Don't hide the past

re: "Opening an old wound" (BP, Editorial, October 6, 2022) 

 Dear editor,

Since it epitomizes so perfectly much that continues to sicken Thailand in 2022, the ugly events of October 6, 1976 deserve far more notice, far more investigation, and far more truth speaking than has ever been permitted. It is almost as though someone, or a few someones, have skeletons they know to be so indefensibly unspeakable that they desperately want them locked away forever  in a dark closet along with the host of other shameful acts of decades.

Reading the Bangkok Post's timely editorial, my thoughts turned to the vision that King Chulalongkorn the Great, Rama V, had of the future of his nation, wherein "Siam will re-emerge as a much more prosperous kingdom." Those are the words of the great king when, in 1873, he moved to abolish what he described as the "severely oppressive" practice of prostration (Royal Siamese Government Gazette, 1873). Knowing that he understood that much reform, including reform of old cultural and moral values, was essential for a modern nation that wished to take a respected place in the world, it is hard to conceive of the great king passively sitting by while such evil as October 6, 1976 was committed against his people and their nation. Such having been committed by those in uniform and allied to the state, is it conceivable that such a great king would acquiesce in a complicity of silence to bury ugly truths lest the guilty be embarrassed as they so richly deserve to be?

Sadly, those who came after him rejected the wisdom of perhaps the greatest Thai king of them all. The result today is obvious: a nation retarded politically, socially, morally and economically for many, many decades. What went wrong? How did the Thai people come to be robbed of the envisioned prosperity they deserve and could so easily have attained? Why did those who came after refuse to follow in the wise footsteps of Thailand's great king? Did they simply give in to their own greedy indulgences with no regard for the welfare of the nation, or was there some deeper malignancy, wrapping itself in impenetrable veils of gaudy show, at work these many decades?

The festering wound of October 6, 1976 should be thoroughly opened up that truth seeking and speaking cleanse it to allow the too long denied national healing to begin. 

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on October 8, 2022, under the title "Don't hide the past" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2409911/massacre-questions