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View all search resultsIndonesia's history deserves dialogue, not dogma
Declaring a single state-approved historical narrative will naturally marginalize and silence alternative perspectives.
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Culture Minister Fadli Zon (center), accompanied by his deputy Giring Ganesha (top), delivers a presentation during a working meeting with House of Representatives Commission X in Senayan, Jakarta, on May 26. The meeting was centered on the ministry’s plan to rewrite the nation's history. (Antara/Dhemas Reviyanto)
T
he Culture Ministry is in the process of revising the National History of Indonesia (SNI) to strengthen Indonesia’s national identity. Since its announcement, the initiative has been criticized by academics and activists, particularly in relation to narratives of Indonesia’s many historical instances of human rights violations.
This initiative deserves public scrutiny, as history is not only an instrument for telling the truth but also for control and manipulation.
George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 is relevant to this context. In Orwell’s story, the ruling Party has a slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.” The main character, Winston Smith, is an employee at the Ministry of Truth, where his primary job is to revise every record to conform to the Party’s narratives. In these settings, truth belongs to whatever the state says.
Orwell’s dystopian world is not only fiction. In How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley provides examples of how an authoritarian regime manipulates history to construct a truth, fabricate a glorious past and erase inconvenient realities.
Fascist regimes, such as those led by Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Nazi Germany, create a mythical past through historical altercation to harness the emotion of nostalgia and use it to validate their authority.
Another example is the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. It was a crusade against the collective memory of a nation by destroying historical relics, literature and knowledge to make way for a single narrative driven by the party.
These three cases represent extreme examples of historical manipulation. Indonesia is not heading in that direction, nor should it.
