your pick.
“Communist governments train kids to be spies, so that they can watch over their parents and make sure that they never conceal any agricultural products that should be submitted to the central government.”
“Families that are happy and prosperous are the bedrock of the nation.”
So where do these evil people who want to destroy the foundation of the nation come from?
From “Red China.” And they had already occupied the area of Sipsongpanna (a region in southwestern China inhabited by Tai-language speakers).
“DANGER!”
On the one hand I want to laugh at these posters, which I think date from the 1950s, for being extreme. But then again, the world depicted in the first image did eventually come to be in neighboring Cambodia some 20 years after that poster was made.
I’ve heard that Saigon and Hue were originally Khmer territory? Can you run down some history about this in a next post?
Yea, if we go back in time, the area where Hue is today must have once been Cham territory, and the area where Saigon is today was once inhabited by Khmer. Supposedly it was called “Prey Nokor,” but I don’t know how we know that. “Nokor” means “city” and while there were “nokor” that weren’t really “cities” as we think of them now, there should have been “something” there that warranted that name (like a temple made of stone), but I don’t know what that was, and I’ve never heard of anything like that.
“Saigon” is not a Vietnamese term. It’s the transliteration of some local term. I’m not sure what. And yea, in the Mekong delta names like “Soc Trang” are clearly Khmer (soc = srok, a term for a polity or settlement in Khmer).