Category: Indonesia
"China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the 'dirty job' of controlling the workers," writes the prominent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. "China as the emerging power of the twenty first century …seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, disdain for workers' rights, everything Read more…
As several revolts shook recently big part of Arab world, as Hosni Mubarak stepped down and the leaders of Bahrain and Libya could not think about anything better than to order bloody crack down against their own people, the world (read Western governments, media and academia) were watching with increasing doze of discomfort. Protests Read more…
APPEAL/OPEN LETTER TO FIDEL CASTRO URGENT NEED FOR UNITED LEFT: LATIN AMERICA AND CHINA By: Andre Vltchek Fidel, I am writing this letter from the frozen shore not far from the northernmost Japanese city of Wakkanai. It is pristine and cold here, bitterly cold. When the wind blows, the snow powder takes to the Read more…
If a volcano kills civilians in Indonesia, it’s news. When the government does the killing, sadly, it’s just business as usual, especially if an American president tacitly endorses the killing, as President Barack Obama just did with his visit to Indonesia. As the people around Mount Merapi dig out of the ash following a Read more…
: Thousands Rally in West PapuaInternational news agencies have reported on the mass rally in Jayapura, capital of Indonesia’s Papua province. Thousands of people joined a long march, walking 17 km from the MRP (Majelis Rakyat Papua – Papua People’s Assembly) to the DPRP (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Papua – Papuan Provincial Legislature), rejecting the Special Autonomy granted by Indonesia in Read more…
President Barack Obama dedicated the signing of health care legislation to a number of people, including his mother, S. Ann Dunham Soetoro, who, he said, “argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.” The health care legislative process and its frenetic endgame prompted the president to postpone a trip to Read more…
Allan Nairn: Breaking News: Indonesian Army, Kopassus, Implicated in New AssassinationsAccording to senior Indonesian officials and police and details from government files, the US-backed Indonesian armed forces (TNI), now due for fresh American aid, assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009. The killings were part of a secret government program, authorized from Jakarta, and were coordinated in part by an active-duty, US-trained Kopassus special Read more…
[Andre Vltchek from Palembang, Musi River and Bangka Island. Introduction by Geoffrey Gunn] Distantly known to the ancients, as in early Ptolemaic representations, Sumatra was also visited by travelers, traders, and monks plying the maritime silkroads between India and China. As confirmed by recent archeology, Palembang, on the banks of the Musi River in Read more…
When General Suharto, the west’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered "a gleam of light in Asia", rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million "communists" was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in Read more…
Ian Sinclair: Book review: ‘Constructive Bloodbath’ in Indonesia. The United States, Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-66 by Nathaniel MehrDespite the best efforts of dissident writers such as Mark Curtis, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, the US and UK involvement in what the CIA called "one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century" remains largely unknown to the Western general public. As the late Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel Prize-winning Read more…