Every October, the past finds its way back to Bangkok.

It returns in flowers laid beneath memorials, in yellowed newspaper clippings pinned to university walls, in theatre rehearsals, and in conversations among the youth born decades after the violence.

As Thailand approaches the 50th anniversary of one of its darkest political tragedies, remembrance itself is entering a new phase. In the absence of an official reckoning, students, artists, scholars and civil society groups have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memory of the brutal crackdown on student activists at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976.

The 49th anniversary commemorations in October 2025 were, in many ways, an overture.

Reclaiming hope

The iron gate slides open.

Students peer into the darkness, searching for something elusive.

The scene was from a short promotional video released by Singhdam democracy group and the Political Science Student Union of Chulalongkorn university, to draw the public's attention to the commemoration "Daydreaming of Democracy in October”.

Although the massacre took place at Thammasat University, students from Chulalongkorn University were also among the dead and injured. Their cases, like so many others, remain unresolved.

Singhdam Democracy commemorated the tragedy in 2025 by recalling not the 6th of October but rather the 5th. They arranged “a funeral of the tyrant.” Flowers were laid. The atmosphere was neither solemn nor mournful, but warm and gentle.  For the organisers, this was a deliberate departure from past commemorations. Moving beyond grief, they chose to foreground hope.

These young people, in their early twenty, wanted to break away from antiquated narratives of mourning. They focussed instead on the night before the massacre, a time when the student movement was still filled with hope and democratic imagination.

“Instead of being moody and murderous, it shed new light on 6 October.” Margaret (pseudonym), one of the organisers, was told by exhibition visitors, who were delighted that Singhdam Democracy used the concept of hope as its main focus. That comforted Margaret, who admits feeling challenged when trying to get teenagers to identify with an incident long past.

Attendance exceeded their expectations. This included members of the 6 October generation who appeared, laying flowers in tribute. 

Postcards from “Daydreaming of Democracy in October” by Singhdam Democracy

Nalinee, who came up with the idea of The Funeral of Tyrant, felt the scene embodied the wishes of those who gathered.

She first encountered 6 October in a comic book at a very young age. The image of the university gate pulled her into a mysterious history. Later, she learned about the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea while traveling. Nalinee was impressed how the Korean state tried to deal with a historical wound by offering compensation to victims’ families.

This made her wonder why the 6 October tragedy in her homeland has never been officially investigated. “People died without a clear reason … we don't really know what happened to them.” She feels that the victims and their families should have been compensated.

Margaret agrees.  She notes that her parents knew almost nothing of the massacre, and believes that many others were also uninformed.  For her, education is vital so that people can learn to talk through problems and not attack each other. She was appalled by the Thai monk, Kittivutto, who said that killing communists is not a sin because communists are demons. She feels this view is still reflected in present-day society. “It's how we imagine enemies of the Thai people … on Facebook and during the Thai-Cambodia war.”

Such considerations are why Rangsiman, another student on the organising team, joined the commemoration. In his opinion, the government should have offered an official explanation of what happened and made a commitment to prevent such violence from ever happening again. He admits that he didn’t know much about the incident at first, gradually gaining a deeper insight into the traumatic episode after joining the team. Violence, he reflects, begins - but never really ends - with its immediate victims.  He also feels the atmosphere nowadays is similar to the past, with the same political structures remaining in place, albeit in modified forms.

“However, Rangsiman still sees some improvement. He believes that 6 October inspired people to reexamine their understanding of state authority, and he remains hopeful that collective efforts will continue to drive changes.”

The weight of history 

The 49th anniversary of 6 October 6 1976 commemoration at Thammasat University

On the morning marking the 49th anniversary of the 6 October 1976  massacre, commemorations were held at Thammasat University.

Colourful wreaths encircled the 6 October Memorial Sculpture. People of all ages passed by, pausing to examine photographs and newspaper clippings from past years. 

Banners stretched across the corridors, resounding memories.

Inside the university auditorium, speakers took turns taking to the stage in a forum on violence and memory. 

That afternoon, the past was revisited in different forms.  The play “Ultramarine: Threat” unfolded on stage. White-clad figures, students, read newspaper excerpts and then collapsed, one after the other. Footsteps echoed across the stage like gunshots. The performance, carried out by Lanyim Theatre, was a testimony - pain returned as a spectre.

