Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

An important contribution to eventual Indonesian unity was the evolution and transformation of the Malay language, a trade language with a long history, into Bahasa Indonesia, the shared national language of all Indonesians today. Even the largest of Indonesia’s hundreds of local languages, the Javanese language of Central Java, is the native language of less than one-third of Indonesia’s population. If that largest local language had become the national language, it would have symbolized Java’s domination of Indonesia and thereby exacerbated a problem that has persisted in modern Indonesia, namely, fear of Javanese domination on the part of Indonesians of other islands. The Javanese language has the additional disadvantage of being hierarchy-conscious, with different words used in speaking to people of higher or lower status. Today, I share with Indonesians their appreciation for the advantages of the wonderful Bahasa Indonesia as their national language. It’s easy to learn. Only 18 years after Indonesia took over Dutch New Guinea and introduced Bahasa there, I found it being spoken even by uneducated New Guineans in remote villages.

There was also opposition to the Republican leadership from Indonesian communists, culminating in a 1948 revolt crushed by the Republican Army that killed at least 8,000 Indonesian communists—a foretaste of what was to happen on a much larger scale after the failed coup of 1965.

Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno (1901–1970), had begun his political career already in Dutch times as a nationalist leader against the Dutch colonial government (Plate 5.1). (Like many Indonesians, Sukarno had only a single name, not a first name and a family name.) The Dutch sent him into exile, from which the Japanese brought him back. It was Sukarno who issued Indonesia’s Proclamation of Independence on August 17, 1945. Well aware of Indonesia’s weak national identity, he formulated a set of five principles termed Pancasila, which to this day serves as an umbrella ideology to unify Indonesia and was enshrined in the 1945 constitution. The principles are broad ones: belief in one god, Indonesian national unity, humanitarianism, democracy, and social justice for all Indonesians. As president, Sukarno blamed Indonesia’s poverty on Dutch imperialism and capitalism, abrogated Indonesia’s inherited debts, nationalized Dutch properties, and turned over the management of most of them to the army. He developed a state-centered economy that the army, the civil bureaucracy, and Sukarno himself could milk for their benefit. Not surprisingly, Indonesian private enterprise and foreign aid both declined. Both the U.S. and the British governments became alarmed and sought to destabilize Sukarno’s position, just as the U.S. had tried to destabilize Allende in Chile. Sukarno responded by telling the U.S. to “go to hell with your aid”; then in 1965 he expelled the American Peace C...

At the time that Indonesia became independent, it had had no history of democratic self-government. Its experience of government was instead that of Dutch rule, which in the final decades approximated a police state, as did Japanese rule after 1942. Fundamental to any functioning democracy are widespread literacy, recognition of the right to oppose government policies, tolerance of different points of view, acceptance of being outvoted, and government protection of those without political power. For understandable reasons, all of those prerequisites were weak in Indonesia.

Sukarno became convinced that he was uniquely capable of divining and interpreting the wishes (including the unconscious wishes) of the Indonesian people, and of serving as their prophet. After the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African states, Sukarno extended his goals to the world stage and began to view it as his personal responsibility to have Indonesia play a leading role in Third World anti-colonial politics at a time when Indonesia’s own internal problems were so pressing (Plate 5.2). In 1963 he let himself be declared president-for-life.

New Guineans who had been on the verge of independence from the Netherlands launched a guerrilla campaign for independence from Indonesia that is continuing today, over half-a-century later.

At 7:15 A.M. on October 1 the coup leaders, having also seized the telecom building on one side of the central square in the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta, broadcast an announcement on Indonesia radio declaring themselves to be the 30 September Movement, and stating that their aim was to protect President Sukarno by pre-empting a coup plotted by corrupt generals who were said to be tools of the CIA and the British.

At 9:00 P.M. on that evening of October 1, Suharto announced in a broadcast over the radio that he now controlled the Indonesian army, would crush the 30 September Movement, and would protect President Sukarno.

