America's Road to Bali. posted by Richard Seymour

One of PJ O'Rourke's minor accomplishments as a reporter was to walk into a refuge in Nicaragua during the carnivorous US assault on the country in the 1980s and say 'anyone here speak English and been raped?' This is far better, in its way, than the ersatz 'concern' of America's moribund centrist media. The uncomprehending tourist pose is one of the least attractive forms of modern reportage, and this is no exception.

The author, a Texan academic named Richard Pells, casts himself as a bemused traveller surrounded by foreigners with odd ways and odder questions - Lost in Translation. Does Texas, they wonder, have grass? (Those old Westerns, you see). Was Michael Moore's film funded by the Bush administration? (They can't envisage a culture run by the thriving private sector rather than the nepotistic state). Oh, they're cute in their nosy way, these Indonesians, but not at all bad people, for "in Indonesia I did not confront the usual anti-Americanism." That is encouraging, as is this: "Nor did I come across students, even at privately financed Muslim universities, whose knowledge consisted exclusively of what they'd memorized from the Koran." Town-planners and engineers gaining all their professional knowledge from the Koran would be strange indeed - what can he be thinking of? "On the contrary, there is — at the moment — a great deal of affection for the United States."

This affection, such as it is, apparently emerges from "America's financial and military assistance to Indonesia after the tsunami devastated most of Aceh Province in Sumatra." Further: "Indonesians are as sensitive as Americans to the menace of terrorism." We'll see about that. And: "Perhaps as a result of both their gratitude toward and shared vulnerability with Americans, many Indonesian students told me after my lectures that they were eager to learn more about American culture, and that they wanted to find out how to obtain grants to study in the United States." However, there just didn't appear to be the programmes to enable such cross-cultural fertilisation (discount for the fact that the latter word implies a creative process). Further, few Americans appear to bother chatting up the Indonesians with any diligence, or setting them straight in their crazy stereotypes about America.

So, the author's answer is to reinvent the Congress for Cultural Freedom in a new form that will "focus on those in the Islamic world who remain ambivalent about the United States and what it stands for — and who are uncertain about how America's policies and values will affect their own cultures, social institutions, and religious beliefs."


Cultural hegemony.

In its way, this sweet essay is a pleasure to read - not least because it advertises in spite of itself precisely all the ways in which any such efforts at wielding 'soft' (ie cultural) power will fail. Never mind the fact that he writes as if the CCF was somehow an open forum of American ideas, rather than a covert tool of infiltration, subversion and manipulation. It isn't the first time that apologists for US power, including neoconservatives like Robert Kagan and Newt Gingrich, have called for an expansive cultural war. This will fail if this academic is involved. Firstly, because the author clearly hasn't a clue how to penetrate a polite exterior. If he wanted to know about anti-American feeling, he could have asked whether Indonesians feel Al Qaeda or the US is a greater threat to the world - he would have got an interesting reply. Secondly, because he misdiagnoses the problem: America's cultural hegemony appears - by the author's own account - to be creating as many misunderstandings as he hopes to solve - those Westerns, the Moore films, endless sexiness in Holywood films. Thirdly because of the Orientalism involved. The author thinks that Indonesia could be a 'test case' for something called "the Islamic world", as if Indonesia is anything like Sudan or Iran, for instance. And finally because the author is hopelessly, hideously blind - as every good Orientalist should be - to the extraordinary devastation wreaked by America on Indonesia. He even cites US "military assistance" to the Indonesian state after the tsunami destroyed the Aceh province in Sumatra, without batting an eyelid. He might have tried finding something out about Aceh before regaling us with tales of fondness for America, for that military assistance will have helped the Indonesian state to continue its butchery in the area - something that did not even pause for an interval of outward decency once the tsunami struck.

Indonesia is a state which, having freed itself from colonial rule and found itself a democratic government - naturally one with nationalist, independent proclivities given what had persisted before - was suddenly obliged to put up with a brutal military dictatorship in 1965. I say, 'suddenly', although it did take a strenuous effort - an effort involving the murder of almost 1 million people in the space of a few months. The CIA were involved, as were the British. Rivers of blood wasn't the half of it: it was a tsunami of violence that would later only be dwarved by direct US military subventions in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. The US compiled death lists for the Generals as they rampaged through the country, while British warships spirited troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could perpetrate the slaughter. Roland Challis, who was BBC correspondent for South East Asia at the time, said that "My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabayo ... There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal." I still remember John Pilger saying to Challis "so, the British were involved?" and Challis coolly replying, "Well, I'd say that constituted some sort of involvement, wouldn't you?"

