545 Comments on “Open Thread”
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Ok, without jumping down the reds under the bed rabbit hole yet again (and it’s not easy when you throw East Timor into the mix and the slaughter into the name of saving us all).
The straw Jakarta is no worse than Mexico city is just that. However, the point I was trying to make (poorly it seems) is yes, it is a bleak and dark article ridden with hyperbole but by the same token Jakarta lends it self to such things. Rather than the straw man the obvious Defence of the article would be “well if I am wrong, show me the progress or improvements particulary in the last decade”. Would it be so bizarre to suggest the infrastructure is actually going backwards, certainly seems that way to me.
Curiously the article in the economist just counterpoints the abject failure of Jakarta and its elite. Oh upon reflection, the Mexico Cities and others rather than justifying Jakarta’s position as a living sewer actually further condemns the city fathers as none of those cities have the potential riches and in flow of Capitial that Jakarta has (link back to the corruption mansion thread now)
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Sorry can’t help myself, the toll by the East Timorese during the occupation in the name of fighting communism was conservatively 15 % of the population so a million plus is an easy bet unless we start with artificial parameters. Of course, most Timorese could not even spell the word (and outside Dili still cannot) but they had to go in the name of freedom.
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ET says:
Although not being familiar with Jakarta itself I found the article too long with too many repetitions to be taken seriously. This Vitchek is a guy who is trying to prove himself and his agenda by constantly hammering things through people’s throats, a typical leftie’s strategy. If the gore is spread out thick enough something will sink in. Where have I seen this before?
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Arie Brand says:
Interesting reactions. The one point we can all agree on is that the thing was appallingly edited. I read Counterpunch fairly regularly and I have never seen the like of it. If I was given to conspiracy theories I would believe that somebody there was out to discredit him.
His grievance about these small private buses I don’t quite understand. The place in Southeast Asia where I stayed last for a few years is Cebu in the Philippines. That hardly has a public transport system either but those private “jeepneys” are in fact quite handy. You can get in and out wherever you want and they are quite cheap. They are not comfortable, no. A person of Timdog’s height would have trouble to even get in – but I am of the local size there and had no trouble.
Vitchek had, however, a more general case to make. He overdid it a bit but as far as I can tell his main point stands: Indonesia has a thoroughly corrupt political class that is quite unresponsive to the needs of its electorate. This is of course no news to any of you but he was writing for a different public.
Indonesia has also a more gruesome recent history (1965, East Timor, Papua) than the rest of Southeast Asia with the possible exception of Kampuchea.
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berlian biru says:
First up, on purely practical matters, evidently English is not Vltchek’s mother tongue,
I believe he is Czech, however from what bio I can find he was born in Leningrad. No doubt the child of some Quisling Czech apparatcik whose parents were rewarded by their Russian politburo masters for helping in the oppression of their fellow countrymen. For the record he speaks almost worse of the current democratic government of the Czech Republic than he does of Indonesia. His wife is Indonesian, although amazingly he himself is now a naturalised American.
Anyway, these bleaters … obviously had the rug pulled out from under them with the fall of the New Order, but seem to have decided, “ah well, let’s just carry on as before – Indonesia’s an evil right wing dictatorship, an ‘archipelago of fear’…”
Spot on, to listen to him as he rages at everything to do with Indonesia, from bakso to dangdut, is to hear a turgid denunciation of a fascist, corporatist (and Islamist for good measure, he hates the Muslims) society without a redeeming feature.
He will continually rant on about “democracy” but his definition of democracy is curiously limited to societies like Chavez’ Venezuela and Cuba with a possible inclusion of China, but he’s nervous about praising China too highly (although he will make excuses for and justify the invasion of Tibet in ways that would make a Suhartoist wish he’d thought of those excuses when it came to East Timor).
Have a read of his interview with that old fraud Pram, you will barely find a more toe-curling piece of sycophancy ever put on record.
Vltchek is an absurd little man, and extremely sensitive to criticism to boot, as are most of his kind.
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Vitchek, Vitchek. I thought that the topic was Indonesia.