Did anti-communist generals know of the coup in advance but nevertheless allow it to unfold, in order to provide them with a pretext for previously laid plans to suppress the PKI? The last possibility is strongly suggested by the speed of the military’s reaction. Within three days, military commanders began a propaganda campaign to justify round-ups and killings of Indonesian communists and their sympathizers on a vast scale (Plate 5.4). The coup itself initially killed only 12 people in Jakarta on October 1, plus a few other people in other cities of Java on October 2. But those few killings gave Suharto and the Indonesian military a pretext for mass murder. That response to the coup was so quick, efficient, and massive that it could hardly have been improvised spontaneously within a few days in response to unexpected developments. Instead, it must have involved previous planning that awaited only an excuse, which the bungled coup attempt of October 1 and 2 provided.

The military’s anti-communist leadership quickly blamed the PKI for the murders, even though the murders had actually been carried out by units of the military itself. A propaganda campaign that could only have been planned in advance was immediately launched to create a hysterical atmosphere, warning non-communist Indonesians that they were in mortal danger from the communists, who were said to be making lists of people to kill, and to be practicing techniques for gouging out eyes. Members of the PKI’s women’s auxiliary were claimed to have carried out sadistic sexual torture and mutilation of the kidnapped generals. President Sukarno tried to minimize the significance of the October 1 coup attempt and objected to the scale of the military’s counter-measures, but the military had now wrested control of the situation from Sukarno. From October 5 onwards, the military began a round-up aimed at eliminating every member of the PKI and of every PKI-affiliated organization, and all of the families of those members.

Because the Indonesian killings were not carried out with the meticulous organization and documentation of the Nazi killings in World War Two concentration camps, there is much uncertainty about the number of Indonesian victims. The highest estimates are about 2 million; the most widely cited figure is the contemporary estimate of half-a-million arrived at by a member of President Sukarno’s own fact-finding commission.

Suharto had previously been considered just as an efficient general, and nothing more. But he now proceeded to display political skills exceeding even Sukarno’s. He gradually won the support of other military leaders, replaced military and civil service officers sympathetic to the PKI with officers loyal to him, and over the next two-and-a-half years proceeded slowly and cautiously to displace Sukarno while pretending to act on Sukarno’s behalf. In March 1966 Sukarno was pressured into signing a letter ceding authority to Suharto; in March 1967 Suharto became acting president, and in March 1968 he replaced Sukarno as president. He remained in power for another 30 years.

In effect, the Indonesian military developed a parallel government with a parallel budget approximately equal to the official government budget.

Military officers founded businesses and practiced corruption and extortion on a huge scale, in order to fund the military and to line their private pockets. While Suharto himself did not conduct an ostentatiously lavish lifestyle, his wife and children were reputed to practice enormous corruption. Without even investing their own funds, his children launched businesses that made them rich. When his family was then accused of corruption, Suharto became angry and insisted that their new wealth was just due to their skills as business people. Indonesians gave to Suharto’s wife (Ibu Tien = Madam Tien) a nickname meaning “Madam Ten Percent,” because she was said to extract 10% of the value of government contracts. By the end of Suharto’s reign, Indonesia was ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world.

Thus, Indonesia under Suharto came to be a military state, much as it was in the last decade of Dutch colonial government—with the difference that the state was now run by Indonesians, rather than by foreigners.

On September 30 every year, all Indonesian TV stations were required to broadcast, and all Indonesian schoolchildren were required to watch, a grim four-hour-long government-commissioned film about the seven kidnappings and killings. There was of course no mention of the half-a-million Indonesians killed in retaliation.

Indonesia’s parliament reelected Suharto as president for one five-year term after another. After nearly 33 years, just after parliament had acclaimed him as president for a seventh five-year term, his regime collapsed quickly and unexpectedly in May 1998.

Had the Indonesian government and army displayed even a minimum of tact, they might have negotiated an arrangement to incorporate East Timor with some autonomy into Indonesia. Instead, the Indonesian army invaded, massacred, and annexed East Timor. Under international pressure, and to the horror of the Indonesian army, Indonesia’s President Habibie, who succeeded Suharto, permitted a referendum on independence for East Timor in August 1999. By then, the population of course voted overwhelmingly for independence. Thereupon, the Indonesian army organized pro-Indonesia militias to massacre yet again, forcibly evacuated much of the population to Indonesian West Timor, and burned most of the new country’s buildings—to no avail, as international troops restored order and East Timor eventually took control of itself as the nation of Timor-Leste. The costs to the East Timorese were that about one-quarter of the population died, and that the survivors now constitute Asia’s poorest mini-nation, whose per-capita income is six times lower than that of Indonesia.

