Friday, February 9, 2018

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

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The Year of Living Dangerously was an Australian film directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, who we could still then claim as an Australian, released in 1985. It was based on the 1978 novel of the same title by Australian writer, Peter Koch. The title is said to have come from the words used by President Sukarno in an Independence Day speech he gave in 1964. Little did Sukarno know that his 22-year stint as the republic’s first president would come to an abrupt halt soon after. The year of truly living dangerously was 1965, a year which saw a volcanic eruption of violence in Indonesia.
Even to this day, historians and Indonesia-watchers are not entirely sure of the minutia and intricacies that culminated effectively in one of the bloodiest revolutions in modern history but the bare bones of the story are generally agreed on.


For most of his time in power, Sukarno had walked a tight rope above the abyss that finally swallowed him. It was a delicate balancing act needed to keep him in power, one that entailed playing off the world’s third largest communist party, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) and largest Indonesian political party against a right-wing military, with organized Islamists also on the far right. The tension between the two extremes could best be illustrated in an analogy in which two gun-fighters have their guns drawn in a “Mexican stand-off”.

The question was, who would fire the first shot. However, as with other such upheavals, factors other than the purely political played their part, notably the economic factor. By the mid ‘60s, inflation was running at between 500 and 1,000% annually, wiping out the savings of the middle class, and downgrading the lives of the peasants and workers (proletarians as the PKI would no doubt have it) from bad to very bad.

When the first shot sounded, the smoking gun was not exactly in the hand of either side. It was fired by a leftist military faction calling itself the 30th September Movement, the night of September 30 – October 1 being the first stage of an attempted coup when six top Indonesian generals were kidnapped, summarily executed and their bodies thrown down a well. The Movement claimed its actions were a pre-emptive strike against a planned coup by the military. But then again, the military may have been marshalling its forces after rumours of a planned Leftist coup began to surface.

Perhaps the greatest mistake of the leftist soldiers was not including the execution of General Suharto in their attempted coup d’état perhaps because of his not being perceived as overly political. Huge mistake as it was around the eminently capable Suharto that the backlash quickly developed.

Although no conclusive supporting evidence has ever been produced, it was immediately assumed that the attempted coup had the backing of the PKI, leading to its destruction by the army leading in turn to what was described by the US CIA as the bloodiest massacre in modern history, knowing full well that much of the blood was dripping from the hands of the US Government which had been alarmed at the rapid growth and influence of the PKI. Accordingly, during the blood-letting, arms and information was being provided to the Indonesian military courtesy of Uncle Sam. The American government was additionally not enamoured of the anti-American Sarkarno who was perceived as getting a little too cosy with the PKI, he himself upsetting the delicate balance of Indonesian power.

Initially by the army and then by another army of blood-lusting camp-followers, communists were hunted down and murdered on an industrial scale. First the communists, then the families of communists, then those suspected of having communist sympathies and then anyone who even looked like a communist. How could it be determined? The suspect usually had Chinese characteristics. If not exactly communists yet they formed a sleeping fifth column. This perception may not have been completely off the mark as we in Australia are obviously saddled fifth column ever ready to act on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. This has been evidenced repeatedly in the ease with which the Chinese government can galvanise protests in its interest by hordes of Chinese students studying in Australia.

Be that as it may, during this time of a peculiar Malay habit of running “amok”, a Malay word, the destruction of communists morphed into the destruction of Indonesian Chinese. However, this wasn’t the first time Chinese in Indonesia had suffered at the hands of the people who saw themselves as indigenous to the islands. Ever since the arrival of the Chinese in Indonesia in the eighteenth century, bloody pogroms had been the cause of many of their numbers dead.

The blood-letting finally petered out but only after between 100,000 and two million no longer drew breath. The figure now most commonly agreed on absolute minimum, perhaps by coming up with a rough average, is half a million. It’s more than likely a conservative figure though given reports of rivers and streams being literally clogged with bodies.

