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Always interesting to read how something very difficult was done very well. Understanding the West's true and purported motivations, bending their own culture -
by ahartmetz 2mo ago
Always interesting to read how something very difficult was done very well. Understanding the West's true and purported motivations, bending their own culture - choosing what to adopt or not and how - without breaking, ceding some land, and it all working out in the end. Quite remarkable.
There's a lot of stuff there that needed to succeed in several different ways (technical, local population, foreign image) to work, and it did.
- fwipsy 2mo ago> it all working out in the end This seems a little too glib to me. Certainly Siam was a success in relative terms, but it seems to me they still adopted Western culture partly under duress. I suppose it's academic at this point, but I wonder how quickly they would have chosen to assimilate without the imminent threat of colonization.
- ahartmetz 2mo agoOh for sure, the success if you want to call it that was to successfully implement the least bad option. Though it does seem that the king saw some good in Western culture, so at least from his POV it was presumably not all about losing their culture, but partially also an improvement. What I find admirable is managing this mess of grey areas.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]