There is still fear of Indonesian military interference in Indonesian democracy: when a civilian politician defeated a general in the 2014 presidential elections, anxious months passed before it became clear that the general wouldn’t succeed in his efforts to annul the election.

Indonesians are proud of their wide territorial extent, expressed in an Indonesian national song “Dari Sabang sampai Merauke” (“From Sabang to Merauke,” Indonesia’s western and eastern extremities, respectively, 3,400 miles apart).

Indonesians now feel sufficiently secure in their national identity that they don’t need misleading accounts of a “communist coup” to reinforce it.

As of 1945, the German economy had collapsed. The German currency was rapidly losing its value through inflation. The German people had undergone 12 years of Nazi programming. Virtually all German government officials and judges had been convinced or complicit Nazis, because they had had to swear a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler in order to hold a government job. German society was authoritarian. Today, Germany is a liberal democracy. Its economy is the fourth largest in the world, and is one of the world’s leading export economies. Germany is the most powerful country in Europe west of Russia.

Germany has largely dealt with its Nazi past. German society is much less authoritarian than it once was.

The term “German Democratic Republic” is remembered as a big lie, like the name “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” that North Korea adopts for itself today. It’s easy now to forget that not just Soviet brute force but also German communist idealism contributed to East Germany’s founding, and that numerous German intellectuals chose to move to East Germany from West Germany or from exile overseas. But the standard of living and freedom in East Germany eventually fell far behind that of West Germany. While American economic aid was pouring into West Germany, the Soviets imposed economic reparations on their zone, dismantled and carted away whole factories to Russia, and reorganized East German agriculture as collective farms.

East Germans began fleeing to the West. Hence in 1952 East Germany sealed its borders to the West, but East Germans could still escape by passing from East Berlin into West Berlin, then flying from West Berlin to West Germany. The pre-war public transport system in Berlin (U-Bahn and S-Bahn) included lines that connected West and East Berlin, so that anyone in East Berlin could get into West Berlin just by hopping on a train. When I first visited Berlin in 1960, like other Western tourists I took the U-Bahn to visit East Berlin and to return to West Berlin. In 1953 dissatisfaction in East Germany blew up in a strike that turned into a rebellion, crushed by Soviet troops. Dissatisfied East Germans continued to escape to the West by way of the Berlin public transport system. Finally, on the night of August 13, 1961, while I was living in Germany, the East German regime suddenly closed the East Berlin U-Bahn stations and erected a wall between East and West Berlin, patrolled by border guards who shot and killed people trying to cross the wall

As for West Germany just after World War Two, one policy considered by the victorious Western Allies was to prevent it from ever rebuilding its industries, to force its economy to revert just to agriculture under the so-called Morgenthau Plan, and to extract war reparations as the Allies had done after World War One and as the Soviets were now doing in East Germany. That strategy stemmed from the widespread Allied view that Germany had been responsible not only for instigating World War Two under Hitler (as is widely agreed) but also for instigating World War One under Kaiser Wilhelm II (a much-debated historical question), and that permitting Germany to re-industrialize could lead to yet another world war. What caused that Allied view to change was the development of the Cold War, and the resulting realization that the real risk of another world war came not from Germany but from the Soviet Union.

West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, proved skilled at exploiting American fears of a communist assault, in order to obtain Allied acquiescence to delegate more and more authority to West Germany and less and less to the Allies. Adenauer’s economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, instituted modified free-market policies and utilized Marshall Plan aid to fuel a spectacularly successful economic recovery that became known as the “Wirtschaftswunder,” or “economic miracle.” Rationing became abolished, industrial output and living standards soared, and the dream of being able to buy a car and a home became reality for West Germans.

