Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
6 - From Old to New Orders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling, pronunciation and names
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 Our colonial soil
- 2 Cultures of the countryside
- 3 ‘To assail the colonial machine’
- 4 The Revolution
- 5 Living in the atomic age
- 6 From Old to New Orders
- 7 Terror and development in happy land
- 8 Age of globalisation, age of crisis
- Biographies of key figures
- Abbreviations and glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- LIST OF MODERN HISTORIES
Summary
We welcome this social instability because it provides the opportunity for Progress. Progress positively demands an element of instability and even of risk.
Ruslan Abdulgani, later Deputy Head of the Supreme Council of Review and Head of the Committee to Develop the Spirit of the RevolutionIn the early 1970s a local leader in a poor suburb of Jakarta, Pak Sumitra, described for an American sociologist how political control was exercised on a local level. He described how Indonesia shifted from a society polarised between Communists and non-Communists, to one where a distant military government was able to pacify and manage the country. The new government's aim was to create the appearance of order and control.
Pak Sumitra was a veteran of the Revolution, like most political leaders of the times. During the struggle in Tegal, coastal Java, he had come across a magical stone that had protected him from harm when all his comrades were being killed. He attributed to this stone his ability to gain a following when he moved to Jakarta to work in the railway yards, where he became a foreman. The community of which he became leader consisted almost entirely of railway workers, many of whom were Communists. This man had an antipathy to Communists because members of his family had been killed by them during the conflict in Madiun in 1948.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Modern Indonesia , pp. 142 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005