[Tlc] "Collective amnesia, a disowning of guilt"

Tue Feb 26 18:47:20 PST 2008

-----Original Message-----

OPINION / THE TRAUMA OF OCTOBER 6, 1976

The Bangkok Post, 26 February 2008

Collective amnesia, a disowning of guilt

Are some acts of atrocity so vicious that a society chooses to repress
and even forget them in order to carry on?

By CHAIWAT SATHA-ANAND

If there is one good thing about Samak Sundaravej becoming prime
minister of Thailand, it is that he has brought the shadow that has
cloaked Thai society into the light for all to ponder over.

Prime Minister Samak claimed in a CNN interview that on Oct 6, 1976
there was no massacre and insisted three times that ''just one died, no
deaths; one unlucky guy being beaten and being burnt in Sanam Luang.
Only one guy died that day.'' (Bangkok Post, Feb 11, 2008).

The interior minister under Tanin Kraivixien, on the other hand, told a
group of Thai students in France on June 4, 1977 that the Oct 6,
1976 violence led to 48 deaths, four of whom were burned to death.

The interior minister at the time was the very same Samak Sundaravej.

Nicholas Bennett, a member of the Coordinating Group for Religion in
Society, perhaps the first indigenous human rights organisation in
Thailand, estimated that some 300 people were killed and about 11,000
arrested on charges of being a threat to society. (Bangkok Post,
Postbag, Feb 14, 2008).

Amorn Amornrattananont, who submitted a petition demanding an
investigation into the tragedy on behalf of a group of activists and
relatives of the Oct 6, 1976 victims, maintained that no fewer than 41
people died that day (Bangkok Post, Feb 19, 2008). The official death
toll, however, put the number at 46, with hundreds more wounded and
about 3,000 arrested.

There are many ways to consider the Oct 6 incident. Some might want to
distinguish the lies from the facts, while others might want those
responsible for the atrocity, the direct perpetrators and those behind
them, to be held accountable. Here I am interested in why in 2008 Mr
Samak, the elected prime minister of Thailand and therefore representing
a large number of people _ and whose voice is certain to be heard by
many more _ insisted that only one person was killed, because he said he
saw only one killed on that day, which is at odds with both his own
account 31 years ago and the official figure.

If one proceeds on the assumption that the prime minister did not lie to
the world, then he must have truly believed in what he said and/or that
he has forgotten what actually took place.

The problem is he might not be the only one in this society who has
forgotten.

This article is an attempt to raise the question: What does such belief
and amnesia do to Thai society?

Put it another way, what would happen to Thai society if the stories of
brutality on the dawn of Oct 6, 1976 were falsely toned down, attributed
to luck, relegated to marginal space in the Thai collective memory, and
eventually placed on the road to being completely forgotten?

Perhaps one should begin by looking at other experiences of atrocities
elsewhere.

SILENCE

The partition of India in 1947 resulted in more than one million deaths
and some 16 million people were uprooted. The experience was so
unspeakable that even those who have made some compromises with this
past oftentimes choose not to talk about it.

Identifying the carnage and exodus as a period of madness, many victims
have chosen to locate the violence outside of normality and disown their
memories.

In an interview conducted in February 1997, 50 years after the incident,
Meenakshi Verma reported that a victim asked: ''Daughter, why talk about
evil days? In our religion it is prohibited to even utter or think about
evil acts. If you do so, it is like actually committing the acts. Why I
do not want to speak about partition? The reason is that the murderers
could not be caught, nor were they punished. People who killed and
looted were strangers. No one could have recognised them.''

In Generations of the Holocaust (1982), a victim who survived the Nazi
concentration camp wrote: ''After liberation the one desire was to
sleep, to forget and to be reborn. At first there was a wish to talk
incessantly about one's experiences: this gave way to silence, but
learning to be silent was not easy. When the past was no longer talked
about, it became unreal, a figment of one's imagination.''

These are the words of the victims, some of whom have chosen to be
silent, nurtured by flight into fantasy and some because others have
forgotten everything. Some might even cry silently and it has to be
silent because no one talks about it.

