Image is of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and the fastest sinking city in the world. A new capital is being built elsewhere in Indonesia.
I was going to make Indonesia the COTW anyway (unless something really massive happened somewhere else) due to the elections that might really designate the end of an era in Indonesian politics. Michael Roberts wrote up a big piece on Indonesia about a week ago, one day before the election began, so a lot of this information is coming from him.
Indonesia has been ruled by President Joko Widodo for 10 years, but is now barred from a third term constitutionally. Under his presidency, the Indonesian economy has seen fairly good GDP growth overall - about 5% per year, or an average of 4% per capita - and is broadly popular with the electorate. The biggest problems are the common ones, such as a lack of jobs and a high cost of living. Widodo’s successors have naturally promised more jobs and an economic plan that clearly draws at least some inspiration from China’s rise from the periphery to the heights of the world economy and manufacturing, but this seems pretty unlikely for Indonesia because, well, Indonesia is ruled by capitalist bourgeoisie parties and China is not. Indonesia’s main gigs are palm oil, nickel ore, and oil, with internal manufacturing of these primary commodities only slowly growing and reliant on foreign labour.
Indonesia has a rather big employment problem. On the face of it, things don’t seem bad, with an unemployment rate of only 5% - but this is only because it counts anybody who works even a couple hours per week. 60% of the workers in Indonesia are in the informal sector, with no real labour rights, sick pay, or guaranteed wages. And half of the ~8 million unemployed are young people. Indonesia is the sixth most unequal country on the planet, with at least 36% of the population in poverty, and the four richest men own as much as the bottom 100 million. This was a natural consequence of the policies of the dictator Suharto, who came to power in a coup overthrowing the communist nationalist leader Sukarno and killing one million communists, a period covered by Bevin’s The Jakarta Method. At a fundamental level, not that much has changed since Suharto, and the country seems doomed to a path of slowing economic growth and massive amounts of environmental degradation under a plundering elite who will presumably fly off to New Zealand with the rest of them once the seas swallow the country, unless a communist movement can be rebuilt from ashes and can learn the lessons of 1965-66.
Though results have yet to be officially announced, it seems that 72-year-old Prabowo Subianto is overwhelmingly likely to have handily won the election. Once banned from the United States for human rights violations - a truly phenomenal feat - he has been the Minister of Defense since 2019, was an army lieutenant under Suharto and was his son-in-law. While this is obviously a particularly bad outcome, none of the other candidates seemed likely to fundamentally alter the trajectory of Indonesia, so the game was rigged from the start.
The Country of the Week is Indonesia! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I want to type up a proper post that will refer to many books and articles detailing Indonesian history but I will be quite busy so I don’t think I’ll manage to finish it within this week’s COTW.
But as for now instead I wrote a quick retrospective that can be served as the “primer” for the eventual post (whenever I’ll finish it).
Many westerners has some knowledge of Southeast Asian history but it typically only focuses on Western actions in the region and it never goes deeper. “the Vietnam War”, “the Phillipines recolonisation” and “the 1965-66 Indonesian Genocide” gets mentioned but it never is discussed within the 3 millenia of Southeast Asian history but especially within the last 500 years of colonization.
This is especially true for the Islamicate in Southeast Asia.
Do Westerners even know the colonial origins of the exonym of the “Malay Archipelago”? What about the Islamic and Socialist internationalist movements that sweeped across the “Malay-Islamic” civilization that consists of modern-day Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia? - and how Phillipines relates to this wider “civilization”?
Do westerners even know the major maddhab that most Southeast Asians muslims follow? Do they even know anything about how Islam spread across a sub-continent as wide as Lisbon to Tehran? Can they even discuss one thing about the richest company in history - the Dutch East India company? Do they even know anything about the political economy of colonial-capitalism in Southeast Asia?
This lack of knowledge stems from two faults, the rampant Orientalism and chauvinism that has penetrated the subsconcious of Western observers and even many Southeast Asians today, but also the failures of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements in the region. Southeast Asian history to this day is being written by the oppressors. We can’t breathe nor think for ourselves.
Can you imagine that? 700 million people, with more than 1300 indigenous languages (accounting for more than 50% of all indigenous languages spoken in Asia), without any voice!
But as materialist dialectics informs us, things continue to evolve and change. Now, ASEAN is experiencing larger economic growth (relative and absolute) than Europe. Under imperial domination for 500 years (and counting) - and still growing faster. Decolonization is not over yet.
The transcription of the talk called Dialectics and Indonesian specificity at the time of imperialism’s agony - Humanity (Indonesia) captures this emotional essence quite well.
I look forward to reading the complete piece ✍️
I can imagine that…
In Britain, Asian means Indian/South-Asian… and In America, Asian means Chinese/East-Asian… So far, not much I’ve heard of South-east Asia, even takin in account Philippines…
That being said, I’ll take a bite out of this article…
Edit: why is it skeptical of Joko Widodo and China though… otherwise it’s fine
spoiler