Indonesia Past and Present

...But he fails, in a most exasperating fashion, to make the criticisms and draw the the conclusions for reform which this account seems so directly to imply...

...Yet today, barely a decade later, the country is torn by civil war and rebellion, faced with economic collapse and menaced by the explosive renaissance of a Communist party eight million strong...

...But Fischer goes no further than to say that, although Sukarno has a naturally sunny personality, as President he is necessarily a lonely man, and that he shows a refreshing lack of hypocrisy about his well-developed interest in women...

...Hatta angrily insisting that he will not rejoin the Government because he will not be the prisoner of other men's policies, and shouting, "I have known Sukarno for decades...

...the Government, stung by the United Nations' refusal to discuss the West New Guinea issue, had suddenly taken over almost all the remaining Dutch properties in the country, bringing widespread economic dislocation...

...In so doing he adds a new dimension to familiar and oft-recorded occurrences which more specialized historians, their eyes focused firmly on the Indonesian foreground, have generally failed to provide...

...Indonesian partisans who saw the new republic in the image of Jefferson's young and optimistic America have more and more come to see it in the image of Chiang's corrupt and doomed China...

...and a rival government, headed by some of the nation's most prominent political figures, had been set up in Central Sumatra, leading to open civil war...

...Nasution confessing with sim-ple soldierly directness, "If I followed the dictates of my heart, I'd suppress all political parties...

...And as always in cases of early promise unfulfilled, the haunting, ever-pressing question in everyone's mind is: What went wrong...

...Fischer stayed two months, traveling and talking with Sukarno at length, interviewing various other leaders—Mohammed Hatta, the disenchanted ex-Vice President...

...it was animated by a vigorous nationalist movement which had successfully resisted Dutch suppression, Japanese manipulation and Communist subversion...

...The Story of Indonesia is vigorous and acute in its portrayal of men and events on the Indonesian scene, but limp and oddly evasive in its judgments of them...

...He will always start mass demonstrations for [West New Guinea...

...Ruslan Abdulgani, perhaps Sukarno's most influential advisor—and acclimating himself to the febrile political atmosphere of Djakarta...

...Louis Fischer, a veteran observer of world affairs who over the past 40 years has been almost everywhere and talked to almost everyone, arrived in Indonesia for the first lime in the spring of 1958, at what was probably its lowest point to date...

...Did Fischer, who has seen politicians of every stripe in action, give no thought to concealed interests, or hidden struggles for power, in evaluating the Indonesian leaders' statements...

...And in the end, Fischer's sole suggestion for Indonesia in extremis is a magnificently superfluous Gand-hian injunction to be true to Eastern traditions, re-emphasize village values and avoid over-hasty industrialization...

...But a simple rendering of the scene is not enough: One wishes to know from a man of Fischer's background and experience what he thinks of it all...

...He won't change...

...There are chapters on an air trip with Sukarno, on the charms of Bali, the Communists and Sukarno's relations with them, native medicines and cures, the Army, the economic situation, the personal ambassadorial work of an American film distributor, and one in which Sukarno and Fischer debate the virtues of birth control—a melange of subjects presented in a kaleidoscopic fashion...

...Abdul Haris Nasution, the tightly professional Army Chief of Staff...

...But for all his avoidance of hard, and admittedly far from simple, questions of responsibility and reform, Fischer has provided in his fine account of Indonesian past and present a book very much worth reading for anyone who remains convinced to the end that responsibility will yet be laid and reform will yet come...

...The "Present" half of the book is much less systematically arranged, much scrappier in quality, and the emphasis on personalities at the expense of social forces, characteristic to a degree of the historical section as well, becomes overwhelming...

...A nasty hand grenade attempt on the life of President Achmed Sukarno had just been made in a Djakarta grammar school...

...University of California OF ALL THE NEW nations which have emerged since the war, perhaps none has proved more disappointing to its friends than Indonesia...

...For example, he makes no comment when Abdulgani says he dislikes Communism because "it does not leave room for religion," when Nasution says that "separate areas of [governmental] activity must be marked out for military, economic and political organs," or when the Sultan of Jogjakarta presents himself as wholly without national political ambitions...

...Combining these first-hand impressions of Indonesia in agony with a survey of the literature on her history and culture, Fischer has produced a very readable book which gives a vivid, compact and generally accurate account of what has gone wrong in Indonesia...

...There is little that is new in these fact-filled pages, but, more than any other recent historical survey, Fischer's places domestic Indonesian events in the wider context of world history and politics...

...But the Indonesian political scene is kaleidoscopic too, and so an intriguing and fascinating, if somewhat fluctuating, image of it emerges from this diversity of detail and incident: Sukarno crying, "Give me something to say to my people and I will change their sentiments overnight...

...And on such matters—matters of judgment, evaluation and criticism—he becomes equivocal rather than trenchant, cagey rather than candid...

...In 1950 it seemed indeed the former colony most likely to succeed: It was rich in natural resources and possessed a large, varied population and a complex culture synthesized from Hindu...

...Fischer divides his book into two nearly equal halves, "The Past" and "The Present...

...It is also both fair and accurate to characterize the Padang rebellion as a blindly negative, wildly unrealistic, emotional outburst—and far from being either wholly idealistic or simply anti-Communist—but it is peculiar not to ask at the same time why a group of first-rate professional economists, deeply religious and fundamentally pacific Moslem intellectuals and patriotic professional soldiers were driven to such suicidal despair...

...The comparison of the moral and intellectual stature of the two Indians and the Indonesian cries to be made, but all we get is the notation that, like Nehru, Sukarno wants to be loved...

...What did a man who is a friend of Nehru and a former intimate of Gandhi think of the Asian leader who, having presided over 10 years of snowballing political and economic discontent, says he wants 250 million people in a country drastically overcrowded at 35 million, who attributes the tremendous growth of the Indonesian Communist party mainly to American foreign policy blunders, and who announces he is a Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Marxist and admirer of Richard Nixon all at the same time...

...A man who knew Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin ought to have something novel and impressive to say about Sukarno...

...In place of the unity, idealism and bold confidence of the Revolutionary period has come a bewildered, cynical or exhausted despair...

...All these images, anecdotes, quotations, crowding in on and reinforcing one another, give the authentic flavor of life among the Indonesian political elite today...

...Moslem, Chinese, European and indigenous elements...

...Under "The Past," he gives a concise and neatly organized review of Indonesian history, beginning with the Java Ape Man a half-million years ago and ending with the transfer of sovereignty from Holland to the United States of Indonesia in December 1949...