Prapassorn, the Theatre’s choreographer, has a personal link to the event.  In her youth, her father often joined protests in Bangkok.  He passed down stories and even took Prapassorn to Phu Phan, in the northeast of Thailand. Now a national park, the mountain range was one of the areas where students took refuge after the massacre.

“We even did role plays in the jungle,” Prapassoorn recalled. Her father wanted her to understand how people survived by hiding while helicopters hovering above them

To twelve-year-old Prapassoorn, the stories sounded like fairy tales and she did not fully understand what had happened.

It was not until she entered university in Chiang Mai that those fragments began to take shape as a complex picture. The process was like putting together a puzzle.

The final piece fell into place when she saw  “A Nowhere Place” a play by Annata Theatre, staged in 2016 for the 40th anniversary of 6 October 1976. 

It is described on Facebook as "The story of a lonely bride and a forgetful groom and the painful memories of a dark day.  Forty years later, they return carrying only their cherished memories, meeting once again—on a day that is, even now, still a dark one."

It was a simple crew with two performers in a tiny room, but a wonderful experience for her. She realised what happened 40 years ago, what the jungle fairy tales were about. She found herself relating to it. 

That experience later shaped Lanyim Theatre’s approach to commemorating 6 October.

In earlier years, their performances centred upon blood and dead bodies.  Prapassorn recalls that audiences burst into tears.  “People couldn’t stop crying. Even after so many years, they were still suffering,” she said.

She began to question whether it was necessary to repeat trauma in order to remember it. “Did we really want to do this again and again?,” she asked herself. “What were we hoping for by repeating the tragedy? It seemed unhealthy. ” 

In 2025, on stage of Thammasat University, Lanyim Theatre shifted its focus to the idealism which originally drove students to the streets.

In the opening scene of Ultramarine: Threat, a girl standing center stage, reads a letter with a clear voice. Prapassorn explained that it was about the powerful intentions of people trying to make changes - “the will to sacrifice one’s life to make things better.”

Ultramarine: Threat by Lanyim Theatre

ShiVa, the director, wanted Ultramarine: Threat to be a play about people across time - past, present and future. Sequences focussed on those who decide to join protests in 1976 also speak to the student movement in 2020, and ongoing struggles at present.

Objects on stage—blue spray paint, red pigment, poetry, newspapers—allude to ShiVa’s earlier works in 2021. Newspapers are an example - “not strictly a newspaper …  one of the tools used to incite violence against students.”

Having participated in the 2020 protests, Shiva knows from his own experience that memory and emotion differ from person to person, even among those who share the same moments. He believes that by talking about of violence and truth, people can still connect to each other because they “understand the same kind of pain”. 

In the final scene of Ultramarine: Threat, archival black-and-white footage of soldiers overlap on the stage with images of the 2020 student movement. ShiVa hopes that it helped a hall full of people with past experiences of pain and violence move on together. 

Prapassorn agrees that people must learn from history and collectively move on.  She believes that public awareness of the bad things that the government has done is important but stresses that the intention of Lanyim was to look at other ways of expressing the tragedy.  “Maybe we need to lead people in a different direction and search for the next step.”

Aftermath: The Fractured History

Kanokrat Lertchoosakul

“States are adept at maintaining silence.” said Professor Kanokrat Lertchoosakul of Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science. What people learned from history, she argues, is that justice rarely arrives until wrongdoers lose power. “You cannot expect the state to voluntarily give justice. I am sorry, but this is the truth.”

Born weeks after the massacre, Kanokrat grew up in its aftermath. Her parents were active supporters of the student movement and joined protests from time to time. 

On the early morning of 6 October, her pregnant mother drove toward Thammasat University and saw the flames. People started realising that something was unfolding.

In Kanokrat’s childhood, her bedtime stories were news reports about the massacre. She has sharp memories of her father reading and explaining what happened.   “It was very, very tragic for a seven- or eight-year-old girl,” Kanokrat remembers. She recalls her father talking of the violence inflicted on students in broad daylight. 

