That’s it with Thai schooling, isn’t it? 

‘A Peace to End All Peace’, David Fromkin’s magisterial account of how the modern Middle East was created from the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire before, during and after the First World War, has recently been re-published 20 years after the original version came out.  And while I’m telling people what a cracking good read it is, the comment I almost invariably get from Thais is:

What does the title mean?

Now the subtitle of the book is ‘Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922’, but that won’t help the average product of the Thai education system, since their familiarity with the iconic dates of modern history is confused by the differences between the Buddhist Era and Christian Era counting systems.  So they are unlikely to see ‘1914’ and immediately think ‘kick-off time for World War One’.

Of course for Thailand, or Siam as it then was, (and for the US, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and other more important belligerents), their participation in this war started much later, because they first had to make sure whose side was going to win. 

Despite having spent the previous decade or two fighting off the French in Indochina (and in the Chao Phraya off the Grand Palace), Siam carefully plumped for the Entente team in 1917 and sent 1300 volunteers to France.  In a war where the British lost over 19,000 dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.  The word ‘tokenism’ springs to mind.

The Siamese troops arrived in 1918, just in time to have a score or so killed before curtain down, hence that monument on Sanam Luang.  But their presence did allow the Thai elite to take a seat as victors at the Versailles Peace Conference and extract maximum benefits for the country.

Ah, the word ‘peace’ has made an appearance and we can now move on to the explanation of the book’s title. 

Now, among all the other things where the Thai education system leaves their students in ignorance is the most common catch phrase of the time to describe WWI – ‘the war to end all wars’.

They couldn’t call it World War One, you see, because World War Two hadn’t been planned yet and until there’s a series, you don’t use ‘one’ with the only example around.  So despite innumerable sequels, the original ‘Godfather’ film was never called ‘Godfather 1’.  (Though I do note the occasional, obviously prescient reference to Pope Paul I.)

Not that anybody really believed that WWI would put an end to war.  Lloyd George cynically noted that WWI, like the next war, was a war to end war, but then again he was already planning wars all over the place.

(Note to any Thai student still with us:  Lloyd George was the British Prime Minister for most of WWI.)  (Further note:  no, Lloyd was not his first name – that was David.)

Nor was Fromkin the first to coin the ironic ‘Peace to End All Peace’ to parody the cocked up peace negotiations that ended WWI, which, among other things, nurtured the emergence of a vengeful right-wing in Germany that was spoiling for WW2.  This phrase was already in circulation during the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.  (It is not known whether the Siamese delegation had any hand in concocting this phrase, or in spreading it.  Or indeed, in understanding what it might mean.)

And the book?  Well, it’s surprisingly similar to reading today’s newspapers.  In the space of 2 years, elite-instigated uprisings, co-opted uprisings and some genuinely popular uprisings broke out all through an area of the world where the British had been in control and had convinced themselves that the local populations were quite happy to be ‘protected’ by the British rather than run things themselves. 

The Egyptians had the presumption to expect Britain to honour its war-time promises of self-rule and staged protests when it didn’t happen.  The Young Turks coalesced round Kemal’s leadership against both the victorious Allies and their nominal ruler in Constantinople and whopped anybody who came close.  The Arabs of Arabia baulked at the protégé foisted on them by Britain.  The stooge that the British put up in Syria to oppose France turned round and struck at Britain.  There were riots in Mesopotamia at British attempts to forge a country called Iraq.  Afghanistan collapsed into the Third Afghan War.  And in the middle of all this, the British pushed on with the Balfour Declaration and encouraged Zionism in the belief that the inhabitants of Palestine would happily go along.

Again and again, this sorry statecraft was motivated by farcical ‘intelligence’ based on such beliefs that Arabs are incapable of ever speaking the truth (but no matter, we have a man in Cairo who can work out what they really mean), that the Turks are a ‘decadent race’ so best arm the Greeks against them, and a schizophrenic mix of doctrinaire Zionism and visceral anti-Semitism.  And all the troubles must have been instigated by one arch-enemy, which for a while was France, or pan-Islam, or maybe Standard Oil, but was eventually properly identified as newly Bolshevik Russia.

And overriding the lot was an utter contempt for the peoples they were dealing with.  Churchill never got to use poison gas in Mesopotamia but his memo said ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’.  In this he was merely following the British Manual of Military Law that the rules of war ‘do not apply in wars with uncivilized States and tribes’.

Just like drones. 

So the book reads unnervingly like a prequel to the Arab Spring.

(Note to Thai students:  The Arab Spring was a series of …  Oh never mind.)