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Indeed Ari. I am myself confused, if we take away the hyperbole which the same could be said for some of the comments here we are left with the Jakarta’s public transport system is a joke, efforts to improve that system have failed due to rampant unfeeling corruption, jakarta’s rivers are a rotting tiolet, nothing is ever done for the poor and this from the most resource rich country in SE Asia ( ok, ok, last bit is mine). Seems to be a grab bag of essentially true aspects of Jakarta, sure you could say he has left out some positive aspects (although in the case of Jakarta, I think you would searching hard to find them) does or can anyone really say those are not facts for jakarta?
His conspiracy theory seems to give more credit to the vultures for organization than they deserve but by the same token vested interests have more say than the common good is not a new theme here. Not sure what his political leanings have to do with the price of eggs in this instance.
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Anyway, these bleaters … obviously had the rug pulled out from under them with the fall of the New Order, but seem to have decided, “ah well, let’s just carry on as before – Indonesia’s an evil right wing dictatorship, an ‘archipelago of fear’…”
Well, count Ben Anderson as one more of these bleaters. He has observed the Indonesian scene for over half a century now and he too sees no basic difference between the New Order and the present political dispensation.
See this interview with him:
(I am not happy with his use of the term feudalism – a system based on land possession. When power is based on a network of followers (as it traditionally was in Indonesia and to a large extent still is) you can speak of a patronage system or, if you want to appear to be very learned, use the German term “Personenverbandstaat”. The Indonesian historian Ong Hok Ham has also used the term ”feudalism” too freely. This is not merely a pedantic point. There are quite different principles of social organization involved).
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I thought that the topic was Indonesia.
Actually the title of the thread is “Open”.
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I see Anderson also runs with the 3 million death toll, some nonsense just keeps on running.
I think like the “one million dead in Iraq” figure, you can safely take a line from that absurdity and thereafter treat anyone’s analysis of Indonesia which begins with “millions dead in 1965” with the rather large bucket of salt it deserves.
Why are so many people unable to discuss the very painful events of this period in Indonesia without completely losing the run of themselves?
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But what does a large bucket of salted communists have to do with Jakarta’s abysmal public services?
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I see Anderson also runs with the 3 million death toll, some nonsense just keeps on running.
Anderrson was asked the question:
Wasn’t there an admission by the late General Sarwo Edhie on these killings?
And the answer was:
How would he know about the massacre of 3 million people?
The figure of 3 million people comes from Sarwo Edhie himself. So the answer can be quite easily read as: How would he know that exactly 3 million were killed?
According to the interviewers Anderson spoke earlier about millions.
Whatever is the case Anderson has consulted all the available documentation since decades. You, BB, seem to have only consulted your prejudices in which you apparently have an absurd confidence.
I
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I am not sure that the interviewers quoted Anderson correctly when he allegedly spoke about ‘millions’. He is on record as estimating in 1966 that about 200,000 had been killed and in 1985 he came up with the figure of in between 500,000 and i million. See Wikipedia.
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@timdog
I also note that he suffers from the Naipaul disease of quoting from Jakarta Post in his authoritative journalism on Indonesia – a bit like using the Southall Sikh Community News as your principal media source for a book on Britain.
Why so? The Jakarta Post is part of the local media, they merely publish in English but all their journalistic and editorial staff (with the exception of the Weekender magazine if I’m not mistaken) are Indonesian, over fifty percent of their readership is Indonesian also.
There are no foreign journalists on the payroll of the Post and it is one hundred percent owned by local Indonesian media groups.
I think it unfair to regard the Jakarta Post as some sort of foreign news organization with imported staff like the BBC or CNN, what you read in the Post is a local Indonesian newspaper with articles researched and written by Indonesians who then translate their copy into English.
If anything the biggest criticism that can be levelled against the Post, and one they would accept themselves, is that they are too Java-centric.
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Not prejudices Ari, merely simple rational logic.
There’s no point in rehashing the debate but I maintain that what happened in 1965 was appalling enough and dreadful for those who suffered without having to over-egg the pudding with absurd, logistically unlikely and more often than not politically motivated (see above) exaggeration of the death toll.