Over the decades, she saw October history fractured into multiple narratives. “Some emphasised state repression, while others foregrounded radical Marxist history and Cold War contexts.” Kanokrat feels that this made any basic historical consensus almost impossible. From time to time, groups attempted fact-finding missions.  Denied full access to state archives, and lacking the institutional capacity to conduct official investigations, these were stillborn.

To Kanokrat, the process has also been hampered by ongoing battles over who is in charge of defining the history of the massacre, and how to tackle the history.

Each year, different committees used the commemorations to communicate their own agendas. Red Shirt groups linked 6 October to the memory of the 2010 crackdown, emphasising shared victimhood under state violence. Meanwhile, commemorations of the 14 October 1973 uprising framed the event as a call for courage and political mobilisation. This pattern mirrors movements elsewhere in the world, Kanokrat explained, where people try to engage themselves, building up new narratives to situate their own struggles within similar past injustices. 

Room for alternatives

"The Thai state, Kanokrat argues, prefers to keep this history incomplete. She sees this ambiguity as a double-edged sword. While the lack of truth is problematic, it also leaves room for civil society to develop alternative narratives."

She learned from her students about how 6 October was noted in high school textbooks as a continuation of 14 October 1973, without mentioning state violence or the suppression of communist students. 

Kanokrat draws a comparison to how Germany approached the Holocaust. 

She notes that it took the deaths of those in power during the Nazi regime for the German government to successfully incorporate the history of the period into national textbooks. However, she stresses that the prevailing narrative remains complex and subject to debate. 

In Thailand, where old institutional heirs retain power, the official narrative has remained a blank space, fertile ground for the writings of Octoberists and the next generation.

Kanokrat observes that young people, particularly those who went through the 2020 movement, have successfully mainstreamed 6 October as an instance of state violence, especially in online spaces. 

“Their initial inspiration wasn’t 1976 but the 1932 revolution that pushed structural reform of Thai politics,” she noted. 6 October became relevant to them when they began to encounter state surveillance, intimidation, and mass arrests.

The widespread recognition of iconic photographs from the massacre, she pointed out, marks a significant achievement.

“The event may not be officially recognised,” Kanokrat says, “but in terms of cultural politics, [critics] have already won.” In her view, Thai civil society has come very far, with alternative histories successfully entered public discourse to pressure political institutions. At the 49th commemoration of 6 October, leaders from major political parties, including the Bhumjaithai Party, delivered wreaths as did the Pheu Thai Party, and the People’s Party, which became part of the commemoration.

Kanokrat sees that as a clear sign that “they can no longer ignore you.”

While pessimism remains, Kanokrat believes there are possibilities to transform activism, search for alternative strategies and overcome limitations. 

The process of transitional justice takes time, Kanokrat argues. Instead of waiting passively, she believes it is crucial to continue the fact-fighting, “applying pressure, offering new narratives and mainstream them.”  

The Long Relay 

Rangsiman and Nalinee

Young people often question the meaning of organised commemorations. 

Their reflections sometimes evolve during the preparation process. 

The 6 October generation is ageing.  This pushed Nalinee to involve herself with the inheritance and continuation of its history. “What we should do is try to collect their memories, make clear what happened, and bring this topic into the public sphere.”   She added, “If we give up, even for one day, people after us won’t carry it on. How can we ask for transitional justice if we let people forget about it?” 

Margaret is thinking of presenting more perspectives such as the Cold War and literary aspects next time. Historical graphics surrounding 6 October are also one of the things she finds interesting.

Rangsiman and Margaret agree that the first step to making the atmosphere free for discussion begins with students. He thinks education is essential. He hopes that by recognising the violence of the incident, structures can be changed and the environment can be made more conducive to speaking out.  As education is controlled by the government, reform must begin with people in the bureaucracy.  

Rangsiman aims to work in the system in the future.  He also has new ideas for the commemoration. To him, the traditional form of displaying archives, papers, and pictures in a building is outdated. He believes that it can be made more engaging through online expression and short films designed to capture the attention of the younger generation and encourage them to look back at 6 October.

Nalinee believes that she must be patient, that reinvestigation must continue until Thailand turns into a fully democratic country and transitional justice prevails. 

To her, this requires help from many sectors including NGOs and the media.  She also does her part, recalling Professor Kanokrat's words that every effort becomes part of the archive.  “We have to work together.”