{"id":1012,"date":"2008-01-28T19:31:17","date_gmt":"2008-01-28T09:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1012"},"modified":"2008-01-28T19:48:54","modified_gmt":"2008-01-28T09:48:54","slug":"suharto-another-life-cut-tragically-short","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1012","title":{"rendered":"Suharto: Another life cut tragically short"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>times 22.12.65 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling<\/ul>\n<p>From the <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\">Department of Crime Doesn&#8217;t Pay<\/a><\/strong> comes the sad <a href=\"http:\/\/ap.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5ijDA5bgxiHlTvS_r-SSjskS1Tq1wD8UE27QO0\">news<\/a> [AP, January 26\/7] that former Indonesian President Suharto (1965&#8211;1998) has died at the tender age of 86, after a lifetime of service to the poor of Indonesia:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;Suharto took power in 1965, with Washington\u2019s strong support and assistance. Army-led massacres wiped out the PKI [<em>Partai Komunis Indonesia<\/em>\/Communist Party of Indonesia] and devastated its mass base in &#8220;one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century,&#8221; comparable to the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the CIA reported, judging &#8220;the Indonesian coup&#8221; to be &#8220;certainly one of the most significant events of the 20th century&#8221;. Perhaps half a million or more were killed within a few months.<\/p>\n<p>The events were greeted [by] undisguised euphoria. <em>The New York Times<\/em> described the &#8220;staggering mass slaughter&#8221; as &#8220;a gleam of light in Asia,&#8221; praising Washington for keeping its own role quiet so as not to embarrass the &#8220;Indonesian moderates&#8221; who were cleansing their society, then rewarding them with generous aid. <em>Time<\/em> praised the &#8220;quietly determined&#8221; leader Suharto with his &#8220;scrupulously constitutional&#8221; procedures &#8220;based on law, not on mere power&#8221; as he presided over a &#8220;boiling bloodbath&#8221; that was &#8220;the West\u2019s best news for years in Asia&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The reaction was near uniform. The World Bank restored Indonesia to favour. Western governments and corporations flocked to Suharto\u2019s &#8220;paradise for investors,&#8221; impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20 years, Suharto was hailed as a &#8220;moderate&#8221; who is &#8220;at heart benign&#8221; (<em>The Economist<\/em>) as he compiled a record of slaughter, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history.<\/p>\n<p>Suharto is also hailed for his economic achievements. An Australian specialist who participated in economic modeling in Indonesia dismisses the standard figures as &#8220;seriously inaccurate&#8221;: the regularly reported 7% growth rate, for example, was invented on government orders, overruling the assessment of the economists. He confirms that economic growth took place, thanks to Indonesia\u2019s oil reserves and the green revolution, &#8220;the benefits of which even the massive inefficiency of the system of corruption could not entirely erode.&#8221; The benefits were enhanced by extraction of other resources and the supply of super-cheap labour, kept that way by the labour standards that impress Washington. Much of the rest is &#8220;a mirage,&#8221; as was quickly revealed when &#8220;foreign investors stampeded.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The estimated $80 billion private debt is held by at most a few hundred individuals, Indonesian economists estimate, perhaps as few as fifty. The wealth of the Suharto family is estimated at roughly the scale of the IMF rescue package. The estimates suggest simple ways to overcome the &#8220;financial crisis,&#8221; but these are not on the agenda. The costs are to be borne primarily by 200 million Indonesians who borrowed nothing, along with Western taxpayers, in accord with the rules of &#8220;really existing capitalism&#8221;&#8230; ~ Noam Chomsky, <a href=\"http:\/\/mondediplo.com\/1998\/06\/02chomsky\">&#8216;Indonesia, master card in Washington\u2019s hand&#8217;<\/a>, <em>Le Monde Diplomatique<\/em>, June 1998<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Oddly, <em>The Newspaper of Record<\/em> has not greeted Suharto&#8217;s tragic death in quite the same awed tones as it did his assumption of power in 1965. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/01\/28\/world\/asia\/28suharto.html?bl&#038;ex=1201582800&#038;en=a0d7bd56323e1b26&#038;ei=5087%0A\">this year&#8217;s version<\/a>, his &#8220;32-year dictatorship was one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century&#8221;, characterised by &#8220;pervasive and large-scale corruption; repressive, militarized rule; and a convulsion of mass bloodletting when he seized power in the late 1960s that took at least 500,000 lives&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Huh? What happened to the gleam of light?<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/world\/article\/0,8599,1707280,00.html\">Time<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Stability had been Suharto&#8217;s gift to his country. He had come to power at the head of a junta of generals in 1965, overthrowing the country&#8217;s flamboyant and charismatic first president, Sukarno, whose friendship with Beijing and predeliction for Communists in the government had brought the country to the brink of economic collapse and civil war. Ensconced in power, Suharto proceeded to purge the country of Communism and anyone suspected of Communist sympathy. No one knows how many died. One estimate has it at 500,000 \u2014 among them many Indonesians of Chinese descent. The Communist Party was outlawed and Indonesian citizens banned from having Chinese names&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wha-? Surely, if Suharto&#8217;s coup and the subsequent mass murder was the West\u2019s best news for years in Asia, the death of one of its key architects merits some more extensive acknowledgment? Locally, <em>The Patron Saint of Adelaide Private School Boys<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=457\">Alexander Downer<\/a>, has perhaps come closest to <a href=\"http:\/\/news.theage.com.au\/rudd-offers-condolences-for-suharto\/20080127-1og7.html\">recognising<\/a> Soharto&#8217;s many virtues (in both theory and practice):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;He was a man who despite his human rights record in Indonesia, which was <a href=\"http:\/\/news.amnesty.org.au\/news\/comments\/328\/\">less than desirable<\/a>, he was committed to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.com.au\/heraldsun\/story\/0,21985,22759894-5000117,00.html\">a good relationship with Australia<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/multinationalmonitor.org\/mm2006\/012006\/scheiner.html\">understood the importance of Australia to Indonesia<\/a>,&#8221; Mr Downer told AAP from his home in the Adelaide Hills.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I always appreciated that and he was always <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/asia-pacific\/7097652.stm\">very civil<\/a> in my dealings with him and very responsive to building a relationship between Australia and Indonesia.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He had a very good vision for building a strong South-East Asian community and a positive view about Australia being part of that.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Speaking of which, Eighties&#8217; music has become synonymous with Disco, Pop, and New Wave. But when I think Eighties, I think <a href=\"http:\/\/www.markprindle.com\/crucif.htm\">Crucifucks<\/a>. <em>I wanna take the President \/ Chop off his head \/ And mail it to them in a garbage bag \/ Hinkley had a vision \/ Hinkley had a vision&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<ul><object width=\"425\" height=\"355\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/fGyz16_MfMI&#038;rel=1\"><\/param><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"><\/param><\/object><\/ul>\n<ul>As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the <em>Times<\/em> and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>times 22.12.65 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling From the Department of Crime Doesn&#8217;t Pay comes the sad news [AP, January 26\/7] that former Indonesian President Suharto (1965&#8211;1998) has died at the tender age of 86, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=1012\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-natas","category-state"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-gk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}