07/08/2026
To this day the ancient story is reserved to be resurrected for nationalist motives...but the new generation of Thai youth saw some similarities when there was a coup in 2021. Yes, time to get past the old narrative.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JY5YXsNFu/
Bencharat Chua is a Thai academic and human rights activist who has spent more than twenty-five years working along the Thailand–Myanmar border, studying displacement, nationalism, education, and the long psychological afterlife of conflict between the two countries. In this conversation, she traces how anti-Burmese sentiment in Thailand was never simply inherited naturally from the past, but deliberately cultivated through modern state-building projects: textbooks, television dramas, war films, political rhetoric, and school curricula repeating the same story again and again — that the Burmese destroyed Ayutthaya, looted its gold, burned its beauty to the ground, and humiliated the Thai kingdom.
Listen: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2026/5/14/episode-536-the-fire-next-door
She says this in "The Fire Next Door" while explaining how deeply that narrative still lives inside Thai consciousness. The destruction of Ayutthaya happened more than three centuries ago, yet generations of Thai students were raised inside a political mythology that keeps the wound permanently alive. Not only in classrooms, but in blockbuster historical films funded by the state, in television series portraying Burmese invaders as barbaric enemies, in nationalist storytelling that turns old imperial wars into emotional fuel for modern politics. The ruins of Ayutthaya remain standing as physical evidence of that memory, and around those ruins, an entire cultural imagination was built: civilized Thailand violated by the foreign aggressor next door.
What Bencharat is describing is larger than Thailand and Myanmar alone. It is the way states manufacture emotional history in order to shape the present. The past becomes a reservoir of grievance that can always be reopened when nationalism is needed, when borders harden, when migrants arrive, when fear must be redirected outward. And what makes her reflection so unsettling is that she is speaking as someone who watched those inherited narratives begin to crack after the 2021 coup, when young Thai activists suddenly saw Myanmar not as the ancient enemy from their textbooks, but as fellow human beings resisting military rule under impossible conditions. For a brief moment, centuries of propaganda collided with living reality. And reality proved harder to contain.
