Horrid Carcass of Indonesia – 50 Years After the Coup
Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there, anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.
Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.
Don’t get me wrong: there is really nothing wrong with maturity. But instead of maturing elegantly into something noble, like a precious wine, Indonesia just decayed into disgusting vinegar, or spoiled milk, or most likely into something much, much more sinister – a monstrous decomposing carcass in the middle of a once socialist, progressive and anti-imperialist Asia.
After the 1965 coup backed by the US, Australia and Europe, some 2-3 million Indonesians died, in fact were slaughtered mercilessly in an unbridled orgy of terror: teachers, intellectuals, artists, unionists, and Communists vanished. The US Embassy in Jakarta provided a detailed list of those who were supposed to be liquidated. The army, which was generously paid by the West and backed by the countless brainwashed religious cadres of all faiths, showed unprecedented zeal, killing and imprisoning almost everyone capable of thinking. Books were burned and film studios and theatres closed down.
Women from the left-wing organizations, after being savagely raped, had their breasts amputated. They were labeled as witches, atheists, sexual maniacs and perverts.
Professional militant Christian cadres from Holland and other Western countries landed in Indonesia well before the coup. They were entrusted with the radicalization of Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Catholics and the Indonesian military. They labeled Communists and other leftists as “dangerous atheists” and began an indoctrination and training campaign aimed to liquidate them.
The right-wing Chinese individuals, mostly traitors who just escaped from their Communist revolutionary homeland, happily joined the fascist putsch-nick clique and later the murderous, whoring and treasonous regime of General Suharto. They joined it as snitches and “preachers”. The Chinese minority in Indonesia, while undoubtedly suffering from certain discrimination, had joined the most oppressive domestic and foreign forces, shamelessly collaborating with military fascism, Western imperialism and the savage capitalist system, which it itself had helped to establish. Because of its control over the crucial part of the local “economy” (read: plunder of the natural resources) and its ownership of the countless brainwashing media outlets and private educational facilities, the Chinese minority in Indonesia has been playing a decisive and devastating role in the spectacular collapse of post-1965 Indonesia.
After the slaughters of 1965/66, everything resembling the Revolution and the People’s Republic of China was banned and obliterated in Indonesia, including red color, the Chinese language, and the word “Communism” itself. Some of it was “inconvenient”, but overall, the Chinese right-wing anti-Communist émigrés in Indonesia finally had it their way! Suharto’s fascism was definitely closer to their hearts than the anti-Western-imperialism and the power sharing between the progressive Muslim leader Sukarno and his “golden child”, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).
After the genocide, the great selling of Indonesia began. Corruption and privatization went hand in hand. Ideological and intellectual blindness were administered to the population.
The murder and rape of millions, theft of everything that used to belong to the nation…
Thus was committed the greatest treason of the 20th century.
Roughly 50 years after this disaster took place, I broke my self-imposed ban and visited Indonesia once again.
***
This time, I did not come to Indonesia for academic work. In fact, I have fully divorced myself from academia, now considering it as prostituted and defunct as journalism. Philosophy has to break itself free from academia and its institutions. Philosophy deals with life, while contemporary academia represents intellectual death.
My damning book, “Indonesia: Archipelago of Fear”, was published more than 3 years ago by Pluto in London, then translated and published by Badak Merah into the Indonesian language. Other translations followed. Enough of theory!
I came back once again to breathe polluted air and to see the ruins of Indonesian society – ruins visible all over the capital. I came to observe the uninspired expressions on people’s faces, to once again experience the totally collapsed infrastructure. I came to face the society that had liquidated almost all science, philosophy and arts, and where local workers are now unable to even put two simple tiles together in a matching manner, much less construct a spaceship or passenger jet.
I returned to shout and to curse, and to write this as a warning to those who still think that a savage capitalism could actually work, that a country that would allow its “elites” to turn it into a doormat (or worse) of the West, could simply survive, let alone thrive.
I came to say what is clear but “forbidden” to say: “Indonesia died! It is finished. It was murdered some time between 1965 and now. It will never get back to its feet. People living there do not really live in a country, but inside a horrific, decaying cadaver.”
The only way forward would be a revolution, as Pramoedya Ananta Toer used to say. A total revolution, a reset! Return to what was destroyed in 1965. Bury the corpse, put on trial all those who have been committing treason, and start from zero, from the beginning!
