Indonesia's history deserves dialogue, not dogma

The 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.