The article focuses on the relationship between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Thailand before and after World War II. The author first seeks to show how this relationship developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries and what the salient characteristics of it were. The second part of the article describes the American attitude toward Thailand during the war and the importance of wartime events for the future of the Thai-American relationship. Finally, the closing section deals mainly with the postwar developments and the reasons for the emergence of the strategic partnership between Bangkok and Washington. Attention is paid to the motivations and expectations of both sides, as it relates to their cooperation. The aim of the article is mainly to show the changed nature of this bilateral relationship, resulting from World War II and events that followed closely in its wake. It also seeks to point out that the common struggle against communism, although important in later years, was neither the sole nor the prevalent reason for the newly emerging American interest in Thailand in the immediate postwar period.
Collaborationist Czechism took over a Reich legend about the Third Reich´s fight for Europe of everlasting peace and social reconciliation in the so-called civil war. After the triumph of the Nazi Germany, the Czech issue would have been to be solved. However, during the war intermezzo the Nazi propaganda pretended an interest in the Czech "folk culture" and its apparent creator - the Czech farmer. Simultaneously, the Protectorate promoted the German "folk culture" (mainly the national costume) and the Reich ethnography (e.g. the ethnographer Kerkman, an expert in folk costumes) as unbeatable models for the Czech ethnography. The study describes the resources of the Nazi interest in the "folk culture", the forms of the culture ́s promotion, as well as the causes of an alleged support to the ethnographic curiosities in the Protectorate. However, the "folk culture" and the ethnography that promoted this culture, worked as a support to Czechism, a Czech nation ́s anchor in its alleged roots, and as an expression of national nostalgia and sentiment. The folk costumes and traditions were revitalized. In comparison to the interwar trends of ethnography, both models of the interest in the "folk culture" gave an impression of a kind of anachronism. The models disparaged the Czech and Moravian people down to the position of an ethnographic group. The "folk culture" (especially folk costumes, folk songs) was also used by the exile propaganda around Edvard Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia, to encourage the exile Czechism, to induce a feeling of the Czech nation´s wholeness (in emigration and at home), and to manifest Czechism and Czechoslovakism in the public.