I believe the much-dismissed official death toll, ghastly enough as it is but which the New Order government openly admitted, may well be a fairly accurate total given the physical constraints of time and place and the dearth of any evidence, beyond wild guesses, to the contrary.
Just for the record I am no fan of Suharto but I do have some training as a historian.
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Well if any one would have been familiar with the ‘physical constraints of time and place’ it would have been Sarwo Edhie, and it was he who came up with the 3 million number – but he might have wanted to over emphasize his efficiency as a mass murderer.
The least trustworthy number of all seems to me the ‘official’ one of the New Order regime.
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timdog says:
Oigal, I guess the whole thing is an illustration of my point about why people like Vitchek are such idiots – a piece about the fact that Jakarta the capital of a nation being discussed seriously as “the next India” doesn’t have a proper mass transit system, and the reasons why, could have been excellent.
But by baring his absurd prejudices and serving it up with lashings of extreme hyperbole (I mean honestly, people falling through the floor of the carriages?), and deeply immature conspiracy theories, the whole thing ends up being dismissed out of hand.
As I said, any “evil” in Indonesia these days is an accumulation of a million fragmented failings and corruptions, and that is, ultimately more pernicious and depressing than Vitchek’s “evil dictatorship” nonsense.Arie, re. Benedict Anderson and his take on the current lot being “the same” as the New Order, I’d view the “dictator” bit as rather hyperbolic, but would also point out that his initial interpretation of the New Order would unlikely be quite as shrill as that of an infant like Vitchek, so he’s not necessarily saying “the same thing”, is he? And it does need to be pointed out, that whatever their “mentality”, the current crop are beholden to the whims of the electorate in a way that their predecessors simply were not.
What I would agree with is the idea that the “political mentality is the same” – that is, there is simply no ideology. That is the great flaw in Indonesia’s “democracy, and it is clearly a result of 1965 and what came afterwards. While the likes of BB would probably celebrate the fact that there’s no “left wing” sector in Indonesian politics, I would never celebrate if someone successfully eliminated the “right wing” sector in some other country – because the result would ultimately be the same: the stagnation, and ultimately the death, of politics.
I have always been surprised, actually, that the mainstream Islamist parties failed (which they did) to progress given that by their very nature they offered an ideology, something they had over everyone else. But I guess that a combination of a resilience to politicised religion far, far stronger than the shrills would have you believe, and the fact that the country has been politically, ideologically neutered for half a century, meant that the electorate just weren’t interested…Again, all that stuff is more subtle and ultimately more depressing than “western stooge fascist cabal dictator blah blah blah…”
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Now ET and BB, why’d y’all have to go spoil the sense of burgeoning brotherhood? Here you’ve got me, statedly someone with left-wing political ideas, expressing my contempt for the likes of Vitchet, and you have to lower the tone….
ET’s “constantly hammering things through people’s throats, a typical leftie’s strategy”. Oh please. Are you sure you don’t just mean the typical strategy of anyone with the political intellect of a four-year-old? Do you really want me to cite you the names of various public “right-wingers” in the USA (or indeed that of a certain someone late of this parish, for that matter)?
I should also note that grown up “left wing” attitudes are no more about shrieking for revolution and wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt, than rocking back and forth in a darkened corner of the internet barking about immigrants and faggots has anything to do with bone fide “right wing” politics.
For non-infants, social issues are actually the ephemera of politics (and are by no means bound to one side or the other anyway – you can be a bigot whatever your stripe). Politics – real politics – is about issues of taxation, service provision, the role of the state, and economic policy, not “throw ’em out, string ’em up”, nor “take the streets, fly the red flag!”And BB, why on earth the conjectural snarling about Vitchek’s posited parenthood? What on earth has that got to do with anything? He could just as easily have been born on a New Zealand sheep farm, and if he ended up with the same attitudes would be deserving of the same attacks. I’ve already mentioned Max Lane (sorry, but I really do have a bee in my bonnet about that guy); he’s an Australian; if I expressed my contempt for his “scholarship” by way of sneering about his parents “probably being illiterate criminal immigrant scum from the worst parts of London” or some such, well, I’d just look like a tosser, wouldn’t I, and it wouldn’t do much for the strength of my arguments.
On the Jakarta Post, I do know something about how the paper works. Incidentally, besides Bruce Emond of Weekender (who’s been at the paper forever), there are a good few other bules on the staff; they’re just not listed in the paper. The features and Sunday eds are usually bules, and there is, of course, a bank of about a dozen bule copy-editors who put the product in some kind of order before it goes on the page.
You are right, of course, it is a bone fide part of the Indonesian media. However, it would just give me a little more confidence in the qualifications of someone who awards themself the right to discourse authoritatively about Indonesia, if they could cite, just for a change, say, Kompas or some such.
Circulation figures and readership demographics are slippery things; the Jakarta Post claims a circulation of 45,000. Rumours have it that the real print run (which is always more than the circulation) is half that.
Either way, Kompas circulates half-a-million; Jawa Pos does three million… You get my point, surely? -
Timdog, the JP is part-owned and printed by Kompas, in many ways it’s merely the English language version of that paper as Kompas is where most of the senior editorial staff emanate from. There are bule copy-editors, naturally, but the journos are all Indons.
The Post’s actual circulation is nearer 30,000 but its local readership is comprised of the sort of demographic that would have most other publications licking their lips in envy. I believe it’s something ridiculous like 80% university degree holder, 90% senior management. Off the top of my head admittedly but I recall being impressed by the stats when I saw them once. It can fairly be described as having its finger on the pulse of the Indonesian elite even if it does rather pass the ordinary man in the street by.
I take your point re: Vltchek’s parentage, but as you’ve probably surmised by now I’ve met the guy and didn’t like him at all, even if I had no idea about his politics.
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Arie, re. Benedict Anderson and his take on the current lot being “the same” as the New Order, I’d view the “dictator” bit as rather hyperbolic, but would also point out that his initial interpretation of the New Order would unlikely be quite as shrill as that of an infant like Vitchek, so he’s not necessarily saying “the same thing”, is he? And it does need to be pointed out, that whatever their “mentality”, the current crop are beholden to the whims of the electorate in a way that their predecessors simply were not.
I didn’t say that he was saying the same thing as Vitchek. I said that he was saying approximately the same thing as the ‘bleaters’ you castigated (and among whom you only mentioned Max Lane). As far as Lane is concerned I trust that what you say about him is correct. I won’t check up. Having met him personally once I have no further interest in his views.
And about that current crop of Indonesian “trapos” (the Filipino word for established ‘traditional’ politicians who just play the game of musical chairs) “being beholden to the whims of the electorate” – who is guilty of hyperbole now?
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Arie, BB,
I’ve met the guy and didn’t like him at all, even if I had no idea about his politics.
Having met him personally once I have no further interest in his views.
My! What lucky boys you are! 😉
Arie, now then, now then, mister; it was “the current crop are beholden to the whims of the electorate in a way that their predecessors simply were not…” The last part rather changes the inference. I would hardly proclaim Indonesia a vision of a perfect, vibrant democracy – and that has at least in large part to do with the aforementioned absence of ideology – but the basic workings of democracy are in place, and when it comes to the actual business of putting ballots into boxes, the country is very clean indeed by the standards of the region.
I’d also point out, as an aside, that the Indonesian press is far, far freer than it was under the New Order. And that certainly counts for something.
All that’s missing is for someone (preferably not an Islamist) to stand up and offer a bit of ideology, and we’re ready to rock and roll…BB, I’ve seen those demographics profiles myself (45,000 certainly did used to be their officially claimed circulation), and from an advertising salesman’s perspective they are an absolute dream.
And yes, obviously, the Post has access of a kind that no other paper of such similarly paltry circulation would have (I mean, seriously, Warta Bali, Pos Kupang, or Radar Kediri all probably shift more copies). And obviously I’m aware of the Kompas-Gramedia connection.
But like I said, I someone talking “authoratively” about Indonesia was able to cite me a few articles from, say, Jawa Pos, Media Indonesia, Antara, Kompas, Tempo (well, I know they have a rather stodgy translated edition – does anyone ever read it?), or, hell, Pos Kupang, I might feel a bit more like I was in safe hands… -
Timdog,
to return to the Anderson interview:
Anderson:
The system is ruled by a dictator with an oligarchic system, sharing the spoils, no opposition. They know that as long as the spoils are divided and everyone is asked to participate, the oligarchy is safe. No member of the oligarchy has had the courage to break away and do something different. Perhaps this will change when there is another economic crisis.
Interviewers:
Indonesian politicians today also are grooming their family members and their children to continue their leadership role and status.
Anderson:
They have nothing except their parents’ or their husbands’ names. These political crown princes and princesses is (sic) a
reflection of feudalism …Does it in such a system matter very much whether or not ballot boxes are stuffed in the correct way?
I mean those “trapos” grooming their family members for their eventual succession are obviously not very worried about the “whims of the electorate”. If need be they join the party that is likely to get the upper hand. The lack of ideology you commented on makes that rather easy (as it is in the Philippines). Is that oligarchy more permeable than it was under the New Order? I don’t know. Do you?
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Arie, dynastic politics is, it seems a particularly rampant disease in Asia, and in all honesty (go ahead, roll your eyes; I’m about to do that thing again 😉 ) it doesn’t strike me as being as pervasive in Indonesia as it is in the Subcontinent…
Patrick French in a recent book about India had a look at the numbers of elected “hereditary” politicians. It’s fascinating stuff – at first glance the figures he collected didn’t look as bad as you might suspect, but then he began to break them down, and it turned out that virtually all MPs in their 30s and 20s were dynasts, the sons and daughters, usually, of the previous incumbent of the same seat. His bleak conclusion is that there’s every likelihood that within a couple of decades, as the last survivors of the first generation die off, every elected Indian politician will be hereditary…
But the thing is, there is rather more ideology available in India than in Indonesia, and the political discourse has a bit more life (it’s positively raucous, actually; the fact that an unelected female Italian immigrant is the most powerful person in the country notwithstanding; only in India, as they say). And people do still have to win and lose their seats, regardless of how they got the inintial nomination. So you could very readily argue that the dynastic tendencies don’t really matter (and that, of course, without mentioning a certain family by the name of Bush), so long as the democracy is functioning.
Indonesia has the structures in place – a free and noisy press, and a clean and efficient electoral process on the actual ground. Dynastic politics doesn’t have to be as bad as all that, as long as there’s some ideology, and some parties with enough clout really to call coalition shots. And that, admittedly, is where Indonesia falls down… -
timdog
What I would agree with is the idea that the “political mentality is the same” – that is, there is simply no ideology. That is the great flaw in Indonesia’s “democracy, and it is clearly a result of 1965 and what came afterwards.
I’ve been living here for more than a decade almost exclusively among Indonesians themselves and I can assure you that – as far as I have been able to assess – low and middle class Indonesians have absolutely no political ideology, only some vague party affiliation, mostly based on direct profit or social pressure from banjar or RT. Most Indonesians whom I tried to invite into conversations about politics in their country became evasive or fell back on typical clichés. The fear induced by the Suharto regime seems still very present. Many spanduk you see during election times in front of the houses are simply put there not as propaganda for the KK’s favorite party but simply because he has been paid to do so by the highest bidder.
Now ET and BB, why’d y’all have to go spoil the sense of burgeoning brotherhood? Here you’ve got me, statedly someone with left-wing political ideas, expressing my contempt for the likes of Vitchet, and you have to lower the tone….
ET’s “constantly hammering things through people’s throats, a typical leftie’s strategy”. Oh please. Are you sure you don’t just mean the typical strategy of anyone with the political intellect of a four-year-old? Do you really want me to cite you the names of various public “right-wingers” in the USA
Just to make a few things clear. I grew up being a left-leaner myself until I noticed that “the left”, which was originally a movement for social justice, as well as “the green” were hijacked by cultural marxism aka Frankfurt School, with a different agenda and methodology, through infiltration in and for a great deal monopolizing the media and the educationary system to brainwash the young and undermine the core values upon which traditional society was build. What the red revolution hadn’t been able to accomplish was replaced by insidious mind control through the invention of political correctness and social engineerihg. To them we have to thank the moral dilemmas that plague many western societies, the US not in the least.
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“The Left”, ET, in my book, and in the book of most people essentially of the political mainstream, is simply a practical, ideological, and if you like ethical, leaning about the way a country should be run. It is not a “movement”, though the lunatic fringe of the other side would have you believe that it was, and that therefore Vitchek, Ed Miliband, Fidel Castro and Barrack Obama are all card-carrying members of some organised cabal.
Most “lefties”, beleive it or not, simply believe that public services should be as much as possible be provided without private sector involvement, that healthcare and eductaion and a number of other basic services that most people in the developed world take for granted should be provided tax-funded and free at the point of delivery, and that while old-fashioned “left” economic models clearly are doomed to failure in the post-modern, globalised world (China and Vietnam’ll tell you that), the great capitilist chimera, “trickle down economics” simply doesn’t work unless someone (namely the government) is forcing something to trickle down through structures and provisions that would come under the aegis of “the left”…
A “movement”, “brainwashing the young” and infiltrating the education system? Oh get a grip mister; we’re all adults here. What you’re issuing there is the equivalent of Joosdiddit…
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Sorry, but if I happen to say “I don’t want a profiteering private corporation to run my hospital, on the deeply dubious rationale of ‘choice’ because it strikes me as so potentially catastrophic not to mention potentially unethical, and likewise, I do not want my school funded and managed by a private corporation,” and you shriek back that I’m a member of a “movement”, a fellow traveller of Vitchek bent on brainwashing the kids in the name of “cultural marxism” (say what??!?), then we are clearly operating at the level of the playpen.
It’s just ridiculous. -
I wasn’t referring to pragmatics in economic policy nor even state provided healthcare and other services. I just wanted to point out the shift in mentality and morality that came about during the last decennia during which individual responsability and initiative became inferior to social dependency and ideological affiliation aka political correctness.
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While the likes of BB would probably celebrate the fact that there’s no “left wing” sector in Indonesian politics,
My turn to scold you I think, I am perfectly happy with a bilateral political entity (I subscribe to the late Queen Mother’s, may the Lord rest her, opinion that the best outcome of an election was a Tory government with a strong Labour opposition).
What I am quite happy to be without is communism, in just the same way that tens of millions of Germans seem to function perfectly happily in a body politic that has been thoroughly extirpated of Nazism. I’m a liberal (in the old fashioned sense) democrat in short.
Specifically on Indonesia, isn’t the PDI-(P) nominally the party of the little guy against the elites? Are there any strong left wing political movements (left-wing in the sense that an Anglo-Saxon would know it) in SE Asia?
I ask out of genuine curiousity, does such a thing exist in Malaysia or Thailand (I’m assuming Thaksin doesn’t count)?
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ET,
I could quite easily turn to you and say that you have been duped by a sustained, decades-long discourse in the right-leaning sectors of the mainstream media, and the shoal of remoras swimming beneath its belly which would have it that bone fide public health provision is somehow tantamount to a “marxism”, that “choice” (i.e. profit) is essential to defeat Joe Stalin’s hordes who are currently rampaging through schools and the BBC on a brainwashing mission, and that an evil global cabal of “cultural marxists” (say what, again???!?!) are preparing the planet for a New World Order. And that this is a line designed to stop you actually saying, “Hey, let’s stop and actually examine the cases on either side,” but paranoidly to howl instead “Obamacare must be stopped! They’re communists!”, a line which has been met with such feeble challenges precisely because of the manifest death of “the Left” as any kind of “movement”, and the filling of the ranks of the nominally “left wing” parties of most of “the West” with myopic box tickers who the previous generation would have regarded as running dog capitalist pigs…Call me oldfashioned, but I’d actually much rather actually just discuss the alternate approaches to genuine political issues, like how to fund healthcare. That’s politics for grown-ups.
