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
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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