War is pretty weird, is my takeaway from the summer. I have absolutely no useful or original reflections on the nature of modern war, but it was odd and interesting to see other people’s reflections come into fine focus as I watched (from the permanently attached “expat” armchair under my butt) the Thai and Cambodian armies fight to secure land they claimed was theirs to begin with.
War is weird because you’re simultaneously following every single thing that’s happening but also have no idea what’s going on. Early in the morning of the 24th of July, after months of diplomatic and military tension finally exploded, Facebook, Telegram, and the office group chats were suddenly and continuously flooded with flashes of information, videos, and photographs. The rapidly deteriorating situation on the border was liveblogged to the residents of Phnom Penh. A lot of this information was fake, some of it almost cartoonishly so. This, of course, did not stop people from believing it. There’s a quote in White Noise: “in a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.”
War is weird because it can feel a bit like it’s not happening while also being the only thing happening. Phnom Penh is quite far from the Thai border, about 6-8 hours in a car from the conflict zone, or maybe 10 minutes in a Thai F-16. As a result, the war feels almost like it’s happening in your phone. Things feel like they ought to change, but of course they don’t. The city looks exactly like it did the day before the war started. Meanwhile, no one outside your community in Cambodia seems to have any idea the war is even happening. Neither the university theoretically entrusted with your care, nor the majority of your friends and family give any indication that the rapidly escalating border spat has reached their radar, adding to the sense that what’s currently happening isn’t actually. In between videos of shells being fired from roadsides, the advocacy team deliberates their group coffee order, exactly as they do every day. I think I got a passionfruit soda.
War is also weird because people get weird about it. Everybody hates what’s happening (almost), but disagrees about why it’s happening and who is to blame. Unsurprisingly, it’s accompanied by a massive upswing of nationalism. Influencers are called out for not voicing their support for the country, Khmer-speakers get attacked in Bangkok, and all of a sudden you learn the expression “don’t Thai to me.” Sometimes you hear exactly what you’d expect to hear from the people you know, and sometimes you get takes which surprise you. Sometimes really lovely folk start to sound a whole lot like a racist uncle. You are also being weird about it, as you nod touristically and try to figure out if there is anything not impossibly inadequate that you can say to your friend whose family is currently fleeing Preah Vihear province.
War is weird because it doesn’t actually start or end. The French draw one set of maps in 1907. The ICJ makes a ruling in 1962. UNESCO accepts an application in 2008. Obviously this didn’t begin in July. Meanwhile, the elites of Thailand and Cambodia, anxiously awaiting ways to distract the citizenry from their corrupt antics, remain exactly where they were before the ceasefire (almost all of them, RIP Paetongtarn Shinawatra). Over 200,000 people have been displaced on either side of the border, and Cambodia’s already strained economy, newly hit by export tariffs, is about to struggle hard to find a way to integrate the Cambodian workers who have fled Thailand. The aftereffects will be long and terrible. The fighting has stopped, though, meaning that everyone outside the two countries can go back to not paying attention, and no doubt will continue to do so until the next time something snaps loud enough that it can’t be ignored.
Funnily enough, this isn’t even the first time this happened to me this year. All of this was more or less exactly what I saw and felt this past May, when India and Pakistan performed surgical strikes on the peace of mind of every South Asian on the planet. I suppose the weirdest thing about war, then, is how there’s always war. It’s just that sometimes all the weirdness is happening to people other than you.