About the Author

Thongchai Winichakul is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

As Thongchai documents in his powerful and personal book Moments of Silence, more than 40 years later, much about the massacre remains unknown, from victims who are still unidentified to deeper and more dangerous questions about the exact role of the monarchy and the military. . . . [T]he monument to 6 October remains a significant marker of past state violence. This book, too, is a powerful study of how a violent past can haunt a society when left unaddressed.--David Hopkins "The Interpreter (24 July 2020)"

The book is the most thorough study of 6 October. It draws on the Thai and English language literature, supplemented by the author's own extensive interviews by many parties involved with the event. Yet, there are many still unanswered questions. . . . A new generation of university, and even high-school, students are learning about this event. The book's publication is therefore extraordinarily timely. This is a fascinating and important book, as well as a testament to those who lost their lives on that day. It will throw new light on 6 October, but will also spark debate about the relationship between memory and history.--Patrick Jory "Journal of the Siam Society, Vol. 108, Pt. 2 (2020)"

The silhouette at the top right of this achingly beautiful book cover recalls a famous photograph from the Thammasat massacre of Oct 6, 1976. The photo showed a dead man hung from a tree being beaten by a chair while a ring of people watch. The silhouette is deliberately ghostly. The incident is well-known but little known. . . . Thongchai argues that the incident is too cruel and too disruptive of the national narrative to be embraced as part of the history, either by the state or by many of its members. . . . This brilliant book arrives just as a new wave of student protesters has taken to the streets to oppose dictatorship, evidently aware of the parallels between their movement and the 1970s. For these brave men and women, this book can serve as both inspiration and warning.--Chris Baker "Bangkok Post"

The subject of Thongchai Winichakul's Moments of Silence is not so much what actually happened on 6 October, but the silence that followed. There has never been an official investigation, and a blanket amnesty issued two years after the event absolved all perpetrators from blame. Most school textbooks make no mention of it, and those that do gloss over it in just a few sentences. To this day, the event remains cloaked in mystery, poorly understood and often misremembered. Thongchai's revelatory memoir-cum-history charts a chronological journey through this silence, examining its causes, exploring its impact on individuals and exposing the toll it has taken on the collective psyche. . . . If Thailand ever reconciles with or integrates this grim chapter into the national history and collective psyche, it will be because of brave books like Moments of Silence.--Emma Larkin, author of 'Finding George Orwell in Burma' "Mekong Review, 5:3"

After reading Moments of Silence, no one should ever again refuse scholars the right to fuse emotion with analysis in reflecting on tragic events they have witnessed. At once a riveting memoir, a careful scholarly assessment, a yearning for conversations never consummated, and an act of sustained political courage tempered with compassionate fairness, the book exposes the violence that the continuing silence about the events of 1976 has inflicted on the Thai body politic. That silence, the norms that sustain it, and the labile public memory those norms have shaped serve the unsmiling authoritarianism that still haunts the "land of smiles" to this day.--Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

It is very difficult for anyone belonging to the 1970s generations of Southeast Asian student activists to read and finish Moments of Silence.There is so much pain in this memoir of Thongchai Winichakul. Yet, somehow, he has been able to take a step back and analyze the 1976 massacre of his fellow students at the Thammasat University. With this book, Thailand's ruling elites will not be able to hide the full story of that tragedy anymore.--Patricio N. Abinales, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

Thongchai Winichakul has done it again. Siam Mapped remains one of the most impressive books on Thailand's past ever written, and his new one is just as good. Moments of Silence is also bracingly personal, for its author as a young activist was directly affected by the violence that convulsed Bangkok in 1976. An innovative blend of memoir and theoretically informed ruminations on memory, Moments of Silence has much to offer not just those concerned with Southeast Asia but also anyone interested in the myriad other settings, from Beijing and Burma to Cairo and Kent State, that have been sites of massacres, large or small, with complex and contested legacies.--Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink