Well, everyone wanted a new discourse on the Malayan Emergency, a week has past so here I go.
Here are some words which you may disagree with, and thus we may engage in colloquy at once. These words amount to an argumentation on my part relating to the subject of the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960.
A new discourse on the Malayan Emergency is not about glorifying heroes, as heroes, is a mutable and porous notion in a new Malaysia where old enemies are new friends contrariwise and vice-versa. It is a discourse in need of nuanced re-telling of experiences rather than moral taxonomies of good and evil.
A complex post-colonial conflict of the past should not be reanimated and restaged in the modern day so that we may pretend in the present, that we are our forefathers. We are not. We may resurrect the matter only to exhume its lessons, and not in its deeds.
There are several sticking points regarding the Malayan Emergency. The question of heroism, good deeds, and just causes are the least important of said collection of sticking points. In my unsolicited deferential opinion, when one moves beyond words, causes just, just gets you shot. In that way, better the crowd be shouting than faceless, silently, aiming.
There are no essentialist positions of History, and no essentialist experiences of the past, if there were, they would be untenable footing. History is written, then stored. It is as easy as, who among us can apprise everything about yesterday, about everyone, everywhere, in every way. Thucydides was born perhaps more, perhaps less, thirty years after the Peloponnesian war, and E. H. Carr was a great admirer of fishmongers.
There is an international dimension to the Malayan Emergency experience to consider, a point of contention often ignored and thus sheds no light on our conclusions today. In the pantheon of Counterinsurgencies (COIN), the case of the Malayan Emergency is considered Herculean, and a specimen for successful COIN, however a nuanced acknowledgement of the cost of the conflict (in all sense of the notion) places that status in question. At the moment, the academic literature is Short, the ‘COINdinistas’ are still at large, and the Hacks of the world are in pursuit.
How long have people argued over the merit of the Malayan Emergency? Since even before a shooting war broke-out in 1948 and has persisted since. We did not discover that novelty.
What are facts? Facts are Euclidean. Just ask some analysts of this post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-UMNO forever, post-OBOR, post-Hanslope, quantum computing world.
A grand market, of ideas and goods, and produce has a stench, wander the market for all its wonder, and enjoy rotting fish if you please.
MA.