Jaundiced Pigs Spitting

In May 1998, a series of riots took Jakarta by storm. Our eyes, flooded by tears, witnessed the violent abuse of the pribumi towards the ethnic Chinese, as Suharto’s regime came to its ultimate demise. In our metropolis, solace was nowhere to be found, as the rancid stench of grim suffering and odium poisoned the arid minds of the victimized. Our great Jakarta, past its façade of glass and steel, was reduced to social debris, as discord between the ethnic Chinese and the native Indonesians disjointed our people in an infinite void of grudge.

My people, yellow-skinned public spitters of horrid artistic tastes, pride ourselves for our cunning wit, perseverance, and willingness to do anything to achieve success. This is who we are, and for being who we are, we have achieved much in this archipelago of seemingly endless opportunities.

In our short time of living here, we, who constitute for just about two percent of the Indonesian population, have grown to dominate the Indonesian aristocracy, with over eighty percent of Indonesia’s wealthiest being of Chinese race.

Funny how the minority comprises for the majority of the privileged. They hate us, but it’s certainly understandable. Envy, after all, is among the most effective catalysts for strife. Throw in obese Italians and you have yourself an opera.

We whine about how we are not given equal rights – how Indonesia will never have a Chinese president; how we are viewed as treasure houses for which we are to be exploited with bribery and corruption. Taxation is targeted at Chinese people and we complain. Sure, it’s irritating, but it is only logical that they tax the people who actually have money to be taxed for.

The reason the Chinese people are so wealthy in this country is that we are selfish and devious enough to exploit the naïve pribumi. Our industriousness doesn’t purely owe to our natural intelligence and determination – it’s more about how fortunate we are that these people are gullible enough to tolerate THEIR underpayment; THEIR mistreatment; the harvesting of THEIR natural resources for our capitalist mindsets. Take a look at America, the capitalist haven where WE are the used ones – mere chefs, butchers, maids, and takeout boys confined to ghetto Chinatowns.

A chauvinistic Chinese idiot keeps on saying how we are the superior race; how CHINESE people are better at designing AMERICAN furniture than AMERICANS are; how sleazy and faulty every non-Chinese person is; how we strive while others fail. True, such is the case in Indonesia, where the natives are not fully acquainted with capitalist evil. But if his bigoted remarks are so true, then why does he continue admitting that he would not be able to do business in Australia – a land of capitalist Caucasians?

Our successes are based on their failures. We took hold of Singapore – Malayan land – and converted it into a thriving Chinese metropolis while its neighbors, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, remain overshadowed by the merlion. Worst of all, they didn’t even realize that we stole their land, and they remain kind and naïve enough to supply Singapore with water.

We ought to stop complaining that they’re not giving us enough rights or that they treat us as the filthy exploiters that we are. We ought to stop viewing ourselves as the finer people and realize that our cousins in Western Chinatowns aren’t doing as well as we are. We ought to realize that though we dwarf the Indonesians here, we remain overshadowed by Caucasians in their lands. We ought to end our parade of social superiority, sympathize, and help, rather than shrilly whining about the poverty and hunger that we – jaundiced, ravenous, conceited, spitting gluttons – have brought unto them.

Indonesia, not a Democracy?

"The Attorney General Office’s banning of some history books.

On 5th March, the Attorney General’s Office banned the further printing and distribution of thirteen history books from the 2004 junior and senior high school curriculums because they play down the role of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in the 1948 uprising in Madiun, East Java, and the 1965 coup attempt in Jakarta.

According to the AGO the books not only failed to state the facts about the PKI’s role in the events but went further and challenged some “accepted truths”, which could create public disorder. The AGO has the authority to monitor the circulation of written materials and has in the past banned a number of books deemed capable of disrupting political stability since the Soeharto era."

http://www.indonesiamatters.com/1172/book-banning/

Disclaimer: This is a piece I wrote for History, one that I sort of rewrote, and one that all history students are familiar off! Sorry people and Ms. Jess, (IT IS A CURRENT EVENTS PIECE) if it’s a just a temporary entry, all the homework and tests pilling up forbid me from making a coherent nice piece..

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

August 1950, Harry Truman sent this message to Congress; that despite all the problems that the Communist Soviet Union has caused America, Congress does not have the right to silence communist ideas and teachings. Ignoring dissents made and insults hurled at him, he stayed true to the fundamentals of democracy; liberty and equality.

To him, democracy meant that the government could not control what its citizen’s listens, reads or says, to him, democracy meant that the government had no right to declare and demand submission from its people and be treated as if they were subjects instead of citizens. Truman is correct; the idea of banning thoughts is the very betrayal of all that is democracy.

Americans are so fortunate; they also have presidents with backbones. *cough* SBY *cough*

Today's government has by and large ignored the fundamental freedom promised by democracy, FREE SPEECH. Even today the fear of saying what we truly want still looms in our head. In my head.

Friends advise me not to be too vocal, sadly they are right.

It has been 9 years since the fall of Soeharto, a fall that would have supposedly lead us to a true democracy. A democracy that entails free speech, a freedom that for so many years have been suppressed and caged tightly by Soeharto.

Now the ban and the propaganda against Communists is still alive and healthy. In public schools, and even National Plus schools, the young and even the old still mostly fear Communism although not knowing what it means; all they know is that Communists had killed the heroic generals back in 1965.

Book burning and book banning is still alive, still active. The Attorney General’s Office censor history books, and in doing so aren't they hailing themselves supreme in intelligence? Are they not proclaiming that those bureaucrats in the Attorney General's Office are superior to ordinary civilians, superior to us?

The truth is that the government is still supreme, and a true Indonesian Democracy has not been accomplished. You would argue that it’s better now, it’s free now. But they have and still are successful in indoctrinating Indonesians their warped account for their past.

North Korea claims that they are democratic, a claim that is absurd. Sadly, there is a similar danger with Indonesia.

We can claim we are democratic, but if our actions and our government actions totally rebuke the foundations of democracy we too, could fall back to Soeharto’s era, banning and freedom of speech is a slippery slope.

One that hopefully Indonesia will not slip once more.

Note: I'm not proposing that we are not a Democratic country, only that in this aspect we're defying all that is democratic, and the dangers to it.