Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. xx, 297 pp. (Figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-8234-1.
Contemporary societies deal with national atrocities in a variety of ways. Some confront their tragic past head on, while others let it fester, unresolved. The Thai state, like many nations, takes the latter road: it has actively tried to control the narrative of tragedies like the October 6, 1976 massacre through information suppression, censorship, and marginalization of critical voices. What the society is left with, after more than four decades, is a foggy and illusive public memory of this traumatic past.
Making sense of the silence surrounding the October 6, 1976 massacre in Thai history is the mission embarked on by one of the country’s most renowned historians, Thongchai Winichakul, in his latest book, Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok. Writing from a deeply personal and activist perspective, Moments of Silence provides a reflective and critical analysis of the memories of that massacre—one of the most tragic yet also obscure atrocities in contemporary Thai history. Winichakul argues that Thais are primed to both remember and forget the October 6 massacre: not able to either articulate it meaningfully or forget it entirely. This half-way stage between remembering and forgetting is what Winichakul calls throughout the book, “the unforgetting,” a condition of memory impasse. The October 6, 1976 massacre is unforgettable because it remains unsolved, while the memory of it is marked by silence and ambivalence.
This unforgetting of the massacre, Winichakul purports, has produced both negative and positive impacts on the country’s political development. On the one hand, Thais have been unable to move on from this atrocity as there has been little attempt to bring about justice and reconciliation. On the other hand, this massacre has also produced a new political grouping, the Octobrists, whose shared radical past has contributed to political change. But without closure to this tragic past, Thais are haunted by the unforgetting of the massacre. This haunting is manifested in art exhibitions, films, protests, remembrance ceremonies, tactics used to intimidate political opposition, and even in social media memes. Each time the massacre is revoked as a symbol of resistance and violence, the unforgetting of this painful past resurfaces.
Moments of Silence serves as an important empirical examination of the October 6 massacre, the Thai state’s efforts to silence the tragedy, and its subsequent commemoration movement led by Winichakul himself. The strength of this book lies in the author’s critical analysis of the concept of silence, which he perceives as having a dual normative importance. Silence is bad when it is forcibly exercised by an authoritarian state to coerce public quiescence surrounding an atrocity. Being silenced in this way makes it easier for the Thai state to sweep the tragedy under the rug, hamper activists’ efforts to fight for truth and justice, and exhaust the public from trying to keep its memory alive. The silencing of the memory of the October 1976 massacre, often under the cloak of reconciliation and national unity, has enabled the country’s autocratic elites to commit further atrocities, as exemplified by the 1992 Black May, the 2010 Bloody May, and 2020 state brutalities against youth-led pro-democracy protesters.
A good silence, argues Winichakul, is used to combat forgetting. This form of voluntary silence is an important way ordinary people fight to keep memories of tragedies alive. It is also a Buddhist approach to dealing with trauma, which focuses on forgiveness, as opposed to demanding truth and closure. In examining the different aspects of silence, the author presents extraordinary accounts of the massacre from the perpetrators’ perspectives, most of whom denied being involved in the killing. They too engaged in the practice of keeping silent about the massacre to suppress their bitter past. The bitterness did not so much stem from remorse; they remain triumphant about their role in history. Rather, they felt bitter about being misunderstood and their actions being taken out of context.
Studying silence is analytically difficult and this is where the book faces its greatest challenge. Silence researchers are often criticized for being speculative in their research methods, attempting to interpret and extrapolate what is unsaid (Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim, eds., Qualitative Studies of Silence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). As Kawabata and Gastaldo note (Makie Kawabata and Denise Gastaldo, “The Less Said, the Better: Interpreting Silence in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 14, no. 4 [2015]), silence is an important form of communication, particularly in non-Western societies, but remains under studied because of biases in qualitative research that emphasizes demonstrating evidence and findings validation. There is a missed opportunity here to engage more in-depth theoretically and methodologically with the silence study literature to examine silence as a form of expressive/repressive political communication within conflict studies.
Aim Sinpeng
The University of Sydney, Sydney