No, I actually worked in Cambodia alongside Khmer folks (as well as working in a bunch of co-working spaces elsewhere in the region). And sure, they were probab

No, I actually worked in Cambodia alongside Khmer folks (as well as working in a bunch of co-working spaces elsewhere in the region). And sure, they were probably lying to me about things (but that's part of the difference I found - the truth is less important than in the West [0]) And yes, you could probably get a long jail sentence in Cambodia for publicly criticising Hun Sen. The thing I found interesting is that that's a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that they're a very authoritarian culture who consider it very rude (our best approximation of the emotion) when people criticise leaders. At least that was the conclusion I came to during my time there. As you say, I'm a tourist so what do I know? I do find it fascinating that we have such a resistance to understanding that different people have different attitudes to the world and different ways of thinking about it. [0] I moved to Berlin a few years later, and the difference was dramatic: Berliners have a reputation for being rudely abrupt even amongst Germans. They do not sugar-coat anything lol.