Indonesian History
So, I’m a dumb American. And I grew up in an education system that didn’t teach us much about the rest of the world. I used to think this was normal but the more I’ve traveled and met people from other countries, the more I’ve learned it isn’t. Brazilian students learn about George Washington and the Civil War, but what do we learn about Pedro I or US-backed dictatorship? Kids in India know a lot about the modern history of our country, but if you polled the average high schooler they’d know nothing about Indira Gandhi and The Emergency, or the tremendous undertaking of their first-ever elections following independence.
I was embarrassed by how little I knew about the history of the world outside my country, so I’ve spent the last few years learning about national histories, one-by-one. I can’t believe it took me this long to get to Indonesia, which has a complicated and fascinating history.
Maybe its history best-illustrated through its influences. They first had their own small agrarian civilizations that held animistic beliefs and traded largely amongst themselves. They then saw heavy influence from India and China due to their extensive trade, leading to the rise of Hinduism, then Buddhism in monuments we can still see today such as the magnificent Borobudur temple on the island of Java. There were subsequently Muslim traders who first landed in Aceh (still one of the most devoutly Muslim parts of the country today) and Islam quickly overtook the Hindu-Buddhist traditions.
Predictably, a bunch of European colonialists showed up and ruined everything. The Portuguese had a minor presence in the area, many words in Indonesian still reflect their influence and Timor-Leste is a curious case of a Portuguese-speaking country very, very far away from Portugal. But it’s really the Dutch who took over much of the land, running a brutal spice colony that did little to help the native people who had a fractured but flourishing society.
There were many attempts to throw the Dutch out, but none were successful until WW2 when the Japanese did it, whereupon many leading Indonesian nationalists became collaborators in the hopes that after the war they could function as the government. Eventually, the war did end and the Dutch did leave, and the nation was nervously shepherded into existence by a great orator and womanizer, Sukarno. I read some of his speeches, I thought they were very moving, did you know he had something like 9 wives? He was famously a political mastermind, careful to not get too close to any faction, though he eventually settled on a sort of socialist belief system. He also went to war with Malaysia to distract from a floundering economy, let’s hope nobody ever thinks of that again!
He was eventually deposed in a coup by a quiet, ruthless man, Suharto. He oversaw horrendous pogroms against leftists and anyone accused or suspected of sympathizing with leftists. He also instituted an incredibly bloody counterinsurgence in Timor-Leste, out of fear that, if they were allowed to be independent, it would break up the whole nation. Of course, Timor-Leste did become independent. And notably, Indonesia remains entirely whole with nobody else following suit, oops! It’s almost like this tiny country where the people speak a different language, hold different religious beliefs and never wanted to be part of Indonesia in the first place was a bad indicator of how the rest of the Archipelago would act.
His brutality did also come with a much stabler economy, one that was developing rapidly. And while it eventually stagnated and this lead to the end of his brutal New Order regime, it demonstrates that we’ve always had dictators who wanted us to accept authoritarian rule “for the good of the economy”.
Indonesia is a unique country, it’s the 4th-largest in the world, and the largest nation that’s predominantly Muslim. They’re also a sprawling Archipelago of 17,000 islands that spans over 5,000 kilometers. Just the existence of such a country is remarkable and worth learning about. And when people talk about vacations to Bali or the wilderness of Borneo, it’s far too easy for us in the Western world to forget that there’s an incredibly complicated culture and history to these places full of tourists. In a time where our government wants us to fear and distrust anything or anyone from beyond our nation, we should seek to learn as much as we can about the outside world. There’s a whole world out there!