In 1996, the mother of Poranee Jullakrin, a second-year accountancy
student of Thammasat _ shot and killed on Oct 6, 1976, her body found
with her arms and legs all broken _ had this to say: ''My daughter was
cute and polite. Why had someone beaten her up like that? I have cried
all through the last 20 years. No one is responsible. Such a loss for
nothing, my daughter. I don't know whom to talk to, whom to complain to.
There was no one to go to. No one came to ask me... no one.''

But what have the perpetrators of the atrocity chosen? In his research
October 6 in the Memory of the Rightists: From Victory to Silence (Still
Victorious), 1976-2006, presented at Thammasat University in November
2007, the University of Wisconsin's noted historian Thongchai
Winichakul, himself one of the victims of the Oct 6 affair, pointed out
that due to its extreme political violence, generally the incident is
disowned in public as a part of a wounded history of modern Thailand.

Based on interviews with a number of perpetrators of violence, he has
found that most have chosen to be silent during the past 30 years. But
their silence results from different ways of seeing their own role in
relation to the brutality: some are still proud of their ''heroic
deeds''; some feel that they had been used as pawns; some maintain that
they had become scapegoats while those who orchestrated it continue to
live beyond reprisal; some insist that the present cannot be used to
judge the past and hence their actions then; and yet some others claim
to have forgotten what they did or said about the incident 30 years ago.

AMNESIA

There are three kinds of amnesia at work here. The victims' amnesia is a
psychological device essential for many trapped in the brutal past they
have experienced, in order to help them cope with the irreversibility of
their pain and to get them through life in the present.

But the perpetrators' amnesia is different. When intentional, it is a
social device designed to avoid responsibility for the atrocious acts of
the past so that they can continue in their present positions.

The third type of amnesia, however, is more important. It is the
collective amnesia of a society that deceives itself into believing that
nothing has happened _ or if it did, very few people were affected and
that it lacked any kind of intentionality, hence accountability is not
an issue.

Trivialising the atrocity in terms of the number of people killed or
cause(s) of the violence (''It began with a drunk policeman...'') paves
the way for collective amnesia. Aided by the demand to solve pressing
problems of the present, such as the rising cost of living, the
proliferation of drugs and crime, trivialisation works by relegating
past brutality to a marginal space reserved for the dustbin of
collective amnesia, which in turn allows a society to proceed without
feeling guilty for its past crimes.

But what will collective amnesia do to the future of that society?

FEELINGS OF GUILT

In the most recent research on the Oct 6, 1976 massacre mentioned above,
the researcher found that none among the perpetrators have accepted that
what they did then was wrong. None have felt guilty about the extreme
violence done to many innocents at dawn on that fateful day in front of
the majestic palace and the sacred temple in the heart of the capital.

When the Oct 6 incident returned to the spotlight with the recent
parliamentary debate, most people according to the latest Abac Poll
considered revision of the history of the Oct 6 massacre to be
irrelevant to their present lives (Bangkok Post, Feb 22, 2008).
Perhaps the state of amnesia about Oct 6 is not only among the
perpetrators but others in Thai society as well. In The Invisible
Holocaust and the Journey as Exodus (1999), Ashis Nandy wrote:
''History lies not by misrepresenting reality but by exiling emotions.''

If history is a mirror, then with emotions already exiled through
collective amnesia, the reflection in that mirror will be a distorted
portrait of the self, in this case _ a collective self that is void of
guilt feeling about the time when members of this society stood by and
allowed such killings of the innocents to take place in this land.

Among many human emotions, guilt is crucial precisely because it is
about something one has done in the past and knows deep down to be
wrong. When present, it helps one feel sorry for a past mistake. When
absent, it robs one of the reflexive feeling necessary to prevent
repetition of past mistakes.

A society that culturally drugs itself into collective amnesia void of
any guilt for its own past mistakes, risks living in the shadow of
another brutal atrocity lying in wait.

Chaiwat Satha-Anand is a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science,
Thammasat University and Senior Research Scholar, Thailand Research
Fund.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Michael Montesano <seamm at nus.edu.sg>
wrote:
>
>
> The Post takes these down so fast .... What did he say?
>
>  ________________________________
>  From: Erick White [mailto:edwhite65 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 7:31 AM
> To: Michael Montesano; Tyrell Haberkorn; Richard Ruth; arjun 
> subrahmanyan
> Subject: chaiwat on samak on Oct 6
>
>
>
>
> http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/26Feb2008_news18.php