Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok by Thongchai Winichakul (review)

Long before I knew anything about Thailand or the horrific violence perpetrated by right-wing thugs and state actors against Thammasat University students in Bangkok on 6 October 1976, I had been aware of the photo of the Chair Guy from an unlikely source: American youth culture of the 1980s. The iconic image shows a rightist criminal using a folding chair to batter the lifeless body of a student swinging from a tree while a gleeful crowd of boys and men cheered him on. The photo adorned the cover of the 1980 EP Holiday in Cambodia by the California hardcore punk band the Dead Kennedys. I loved the angry music but hated the cover image. To this day, the perpetrator and the victim captured in Neal Ulevich’s Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph remain unidentified. The haunting anonymity of perpetrator and victim not only continues to surround this single act of barbarism but also much of the 1976 massacre. Now, one of the country’s most famous historians who was a student leader during those traumatic events has written a book on the massacre and its legacy. The result is a study that is both good history and a wrenching personal story. Writing Moments of Silence has been, as the author writes, one of his life’s missions, and his reckoning with the atrocity that consumed many of his friends has shadowed his professional and private life.

The book is not a history of the events of the mid-1970s that drowned a brief flourishing of Thai democracy in blood—one sandwiched between long periods of military dictatorship. Instead, Thongchai writes about the silence that has surrounded and shaped the memory of the event. The silence, as the author writes, is complex and is not simply a forgetting or disavowal of brutality in a supposedly peaceful society. The silence is active, akin to a haunting, and one that has been shaped by the country’s “chronopolitics” (p. 15)—a term borrowed from the historian Carol Gluck that means changing political contexts and their discursive conditions. The result is what Thongchai terms the event’s “unforgetting” as an inability to remember or forget the trauma.

Thongchai writes that the wave of memory studies and scholarship that flowered around the world in the 1990s inspired him to think about his experiences and Thailand in the 1970s. The field of memory studies and how it is useful for the author’s mission is the subject of the book’s first chapter. The second through sixth chapters are chronological, and they explain the various political contexts; of initial memories of the events in the first two years afterwards, then the long period of silence from 1978 until a breakthrough in 1996. The second chapter briefly describes the events of the day, beginning with the rocket-propelled bomb attack on the university at 5:30 a.m. that signalled the beginning of the killings. This chapter also explains the Cold War context of the massacre. The victories of communist armies in Indochina in 1975 created near hysteria among the Thai elite—in the military and civilian bureaucracies, in businesses and in the palace—that their country would be the next to fall to communism. The four to five thousand people at Thammasat that early October—who gathered to protest peacefully against the late September return of one of the dictators toppled by an October 1973 uprising—became the outlet for their rage and fear, whipped up by rabid anti-communist propaganda. The chapter then asks a series of still unanswered questions that are revisited throughout the book since they inform the unforgetting over the following forty years. Who ordered the siege of the university? Was it planned long in advance of that early October day? Who were the victims? The biggest question, which Thongchai has referred to here and elsewhere as the elephant in...