YOURSAY | History not a subject to glorify political victors

 

YOURSAY | ‘All the factual errors and distortions in our history textbooks are indeed shameful.’

COMMENT | Factual errors and half-truths in our history textbooks

Straight Citizen: Dear historian Ranjit Singh Malhi, thank you for writing this article.

In all honesty, I haven't felt so sick in the gut and in the heart from just reading an opinion piece for some time. To see the Indians and Chinese history in this beautiful country we call home being systematically and deliberately wiped off our history pages really brings grief to our hearts.

None of us ever denied the importance and the pre-eminence of the Malays in this country but certainly isn't there a place to objectively record how we developed as a nation together? We respectfully studied Sejarah Dunia in Form 4 back in my schooling days and learnt Islamic history without any qualms. We still had that semangat muhibbah back then.

I don't believe those who hold the pen are going to budge or even try to insert one or two more pages or even a few extra piecemeal sentences to give a balanced account of our history again. My genuine fear is all your objective observations will be just regarded as noise.

We all love Malaysia. It just hurts us that our citizenship in our beloved country is being diminished, and very soon, many of us will be regressively treated as pendatangs. God saves Malaysia.

GreenViper4010: Thank you Ranjit, for an illustrative, though sadly not surprising, tale of how this country's story, and our children's minds, are still being corrupted by the ‘ketuanan’ faction.

I thought that the first item in your "fact table" is very illustrative. When you point out that our history writers claim that the industrial revolution started in the 17th century... well, they probably knew (rightly) that it was sometime in the mid-1700s (no one would say the 1600s), however to our distinguished academicians, the 1700s were indeed the "seventeenth century", and not the eighteenth. This is a common error, and simply the result of our mediocre educational system, with poor maths training amongst other deficiencies.

Whereas the above "mistake" can be traced back more to ignorance rather than to outright malice, the same cannot be said about the omission of the role and presence of Hindu-Buddhist culture in early Malayan history and its enduring impact even today. The selective omission of historical facts (not fake news) to perpetuate ‘ketuanan’ myths (with unhealthy doses of self-justification and entitlement) is a betrayal of all Malaysians, Malays included.

Why do we still have such garbage after more than 60 years of Merdeka? Sadly, this rot will continue and perpetuate itself, given the "quality" of our political class, some of whom wish to return to Jawi as some sort of touchstone of our "bangsa" and civilisation.

Unfortunately, we know with whom this whole canard started. Shame.

Manjit Bhatia: Japanese nationalists backed by the oligarchs of the Liberal Democratic Party still whitewash Japan's history and its war crimes and brutal colonisation of countries in Southeast Asia. The fascist Chinese of mainland China, despite their criticisms of Japanese atrocities, have been doing the same with "their" history. I am sure in time the fascist Hindu nationalists of the BJP in India will do likewise to Indian history.

I do not mind historical revisionism if historical revisionists are open to public debates about their work. This happens mostly only in the West and in Western scholarship. Where biases are detected, they are critiqued, criticised and even condemned in voice and letters.

What these people are doing with their "interpretation" of Malaysia's history is not only its deliberate distortion of historical facts through totally dishonest practice but nullifying any possibility of anybody well-schooled to openly challenge not "Malaysian history" but "Malay history".

This, to me, is the hallmark of Malaysia - corrupt, racist, bigoted, consistently prone to being dishonest. It adds to the ongoing ruination of Malaysia's almost useless and laughable education system and its students since the late 1970s.

Apanakdikato: All the factual errors and distortions are indeed shameful. They reflect negatively on the educational background of the 18 "professors" who wrote these textbooks. Obviously, the books were written with a political agenda to falsely portray the "superiority" of a certain ethnic group.

By right, history is a subject to help us understand how and why people and societies behaved in certain ways, their consequences, and how we as a nation can learn from the past to move forward in the right direction. It is not to glorify the political victors.

Malaysia has been moving in the wrong direction in many ways in the last 60 years, as evident from the current deplorable state of the nation, partly because the wrong type of history is being taught in schools.

Students may view the current Malaysian history syllabus as only a requirement for passing exams, but parents are advised to educate their children through more wholesome references on local and world history available through the internet and history books published outside Malaysia.

It is hoped that Malaysia will be blessed one day with a competent and honest government, which will have the political will to build a nation free from racial and religious bias and correct all the errors of the past. Only then can Malaysia be gradually freed from all its current economic and political predicaments, and convince foreign investors to return.

Vijay47: Ranjit, I wish you had never written this expose for Malaysiakini.

Painstaking as must have been your analysis of the rubbish that passes off as school teaching material, it is equally painful for us to be reminded of the raving racist attitudes that have dominated the writing of Malaysian history, not that they are lacking elsewhere.

Minor errors of facts, like the confusion over “Lion of Malaya” and “Singa” can be forgiven, but never the deliberate distortion and falsification of facts for the continued subjugation of those the Malay elite seem eternally terrified of.

In our history textbooks, we again witness that Neanderthal attitude with a huge inferiority complex albatross on the shoulders, refusing to acknowledge the achievements and contributions by Indians and Chinese in the belief that this dog-in-the-manger mindset somehow enhances their own pathetic image.

I am sorry, Ranjit, but almost every line in your article is an unintended stab in the heart, so I shall not address any specific issue you have included here. I shall also prudently refrain from commenting on certain paragraphs on contributions towards the progress of the nation.

I recall that a history book on the establishment of Malaysia had no mention Tunku Abdul Rahman at all! For this, we can thank Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for another of his glorious boosts to Malaysian education. The small consolation is that he is condemned to live the karma of history. In the meantime, let us blame Tommy Thomas’ book for something or the other.

There may soon be a book to hold that astronaut Neil Armstrong was actually a Malay sailor from Pengkalan Chepa, Kota Bharu. After he single-handedly defeated the Siamese forces.

By the way, Ranjit, any idea when the next Dignity Congress is?

Corgito Ergo Sum: I am waiting for the writer’s history book which I think he had undertaken to write some time ago. It will be a gold standard I know for others to emulate.

To erase part of our multi-ethnic history is fascist, to say the least. But the tragedy of it all is that no one in power is bothered to tell the story of Malaysia as it should be. And the generation to come can’t be bothered. As long as they pass the exams, it’s fine.

PinkBear4371: I agreed. I appeal to Ranjit to start an open history book on Wikipedia. He just needs to propose the structure aligning to good pedagogy and I'm sure many experts with right moral compass will contribute to the content.

Let true democracy prevail with the help of technology, otherwise our nation-building narrative continued to be hijacked by the morally-corrupt few. - Mkini