With the PKI totally destroyed and any chance of a resurrection prevented by law, Sukarno being yesterday’s man, strong man Suharto now holding the reins of power, the nation was in transition to the “New Order”. This was a change of direction that would see the Left dumped from the see-saw of power, Indonesia securely lodged on the path of an American orbit, and much of the old order rotting on the garbage dump of history. Retained however was the doctrine of “Pancasila”, the national philosophy and an attempt at a glue that would hold a disparate country together. The term is the mating of two old Javanese words: Panca, meaning five and Sila, meaning principles. Introduced by Sukarno in 1945, it became part of the constitution with only slight alterations. The five principles are:

1)     Belief in one god
2)     Just and civilized humanity
3)     Indonesian unity
4)     Democracy under the wise guidance of representative consultations
5)     Social justice for all the peoples of Indonesia 





After the unprecedented violence of ’65, it’s difficult for an outsider, or even possibly a thoughtful insider, to not see this declaration as a grotesque and ironically twisted joke and to wonder how its retention could even have been considered. The belief in one god had always been a stretch, that is, if Christians, Hindus (with a multitude of gods) Muslims and Buddhists with no god at all, had not somehow been hypnotized into the belief that no godly differences actually existed, even between a god and no god. Theoretically, it’s possible when it’s considered that a goodly proportion of the White race has been hypnotized into the belief that no differences exist between the races.

A just and civilized humanity? The less said about that after ’65, the better. Indonesian unity? Possibly, if you consider the destruction of a part not fitting so well as achieving unity. Democracy? No, military dictatorship, no matter how much gloss, is still merely a pig wearing lipstick. Social justice for all? The piles of corpses rotting and stinking under the tropical sun were of course deaf to that one.   

This focus on the Indonesian cataclysm of 1965  is just one part of a series of posts on this blog intended to show the pandemic of racism in our region - institutionalized racism in the cases of Fiji and Malaysia. While we Australian Whites, just like our sisters and brothers all over the world, flagellate and curse ourselves, want to disown our entire histories, prostrate ourselves and issue unending abject apologies for our very existence because of the blackest evil of racism that only we are capable of, we are laughed at by races to whom real racism is as ordinary and omnipresent as the clouds above. For hundreds, if not thousands of years they have lived with racism in all its manifestations, be it actual racial strife, instinctive immutable mutual distrust and antipathy, or even outright beliefs in racial superiority. 

They know enough to be able to see that racial separation is the optimum prevention of racial strife. For most though, that is a luxury beyond the bounds of possibility. The second-best option is a political heavy handedness such as Tito’s which, when it was lifted, the ethnic kaleidoscope of the Balkans descended into a whirlpool of blood and the word “Balkanisation” became a prophecy of doom for any nation tempted to flirt with multiculturalism. Much more than soothing words such as the Pancasila were needed to keep people together who would be happier cutting each other’s throats.

When the white-ants and their Jewish urgers-on were busy plotting the destruction of the so-called White Australia Policy, thus the destruction of Australia, a justification given was that the Asians to our north were beginning to dislike us for it. This became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy but only because after witnessing the intense soul-searching our “betters” were engaging in, their guilt and the self-induced pain it was sincerely hoped we’d all share, our neighbours weren’t going to let an opportunity like that go to waste. Of course they understood our need to maintain a racially homogenous nation. Of course they understood our wanting to avoid the strife and fragmentation that they’d suffered for centuries. And of course they recognized the wisdom of taking note of the problems in old countries and taking the opportunity to avoid them in a brand new country.

 It’s unlikely they didn’t resent our not wanting to include their huge excess populations in our immigration but neither were they so dim as to not appreciate the reason for it. But if we were going to be stupid enough to dump all of that wisdom generated by thousands of years of experience and turn our country on its head, by Christ, they were going to take advantage of it. Here at last was a chance to dispose of some of that excess population and why not expedite the process by making the white man feel even worse than he was making himself. 

The Taiwanese author of The Asian Mind Game, Chin-ning Chu, has provided an invaluable service to Westerners in lifting the lid on this whole  pot-calling-the-kettle-black and getting away with it scam. On page 9, she writes:
“Asians do not feel guilty about thinking in racial terms, but they do understand that Westerners … do. They will often use accusations of racism to disarm their Western opponents. The same Japanese politician who loudly imputes racist motives to American criticism of Japan himself believes implicitly that the Japanese are racially superior to Caucasians, and also to their Korean and Chinese neighbours. He would never admit these beliefs to Westerners, but among Asians it is so commonplace to think in racial terms that they do not even bother with denial or guilt.”

Thank you Chin-ning Chu. RIP





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