The History Eaters

 

There’s something rotten in the state of remembering, friends, and it’s spreading like a cancer through the marrow of nations. You might think I’m talking about some Stephen King monster—something with too many teeth and not enough conscience—but the truth is worse than fiction. The monster is real, and it’s eating our past one page at a time.

Down in Jakarta, Minister Fadli Zon sits in his air-conditioned office, surrounded by the ghosts of a hundred and thirteen historians. They’re all working on something ambitious—ten fat volumes to replace the old six-volume set that Sartono Kartodirdjo and his team cooked up back in 1975. Revision, they call it. Like you’d revise a grocery list or a love letter. But this isn’t about fixing typos, folks. This is about deciding what happened and what didn’t, what matters and what gets fed to the shredder.

The thing about history is that it’s a lot like memory—slippery as a greased pig and twice as ornery. You can twist it, bend it, make it say pretty much whatever you want if you’re clever enough and have enough power behind you. And power, well, that’s something these folks have in spades.

Take Xi Jinping, sitting in his palace in Beijing like some emperor out of a nightmare. He’s got a particular talent for making inconvenient truths disappear. Ask one of China’s fancy AI systems about what happened in Tiananmen Square back in ‘89, and it’ll tell you with a straight face that nobody died. No massacre, no sir. Just a peaceful little gathering that ended with everyone going home for tea and cookies.

But here’s the thing about ghosts—they don’t stay buried, no matter how deep you dig the hole. Those students who died in the square, they’re still there, still bleeding into the concrete. The mothers who lost their children, they remember. The fathers who never came home from work that day, their absence echoes in empty chairs at dinner tables across China.

Xi calls it “historical nihilism”—the idea that there might be more than one way to tell China’s story. In his world, there’s only one truth, and it’s the truth that keeps him in power. Deviation from that truth? Well, that’s attacking communism itself. And we all know what happens to enemies of the state.

The sickness spread south to Korea, where Park Geun-hye sat in the Blue House, polishing her father’s tarnished legacy like it was the family silver. Park Chung-hee’s military coup in 1961 got rebranded as “The Miracle on the Han”—a revolution to save the nation from the communist boogeyman. Never mind the workers who died in factory accidents, working sixteen-hour days for pennies. Never mind the dissidents who disappeared in the night, their families left to wonder if they were dead or just forgotten.

Park Geun-hye called it “correcting distorted history,” but what she really meant was covering up the blood on her family’s hands. The truth was too ugly, too complicated for the sanitized version she wanted to teach in schools. So she mandated “approved content” in textbooks, wrapped it all up in a pretty bow called “unity.”

But unity built on lies is like a house built on sand—looks solid until the first big storm comes along.

Then there’s Japan, where Shinzo Abe spent his career trying to scrub the stains out of his country’s past. The Nanking Massacre? Never happened. The comfort women? Just a misunderstanding. Those UNESCO World Heritage sites where thousands of prisoners died as slaves? Well, those are just monuments to Japanese industrial achievement now.

Abe got himself assassinated in 2022, but his ghost lives on in the history books he helped rewrite. He understood something fundamental about power—that if you control the past, you control the future. If you can make people forget the monsters their grandfathers were, maybe they won’t notice the monsters their leaders are becoming.

The disease has spread to India too, where Narendra Modi’s government has been playing editor with the nation’s memory. Gandhi’s assassination? Too controversial. The Gujarat riots where over a thousand people died? Too divisive. The centuries of Muslim rule? Too complicated for the simple story they want to tell.

Students in New Delhi are reading sanitized textbooks now, history books with all the sharp edges filed off. Their principal, Pooja Malhotra, thinks this is just fine. “Everyone knows Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi,” she says, “but because it’s related to Hindu-Muslim issues, it has created a lot of hue and cry.”

Hue and cry. Like genocide is just a noise complaint.

You see, the thing about these history eaters is that they’re not just destroying the past—they’re poisoning the future. Every generation that grows up on these sanitized lies is another generation that can’t recognize the warning signs when the monsters come calling again.

In Indonesia, those 113 historians are probably good people. Smart people. They probably believe they’re doing important work, creating a national narrative that will bring the country together. But here’s what keeps me up at night: What stories are they choosing not to tell? What uncomfortable truths are getting left on the cutting room floor?

Because that’s how it always starts. A little revision here, a small omission there. Before you know it, you’re living in a world where the past is whatever the people in power say it is. Where asking questions about what really happened is treason. Where the truth becomes as extinct as the dodo bird.

The worst part? These history eaters always wrap their work in noble language. They talk about unity, about healing, about moving forward. They say they’re preventing conflict, promoting harmony. But what they’re really doing is performing surgery on the collective memory of humanity—and they’re not using anesthesia.

So when you see those ten volumes of revised Indonesian history hit the shelves, remember this: Every page that’s been rewritten is a page that’s been stolen from the truth. Every story that’s been sanitized is a warning that’s been silenced. Every inconvenient fact that’s been erased is a ghost that will keep haunting us until we find the courage to speak its name again.

Because in the end, that’s all we have against the darkness—the courage to remember, even when forgetting would be easier. Even when the truth is ugly and complicated and makes us uncomfortable at dinner parties.

The history eaters are counting on us to forget. The question is: Are we going to let them win?

Sometimes dead is better, as they say in my neck of the woods. But sometimes, the truth is worth resurrecting, no matter how much it stinks when you dig it up.