Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Blind faith vs scientific reasoning on dossiers

In my last observation on the 'May 13' book, I said that unless and until we have perused and studied BOTH sets of information by comparing and contrasting them emprically, we cannot know for sure and without an iota of doubt at this point of time that the Malaysian police Special Branch (SB) archive must necessarily be "more accurate" than the British dossiers. To claim or assert otherwise is not social-scientific at all.

Now, I further put it to you as a hypothesis that British dossiers on the 'May 13' riots are inherently impartial and disinterested because no Britons or any other Briton-like Mat Sallehs were involved in the physical fightings in the streets while British dossiers on the twelve-year 'Emergency' from 1948 to 1960 are inherently biased and self-serving because British and other Commonwealth troops physically fought with the anti-colonial insurgents on the ground.

Mindguards' changed view on British dossiers

2 Comments:

Blogger Monsterball said...

Hi James,
So your thesis is that the disinterested or less involved party is more likely to get its facts right. Makes sense.

But balanced against that would be by 1969, British intelligence capabilities and contacts in Malaysia would likely have been very much drawn down.

The truth ? Don't know, but the Government ought to agree to the release of their own police/SB documents. Personally, I don't think it will ever happen, because large parts of the officially published story were "manufactured".

2:48 AM  
Blogger James Wong Wing-On said...

Hi, kittykat46,
just to let you know after you responded with a comment i've amended the headline of this entry for sharper contrast. the esssence of my hypothesis remains unchanged. Hope yu don't mind.

6:21 AM  

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