After the Allies had fought two world wars in order to defeat and disarm Germany, West Germany began to rearm and to rebuild an army—not at its own initiative, but (incredibly!!) at Western urging and against a vote of the West German parliament itself, so that West Germany would have to share with the Allies the burden of defending Western Europe. From a 1945 perspective, that represented the most astonishing change in American, British, and French policy towards Germany.

For example, West Germany’s first chancellor after the war was Konrad Adenauer, a non-Nazi whom the Nazis had driven out of his office as mayor of Cologne. Adenauer’s policy upon becoming chancellor was described as “amnesty and integration,” which was a euphemism for not asking individual Germans about what they had been doing during the Nazi era.

Bauer’s response, which he formulated again and again at the trials and in public, was as follows. Those Germans whom he was prosecuting were committing crimes against humanity. The laws of the Nazi state were illegitimate. One cannot defend one’s actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says. Anyone who takes part in what Bauer called a murder machine, such as the Auschwitz extermination apparatus, thereby becomes guilty of a crime.

In reality, many, perhaps most, of Bauer’s prosecutions failed: the defendants were often acquitted by German courts even in the 1960’s. Bauer himself was frequently the target of verbal attacks and even of death threats. Instead, the significance of Bauer’s work was that he, a German, in German courts, demonstrated to the German public again and again, in excruciating detail, the beliefs and deeds of Germans during the Nazi era.

What my wife and I saw then at Dachau is part of what all German children have seen from the 1970’s onwards. They are taught at length in school about Nazi atrocities, and many of them are taken on school outings to former KZs that, like Dachau, have been turned into exhibits. Such national facing-up to past crimes isn’t to be taken for granted. In fact, I know of no country that takes that responsibility remotely as seriously as does Germany. Indonesian schoolchildren still are taught nothing about the mass killings of 1965 (Chapter 5); young Japanese whom I have known tell me that they were taught nothing about Japan’s war crimes (Chapter 8); and it is not national policy in the U.S. for American schoolchildren to be taught in grim detail about American crimes in Vietnam, and against Native Americans, and against African slaves.

Those facts about the different experiences of Germans born in different years help explain why Germany experienced a violent student revolt in the year 1968. On the average, the German protestors of 1968 had been born around 1945, just at the end of the war. They were too young to have been raised as Nazis, or to have experienced the war, or to remember the years of chaos and poverty after the war. They grew up mostly after Germany’s economic recovery, in economically comfortable times. They weren’t struggling to survive; they enjoyed enough leisure and security to devote themselves to protest. In 1968 they were in their early 20’s. They were teenagers during the 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Fritz Bauer was revealing the Nazi crimes of ordinary Germans of their parents’ generation. The parents of protestors born in 1945 would themselves have mostly been born between 1905 and 1925. That meant that the parents of Germany’s 1945 generation were viewed by their children as the Germans who had voted for Hitler, had obeyed Hitler, had fought for Hitler, or had been indoctrinated in Nazi beliefs by Hitler Jugend school organizations.

If a child did ask, “Mommy and Daddy, what were you doing during Nazi times?,” those parents answered their children with responses similar to those that older Germans willing to talk gave me in 1961: “You young person, you have no idea what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state; one can’t just act on one’s beliefs.” Of course that excuse didn’t satisfy young people. The result was that Germans of Jahrgang around 1945 discredited their parents and their parents’ generation as Nazis. That helps explain why student protests also took a violent form in Italy and Japan, the other two aggressor countries of World War Two.

In today’s world of carefully scripted, unemotional diplomatic statements, Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto stands out as a unique heartfelt apology by the leader of one country to the people of another country who had suffered greatly. By contrast, think of the many other leaders who did not kneel and apologize: American presidents to Vietnamese, Japanese prime ministers to Koreans and Chinese, Stalin to Poles and Ukrainians, de Gaulle to Algerians, and others.

But self-pity and sense of victimization have not dominated Germans’ view of themselves after World War Two, as they did after World War One. Part of the reason has been German recognition that the horrors inflicted by Russians, Poles, and Czechs on German civilians resulted from the horrors that Germans had so recently inflicted on those countries. But we should not take for granted Germans’ rejection of the victim role and assumption of shame after World War Two, because it contrasts with the assumption of the victim role by Germans themselves after World War One and by Japanese after World War Two (Chapter 8).

