Corpses, prisoners of war and captured documents: British and communist narratives of the Malayan emergency, and the dynamics of intelligence transformation

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Notes

Narratives, stories or even myths in the sense that accounts attempt not only to impose order on facts — a central narrative — but also meaning. The dominant British ‘myth’ makes participants characters in a story of Phoenix‐like resurrection from 1951's despair, victors in one scene in a wider Cold War drama, and actors in a morality play that has, as its moral, the need for unified, vigorous leadership (preferably under one supremo) or ‘hearts and minds’ tactics. This sort of story can fit into a Whig interpretration of Empire: the British won their counter‐insurgencies because of superior foresight (the French and Americans not so). Or (as with Richard Stubbs), it can provide a didactic tale about counter‐insurgency, stressing the need to combine stick and carrot, bullet and bridge‐building. The story‐telling (there is no reason why stories cannot be true) thus has many functions at the levels of individual, military and state history.

For more detail, see my ‘Intelligence and Counter‐Insurgency in the Era of Decolonisation: The Example of Malaya’, in Intelligence and National Security 14/2 (Summer 1999) pp.24–55, and ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30/1 (March 1999) pp.99–125. This piece provides a shorter summary, new material from the Public Record Office in London and a Canberra Workshop with Chin Peng; and a greater recognition of the late (late 1952–55) perfection of agent‐recruiting procedures.