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The Historical Truth

Acharn Thongchai Winichakul was butchering more sacred cows this week at the opening of Thammasat University’s Southeast Asian Studies Institute, as reported on this website.  

A parochial focus on a ‘royal nationalism’ to the neglect of neighbouring cultures and societies not only makes for some appalling history teaching in the Thai education system, he argued, but also distorts the Thais’ view of themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the world.  From it flow such comforting fictions as this thing called Thainess, where you have to be it to get it.  So only Thais can understand Thais and the rest of the world is automatically inferior because they can’t.

Let me here extend Acharn Thongchai’s view and point out that this blinkered view of history not only poisons the way Thai history is taught.  It infects the teaching of history in general.

In an idle moment, I once made the mistake of looking through a Thai university textbook on Modern European History, one of those books whose sales, if you subtract the copies bought by students for whom it is required reading for the author’s history course, must be close to zero.  The chapter on the Spanish Civil War was illuminating.

This was partly because there was such a chapter.  My recent totally unscientific survey of a handful of Thai university graduates that asked ‘Who won the Spanish Civil War?’ revealed that nobody knew, mainly because they didn’t know there had ever been any such war.

The textbook explained that in this conflict, Side A comprised republicans, socialists, anarchists and communists, and were opposed by Side B, the nationalists, led by Franco with Hitler and Mussolini in strong supporting roles. 

One of the major objectives of the chapter was proving that Side A were the baddies (well, they included the communists, didn’t they?), whereas the good guys on Side B supported the monarchy, religion and nation, and even the dullest Thai undergraduate can figure out what that reminds you of.

Now one cannot expect an undergraduate chapter to capture all the nuances that you will find in the tomes of Hugh Thomas and Antony Beevor and the like.  Or even in the Wikipedia pages on the subject.  But one might expect more than an account that reduces it to the dimensions of a football match between ‘our lads’ and ‘them other buggers’.

But this gross oversimplification of one of the most complex struggles of modern times conforms exactly to the ‘good people/bad people’ view of society that is regularly expounded by many sections of Thai society, especially those toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum.

I also recall a university history teacher who, without any prior experience or present enthusiasm, found herself responsible for courses on South Asian history.  She was comfortable with the ancient stuff about Ashoka and Buddhism, but started losing the plot when the narrative got to independence and the Indo-Pakistani wars.

Finding next to nothing in the university library, she’d had the bright idea of asking for help from the Indian and Pakistani embassies, who’d happily provided reams of material.  She was now completely at a loss.  The two sources seemed to be telling completely different stories; at times they blatantly contradicted each other.

She thought she must be misunderstanding the English, which is why I was consulted.  When I started talking about questions of interpretation, selection and bared-faced propaganda, her mouth was gaping.  It was if historiography had never been invented.

History, as she had been taught and had been teaching for thirty or so years, was simply a matter of imparting the most important facts and grading students on their memory of these.  How could there be doubt about facts?  Or even disagreement about which were important?  This was totally unlike Thai history, she pointed out, where everyone knows what happened and who the important players were.

Her faith in the unambiguous and incontestable truths of Thai history was unshakable, and as a non-Thai, I was of course automatically incapable of understanding why this was so.  But with the help of the competing propaganda from the Indian and Pakistani cultural attaches, I was able to extract a grudging acceptance that modern South Asian history didn’t seem to be based on such a terra firma.

So when you teach your students, perhaps you will have to present alternative and even conflicting interpretations of events, I suggested.  She sighed.  No, she would have to make some more or less arbitrary decisions about who was right and who was wrong so that she could assemble a proper syllabus of facts.  Anything else would just be too confusing for the students.

 

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