This is reality, and it does not require footnotes or quotations!
***
But back to the deal between Empire and local “elites”:
The deal was clear: the West allowed the putsch-nicks and their religious and “educationalist” lackeys to rob the nation, tolerating the lowest forms of corruption. But, in exchange, they had to guarantee that the Indonesian people would to be kept thoroughly brainwashed and uneducated, never demanding the return of the Communist Party, never striving for great patriotic ideals and never questioning market fundamentalism and the indiscriminate looting of Indonesia’s natural resources.
The Christians that were put “in charge” were those from the most deranged evangelical sects, braced by the imported army of North American and Australian intelligence/religious cadres. “Prosperity Gospel” and “Pentecostals” were the most successful implants. The preachers listening to Voice of America and reading Western economic journals were suddenly in control.
Saudi-style Wahhabi Western allies shamelessly sidelined almost all socialist brands of local Islam, and the most militant and intolerant varieties of otherwise progressive and socialist Muslim religion began their destructive, totalitarian and intellectually ruinous activities.
The West, its media and academia, started unashamedly backing all fascist cultural dogmas: including regressive religious and family structures.
Not only that – they kept spreading the most grotesque lies: about “how tolerant Indonesia became”, and “how moderate” it is. “Third largest democracy” was how the Western demagogues have constantly described the country without one single pro-people or anti-imperialist political party. Indonesia is called “the largest economy of Southeast Asia”, a totally misleading definition, considering that Indonesia has more than three times more people that any other nation in the region. And could it really be called an “economy”, something that produces hardly anything and lives predominately from the unbridled plunder of its natural resources, as well as from the resources of colonized Papua, where Indonesia has been committing horrific and silent genocide?
The local media has continuously quoted all this propaganda and disinformation, quite logically, considering that corrupt business interests own virtually all of it.
After the regime murdered around 40% of teachers in Java alone, the education system fell to the hands of totally ignorant but zealous morons: themselves collaborators with the West. These people were nothing more than cynical and money hungry businessmen and businesswomen, but definitely not educators. Spreading ignorance and stupidity was not only their mission; it was a natural way of expressing themselves, their method of interacting with the world.
After years of the horrid plunder of the resources, of incongruous religious gaga, of censuring of everything deep and creative, and after preventing Indonesian youth from getting real knowledge about the world, the country of Indonesia began eventually resembling what it is not: a nation of 300 million people (the government lies about the numbers, too, as I was told by several leading UN statisticians while I was working on my book) without one single thinker (now that people from the PKI and Sukarno era, like Pramoedya Ananta Toer, passed away), without one single internationally recognizable scientist or a musician or public intellectual…
Dirt everywhere, horrendous immoral social contrasts on every corner… Range Rovers and Gucci boutiques right next to open sewers and children showing clear signs of malnutrition. There are hardly any parks in Indonesia, no waste treatment plants, and hardly any sidewalks or public playgrounds for children. There are no public educational television channels, while public libraries are almost-not existent – a shocking contrast to Malaysia. Water is, of course, privatized.
The nation stopped reading. One bookstore after another is closing down. It only translates a few hundred titles each year, most of them commercial. Translations are of horrendous quality.
Nothing, almost nothing, works. There are constant blackouts, and the roads are uneven and narrow. Even trans-Java “highways” are two-lane, narrow potholed tracks, of a worse quality than some village roads in Thailand or Malaysia. Traffic jams are all over, in the cities and countryside, as even poor people have to rely on private vehicles and infrastructure that has already collapsed many years ago.
Internet and phone signals are so bad that when I was editing my films, I was forced to fly to Singapore in order to upload some larger files.
Old ferries are sinking, airplanes are falling from the sky, and trains keep derailing.
No forests are left intact. The entire nation is logged out, mined out – ruined, screwed!
And the West is dancing on that horrid Indonesian carcass, celebrating! Yes, celebrating! It loves, it adores this “democratic”, “tolerant” nation which is in ruins. Instead of thinking, Indonesia is listening to some repulsive pop, grinning idiotically, producing incomprehensible squeaks and giggles befitting a mental institution, sacrificing itself oh-so-generously to the wellbeing of Western corporations and governments!
Lees verder: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/13/horrid-carcass-of-indonesia-50-years-after-the-coup/
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