On an entirely other note – and I have no idea why it just popped into my head – but the other day I was riding my bike through a small town near the East-Central Java border, when I stopped at the traffic lights. On the wall to the right, amongst the other grafiti, was a glorious piece of heresy – it said “Sorry, your God is currently having sex…” which made me smile, anyway…
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My turn to scold you I think, I am perfectly happy with a bilateral political entity (I subscribe to the late Queen Mother’s, may the Lord rest her, opinion that the best outcome of an election was a Tory government with a strong Labour opposition).
Alright BB, my bad. And I must say that the Queen Mum’s ideal would be a damn sight better than the horror currently in place in the UK. I mean, seriously, Blair and Thatcher spawned a bastard, and it’s called the Con-Dem coalition…
On the question of the left in the rest of the region, I genuinely don’t know, but would suggest that given that Indonesia, if only by default, certainly gets onto the “most democratic country in ASEAN” podium, the question might well be academic.
In India, however, Congress clearly do have at least the remnents of a left-wing core, while the BJP evidentally are of the right. And hell, there are even tame communists kicking around…
That’s why India’s democracy, despite being more corrupt (in terms of vote buying ballot stuffing, and intimidation at polling booths) and more hereditary than Indonesia’s, is actually the healthier version…
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Well, having read it again and reflected, I find myself in something approaching agreement with BB…
First up, on purely practical matters, evidently English is not Vltchek’s mother tongue, but anyone with the temerity to describe themself as “a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist” working in English ought to make a point of sorting their grammar out. As doesn’t “Counterpunch” have a copy-editor? It ought to get one if it wants to be taken seriously…
Now I think I have placed it firmly on record which side of the fence I stand, but there is a certain kind of “campaigning journalist” and “historian” from the out-dated “left” who still like to think of Indonesia as some kind of extreme right dictatorship (not something I entirely believe was ever the case – as I think I mentioned elsewhere, it’s always seemed to me that the New Order, despite its rhetoric and economic policies, followed an essentially left-leaning model of service provision and community development, but that’s another story).
Anyway, these bleaters (amongst the “historians” Max Lane is notable; he’s a man I would particularly like to poke in the eye, particularly for his grotesque romantising of “aksi” and apologetics for anti-Chinese violence) obviously had the rug pulled out from under them with the fall of the New Order, but seem to have decided, “ah well, let’s just carry on as before – Indonesia’s an evil right wing dictatorship, an ‘archipelago of fear’…”
It’s just stupid. And worse, the kind of flagrant hyperbole demonstrated in this article from Vltchek has a dampening, deadening effect on real, valid criticism…
Now very clearly his conspiracy theories are nonsense, and his talk of passengers “falling through the floor of trains” and tumbling from busway platforms is actually laughable.
And his talk of the poverty viewed from trains? Well, he’d see the same thing in Bangkok (despite its excellent public transport), and he’s see much worse in the Philippines and India (where, incidentally, Bajaj auto-rickshaws are very much still on the roads, despite what he claims).
I also note that he suffers from the Naipaul disease of quoting from Jakarta Post in his authoritative journalism on Indonesia – a bit like using the Southall Sikh Community News as your principal media source for a book on Britain. Does he actually speak Indonesian well enough to read the local press (which is certainly proving vigorous in its coverage of current corruption cases)?
Anyway, to repeat, this kind of laughably lurid overblowing of the situation has the effect of deadening real valid criticism.
Any “evil” in the way Indonesia operates these days is of a far more banal kind than “evil conspiring fascist western stooge dictatorship”. It’s built of a million small individual failures and corruptions, and rests with no wicked dalang. Of course, that’s ultimately more depressing than the idea of a cabal of fascists in the palace – itself a childish idea for a childish man, which Vltchek evidently is…
(and yes, BB, though I found your attitude towards the slaughter of 1965-66 thoroughly callous – a classic example of violent political prejudice utterly overriding compassion – you are quite right; “3 million” is clearly over the top – though in his defense he does say “from 800,000 to 3 million”. We know your take – but most people without their own clouding prejudices probably wouldn’t be upset by his lower parameter)…