Having helped a right-wing General named Haji Mohamed Suharto to power (which Time salivated over in its July 8, 1966 issue as "The West's best news for years in Asia" before going on to give accurate coverage of a "boiling bloodbath" in the country), the US and UK were able to seal the country's economy for the multinationals. In a documentary a few years ago, quoted from above, John Pilger explained how:

In November 1967, following the capture of the "greatest prize", the booty was handed out. The Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva which, in the course of a week, designed the corporate takeover of Indonesia.

It was attended by the most important businessmen in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and all the giants of western capitalism were represented. They included the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, the International Paper Corporation, US Steel.

Across the table were Suharto's men, whom Rockefeller called "Indonesia's top economic team". Several were economists trained at the University of California in Berkeley. All sang for their supper, offering the principal selling points of their country and their people: "Abundance of cheap labour . . . a treasure house of resources . . . a captive market." Recently, I asked one of them, Dr Emile Salim, if anyone at the conference had even mentioned that a million people had died in bringing this new business-friendly government to power. "No, that was not on the agenda," he replied. "I didn't know about it till later. Remember, we didn't have television and the telephones were not working well."

The Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector, at the conference. In one room, forests in another, minerals. The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper in West Papua (Henry Kissinger is currently on the board). A US/European consortium got West Papua's nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. A group of US, Japanese and French got thetropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan.

A Foreign Investment Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this plunder tax-free for at least five years. Real, and secret, control of the Indonesian economy passed to the IMF and the World Bank through the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Under Sukarno, Indonesia had few debts. Now the really big loans rolled in, often straight into pockets, as the treasurehouse of resources rolled out. Shortly before the Asian financial crash in 1997, the IGGI godfathers congratulated their favourite mass murderer for having "created a miracle economy.

Indonesia - thanks to this bloodbath - became and remains a series of islands united by cheap labour and a brutal government above the ground, not to mention a mass grave beneath it. Suharto remained in power with the firm support of the West until 1998, his invasion of East Timor sealed with a kiss from Henry Kissinger (well, Jill St. John couldn't say no either). Even when a democratic movement of left-wing students and workers finally kicked Suharto out, the ensuing governments have been regaled with the very best in modern repressive weaponry by the West, who were kind enough to allow Indonesia to carry out a brutal massacre in East Timor before departing, and continued to assist the slaughter in Aceh until a recent peace deal.

It seems to me, then, that the reason why America might be 'misunderstood' in Jakarta and elsewhere is that the US government has been aggressively exploiting, torturing and killing its people, its land and at least one neighbour. John Perkins, a former 'Economic Hit Man' for the US and a much better interpreter of his surroundings than our unfortunate academic, explained it succinctly:

Travelling across Indonesia and interrogating local officials in major population centres for data, he was shocked to find that ordinary Indonesians saw the World Bank’s involvement in the country as part of Nixon’s foreign policy, not only across Indochina, but also the Middle East. US policy was not merely greedy, rapacious, but also anti-Islamic (This was just before the high watermark of political Islam). The Soviets, some students told him, would not last, but the next civilisational strife would be between Islam and Christianity – just read Arnold Toynbee’s Civilisation on Trial, and The World and the West. It’s all there. And they warned:

“You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There’s not much time left. If you don’t change, you’re doomed.”

I don't know about all that "doomed" business, but perhaps it is time to stop using slave labour, slaughtering countless millions, treating the Atlas as America's own personal connect-the-dot-n-colour-in book, bashing unions, sponsoring terrorism and then hypocritically declaiming that one favours freedom, democracy, dignity of life and death, an end to various scourges etc. To put it in terms a politically correct apologist for imperialism might understand, people from Over There (yes, those ones) might misunderstand that sort of thing: it simply doesn't translate well across the cultural divide.