Indonesia’s Emergence
insidestory.org.au
insidestory.org.au
Not sure if it was taken down, update: https://youtu.be/nSf3268tAbg?si=9v7yFavM7okwMy9N
Can’t imagine day-to-day life with stepping on recently dropped unexploded bombs being a real danger
Arguably the occupation of West-Papua is the worst of that. Also because there's just so little attention to it.
The punchline is that this is hurting the US even more now as that keeping these governments aligned is a much harder job than imagined and they are being scooped by Chinese influence in the present day.
Yes, but, colonial rule was a) not at all sustainable b) probably thoroughly corrupt in favour of different rulers and c) directly responsible for the shape of Indonesian politics today.
So, yeah.
I am a citizen of both a former British colony and a British citizen and I have fairly recent ancestry from another former British colony. I suspect some of my ancestors support the British (because they seem to have up to my grandparents generation) because it allowed them freedom of movement, or because they had been oppressed by the previous ruling castes.
Colonial rule in many places was only possible because it had significant local support. A good example is that a tiny number of British people were not holding places like India through force of arms.
Did British colonisation really have significant local support from the Sinhalese?
Because I feel like the fact that there were two Kandyan wars before Britain managed to take control of Sri Lanka is a strong argument against that.
And if the British colonisation had so much local support, then why did they import Tamils, surely the Sinhalese were eager to work for them?
Colonisers have always played off groups/tribes/petty kingdoms against each other to gain a foothold. Substantial support? Citation needed, seriously.
And as for India not being held by arms alone, true, it was also held by alliances with petty kingdoms and diplomats playing them off against each other.
As well as a bunch of armed soldiers invading when push came to shove.
This is exactly how it played out in Ireland too. Where my family is from - on the coloniser side.
But then India wasn't a coherent polity at the time - which is the point I made in a previous paragraph about how colonisers rolled.
With regard to India, and to some extent Sri Lanka, the worst lower castes had to fear from empires was that one oppressor would be replaced with another. They also got the opportunity to move and start elsewhere (as my fisher caste ancestors did, very successfully) where prejudices were weaker.
I would turn your question about Tamil labour in Sri Lanka around - why were they willing to leave their homes and go to another country to work for the British?
I did not say there everyone supported British rule, I said a large enough group did to make it viable. Minorities and oppressed groups were probably more likely to do so.
According to the books I have read on colonial Sri Lanka there was definitely support. It is also the only explanation of how a tiny number of British people could run the country (just as in India). Sometimes you would have one British civil servant in charge of a district, and the only British person in that district.
I recently read Leonard Woolf's biography (the second volume) and it is very illuminating on how things did work - and this is a work of a man who came to oppose the imperial project, so not biased in favour of it.
The person I responded to was heavily implying that.
This is even more starkly evident in its neighbor, Malaysia, where the Islamic dynasty had only been established for about a century before Europeans showed up. Ethnographically, to be "Malay" in Malaysia is to claim descent from overseas colonists from elsewhere in SE Asia, not from the "native" peoples of the peninsula (i.e. those who migrated prior to recorded history).
Because of its size and diversity (geographic and cultural), it's entirely unsurprising that Indonesia is politically... complex. Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial periods blend almost seamlessly into its long history, which perhaps more than any other region in the world is a product of serial colonization by seafaring empires. But similar patterns are seen throughout SE Asia--rich, dynamic, if sometimes contentious, admixture of cultures resulting from millennia of seafaring, both peaceful and in conquest.
Never mind that the Japanese lost or that a good number of SE Asian countries weren't fans of Japan, they saw first hand that the Europeans could be pushed aside.
Many countries in the region post WWII pursued citizen lead democracies that expressed interest in socialist policy | ideals; these didn't fare well with post war European colonial powers pissing in US ears and encouraging coups and pro US military dictators.
The US|UN aligning with Indonesia against Dutch interests is one example that seems to break that pattern, however US mining interests and US anti communist interests aligned in not wanting a war of Indo Vs Dutch that would send Indo back to the communists and ruin chances of huge US owned mined in W.Papua.
It's hard to say if being ruled from Jakarta is better than being ruled from Amsterdam.
I’m a native of a former colony so I absolutely hate colonialism and don’t see any good coming out of it. Even though it I try to detach myself from that situation, I can see some good things have been done. But I think it’s fair to reason that we could have done those things ourselves given enough time and interaction with the outside world.
At the same time it appears to me that people who are natives of former coloniser powers who want to keep apologising for and even glorifying the imperial times do so by minimising the extremely harmful effects of settler imperialism. Maybe they are compensating for the rise of a section of their culture which is too apologetic of their own history.
So even though the actual events of history and their consequences are complex, in the current time I’d rather have a king/queen who has all their eggs in my basket than have a backup option somewhere else.
Not most. All. Including ours. All independence stories are nonsense if you bother to think about it.
> They were enabled by the US to kick out the Europeans out of their colonies.
That's some serious revisionist nonsense. Not only was the US was one of major 'european' colonizers in east asia since the early 1800s, it was also a major guarantor/protector of european colonial interests in east asia. The US fought the japanese in ww2 mainly to protect european colonial interests. Delve a little deeper than superficial propaganda. The vietnam war was the US fighting the vietnamese to protect european/french colonial interests. Heck today, the US is the major 'european' colonial power in east asia, and the rest of the world, protecting european colonial interests.
> The punchline is that this is hurting the US even more now as that keeping these governments aligned is a much harder job than imagined and they are being scooped by Chinese influence in the present day.
'Scooped by china'. What gibberish. Does that mean they were 'scooped by the US' after ww2?
Pearl Harbor was the main reason. And perhaps the Philippines (a US territory at the time). But the US gave up most of its overseas empire after the war, so it’s hard to argue they fought the war to keep their colonies
[I live in Indonesia as an expact]
They were early adopters of appalling character leaders, Suharto was elected in 1968 after seizing power and self appointing in 1967.
He was repeatedly elected for thirty years (with varying amounts of opposition and rigging during those decades).
Just saw this in Wikipedia: "When a UN delegation arrived in Jakarta on 8 September, they were told by Habibie that reports of bloodshed in East Timor were "fantasies" and "lies". General Wiranto of the Indonesian military insisted that his soldiers had the situation under control, and later expressed his emotion for East Timor by singing the 1975 hit song "Feelings" at an event for military wives."
I recommend "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World" book for people looking to understand how the coup was orchestrated and what followed it.
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-islam-came-to-dominate...