While Wilhelm was much less powerful than Hitler, he still appointed and dismissed Germany’s chancellors, held the loyalty of most Germans, and commanded Germany’s armed forces. Although not evil, he was emotionally labile and unrealistic, had poor judgment, and was spectacularly tactless on numerous occasions that created unnecessary problems for Germany. Among his many policies that resulted in Germany’s entering World War One under unfavorable circumstances leading to defeat was his non-renewal of Bismarck’s treaty between Germany and Russia, thereby exposing Germany to that already mentioned military nightmare arising from its geographic location: a two-front war simultaneously against Russia and France.

Overall, as an American I am struck by the uninterrupted good sense of West Germany’s chancellors since World War Two, during an era in which the U.S. has been suffering from several failed or undistinguished presidencies.

American Marshall Plan aid, and West Germany’s wise use of it, made possible West Germany’s economic miracle after 1948. Conversely, negative economic aid—i.e., extraction of war reparations—contributed to the undermining of East Germany after World War Two, and of Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One.

Interestingly, recent German history provides four examples of an interval of 21–23 years between a crushing defeat and an explosive reaction to that defeat. Those four examples are: the 23-year interval between 1848’s failed revolutionary unification attempt and 1871’s successful unification; the 21-year interval between 1918’s crushing defeat in World War One and 1939’s outbreak of World War Two that sought and ultimately failed to reverse that defeat; the 23-year interval between 1945’s crushing defeat in World War Two and 1968’s revolts by the students born around 1945; and the 22-year interval between those 1968 student revolts and 1990’s re-unification.

Aborigines were eventually forbidden to marry non-Aboriginals without government consent. There has been much controversy over a policy, developed in the 1930’s, of forcibly removing mixed-race Aboriginal/white children and even Aboriginal children from Aboriginal homes, to be raised (supposedly for their own good) in institutions or foster homes. A movement, beginning in the 1990’s, for white Australians to apologize to Aborigines has faced strong opposition.

In short, British Australia’s White Australia policy was directed not just at non-white potential immigrants from overseas. It was directed also at the non-white original Australians into whose lands white British settlers were immigrating, whose right to those lands was denied, and who (many white settlers hoped) would die out quickly.

Each year on July 4, on the anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, Americans celebrate Independence Day, which is one of our biggest annual holidays. In contrast, Australia doesn’t recognize or celebrate an Independence Day, because there wasn’t one. The Australian colonies achieved self-government with no objections from Britain, and never severed their ties with Britain completely. Australia is still joined with Britain in a (British) Commonwealth of Nations, and still recognizes Britain’s sovereign as Australia’s nominal head of state. Why did the relaxation or severing of ties with Britain unfold differently in Australia and in the U.S.? There were several reasons. One is that Britain learned lessons from its expensive defeat in the American Revolution, changed its policies towards its white colonies, and readily granted self-government to Canada, New Zealand, and its Australian colonies. In fact, Britain granted many features of self-government to Australia of its own initiative, before Australians had made any requests. A second reason was the much greater sailing distance from Britain to Australia than to the U.S. East Coast.

The resulting slowness of communication made it impossible for the British colonial office in London to exercise close control over Australia; decisions and laws had to be delegated at first to governors, and then to Australians themselves. For example, for the entire decade from 1809 to 1819, the British governor of the Australian colony of New South Wales didn’t even bother to notify London of new laws that he was adopting.

A third reason for the difference between Australian and American history was that the British colonial government had to station and pay for a large army in its American colonies.

Hence Britain never needed to station a large army in Australia, nor to levy unpopular taxes on Australians to pay for that army; Britain’s levying taxes on the American colonies without consulting them was the immediate cause of the American Revolution.

Still another factor was that Britain’s Australian colonies, in contrast to its American colonies, were too unprofitable and unimportant for Britain to care about and pay much attention to.

Britain’s principal Australian settlements for a long time remained separate colonies with little political coordination.

Australia arose as six separate colonies—New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—with far less contact among them than the contact among the American colonies that would later become states of the U.S.

Not until 1917 did all five of the capital cities on the Australian mainland become connected by railroad.