Inheriting Anger

I am staying in my mother’s house on the side of a mountain in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

The afternoon thunderstorm is coating the green bamboos and the lush rice paddies in its gray peacefulness.

Yet, for a while I have been sitting here staring blankly at the long snakelike valley with anger beating at my breast.

The wave of anger came as I had just read a particular passage from Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. In it, Klein argues that America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

One of the first countries used as an experiment for the propagation of free-market economic policies by way of a military coup d’etat upon a ‘too-leftist-leaning’ first president was… Indonesia.

The brutal military coup, masterminded by General Suharto (who came to be Indonesia’s second president and ruled for 32 ½ years) combed the countryside for alleged ‘Communists’.

Women associated with Gerwani, a national women’s organization which had until then worked to provide universal childcare and combat illiteracy, were particularly targeted.

In late September 1965, the military fabricated and propagated the story that Gerwani members had brutally mutilated and then murdered army generals in an attempt to overthrow the government. Thousands of women were arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tortured and remain branded as shunned ‘Communists’ to this day.

Some of the women had never heard of ‘Communism’, they were just trying to provide affordable community childcare.

Yet even their children do not believe them, as since 1966, thanks to three decades (and counting) of carefully formulated ‘education’, we were fed the story of how the Gerwani women danced around the army generals naked whilst singing a popular folk song, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ and mutilating their penises.

Klein notes that Suharto ‘had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto’. (2007:69)

I then read another statement that only compounded the anguish I feel on behalf of all of us whose nations have been systematically robbed of our natural resources; all of us who have been reduced to being nothing more but cheap, dumb and alienated labour on our own lands (actually most of the lands don’t belong to us anymore, they belong to multinational corporations), all of us whose bodies were considered expendable enough to be experimented upon for the state’s terror-spreading purposes, all of us, all of us, all of us…

The statement goes: ‘The success of that [operation] meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ (2007:69)

In Chile (September 11,1973), in China (June 3, 1989), in South Africa, Poland, the list goes on…

And I think my renewed outrage comes from being reminded that all of this suffering, all of this, as Klein would put it, ‘shock therapy’, employed at both the macro level of economic policies and political coup d’etats, as well as at the micro level of people's bodies… all of this suffering, all of this ignorance, all of this pain, all of these lies… all of this was for the propagation of free-market policies?

Let us have a moment here.

We need to realize that my mother’s memories of the Solo river in 1965-1966 Java, being clogged with bodies of the anonymously assassinated... only happened in order to open up our country’s economy to foreign control and exploitation.

Let us commemorate the ‘Gerwani’ women who still find their identification cards marked ‘communist affiliated’ to this day… and acknowledge that their on-going suffering was imposed upon them in order to make us, in neo-liberal speak: ‘internationally competitive’.

In order to become ‘internationally competitive’, we have been told that we ‘need’ to get rid of the minimum wage, we ‘need’ to get rid of unionism… otherwise we will scare Foreign Direct Investment away.

Wonderful! All of this brutality came to pass so that we may become slaves to Foreign Direct Investment and systematically be made to fail in protecting our farmers, our primary producers, our industry sector, our women, our political and historical awareness… our people.

How can one not be angry?