A very good article about remembering October -76

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Bamboo Grove
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A very good article about remembering October -76

Post by Bamboo Grove »

A very good artcicle about the happenings in October -76.
Memories are the first victim of 'happiness'

October is here. Along with the monsoon and beclouded mood, the month has always been marked by the political remembrance whose toxic vapour still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth even of those who didn't live through it.

Every year, the events of Oct 14, 1973 and Oct 6, 1976 — the first a transient victory, the latter a pure horror movie — are dusted off and memorialised. The mood is often solemn, the number of deaths questioned (certainly more than one student died in 1976, as opposed to what the late Samak Sundaravej insisted on CNN), and catchy axioms such as "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it" or "remember your history or someone rewrites it for you" are tossed about in seminars — they sound banal, but banality contains truth, and truth, after four decades, is still vaporous, ethereal, or swept under the rug like dead cockroaches.

The tranquiliser of forgetting is more soothing than the hard drug of remembering. Will Oct 14, 1973 and Oct 6, 1976 be commemorated this year? And in what we can learn from it? Will the rotting legacy of dictatorship be discussed? Will the most horrific chapter in our modern history — not because of the number of deaths, but because of the way hatred was institutionalised by the state to the extent that people laughed at mutilated corpses, as they did in the late morning after the massacre of students at Thammasat University on Oct 6, 1976 — be a reminder of odious fascism, black propaganda, Cold War senselessness, and worst of all, the corruption of humanity?
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http://bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/ ... -happiness
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STEVE G
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Re: A very good article about remembering October -76

Post by STEVE G »

As the comment below the article suggests, this is indeed a courageous article and it's good to see that not all journalists are completely cowered down.
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