Karnal wrote on Apr 29^th, 2014 at 9:29pm:

Singapore?  Well, it was lucky enough to have the Britannic inheritance AND smart enough to keep it and hang on to it - rather than repudiate it like the Pakis or the Burmese or any number of 'liberated' African countries.

Good post TC.

No need to reply FD, I think I've got it covered for you:

blah blah blah 700 jews beheaded... blah blah blah rape pillage murder... blah blah blah 700 jews beheaded... blah blah blah warmonger thief oppression... blah blah blah - did I mention 700 beheaded jews?

rinse and repeat ad-nauseam...

Quote:


And yet this is exactly what the Islamic state offered to many. Convert or die.

Convert or be taxed 50% and have everything taken from you.

Convert or suffer endless indignity and deprivation.

Keen to secure the great wealth of the Indonesian archipelago for Western corporations, Australian and US government support for Suharto goes all the way back to his rise to power via a bloody military coup in 1965.

Suharto, then a top-ranking general, overthrew the nationalist government of president Sukarno, which had undertaken a number of measures that attempted to protect Indonesia from the ravages of exploitation by Western corporations.

Even more concerning for Western governments was the rise of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) on the back of mass struggles by workers and peasants. By the time Suharto took power, the PKI had an estimated 3 million members and 20 million organised supporters, making it the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and China.

With the active assistance of the CIA and the US embassy, Suharto launched his coup, utilising the military and
right-wing Islamic fundamentalist militias to carry out a campaign of mass slaughter against all leftists or suspected leftist sympathisers.

No-one knows the exact number killed, but at least half a million people were butchered in the space of four months. Some estimates put the figure as high as 2 million.

The PKI was physically exterminated — completely wiped out.

Under Suharto, democratic elections and freedom of speech were completely non-existent, while opponents were routinely killed, jailed and tortured.

At a New York meeting of the Australian-American Association in July 1966, then-prime minister Harold Holt expressed his joy at this turn of events, infamously declaring with satisfaction: “With 500,000 to 1 million communist sympathisers knocked off … I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”

Indonesia was opened for business. Via corruption and nepotism, Suharto and his cronies became obscenely rich while any attempt by ordinary Indonesians to organise to defend their rights was brutally suppressed.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s takeover of Indonesia in 1965-6 as “the model operation” for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” he wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter.  “British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time...There was a deal, you see.”

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia”. In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened”. Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described  the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil”.

Islam is the greatest modern barrier to the march of freedom and democracy. Millions of people around the world live in poverty and oppression (and a few with great wealth and oppression) because of Islam.

Freedom, eh?

Can you provide any evidence of this Freediver?

Incorrect. People living in non-muslim areas incorporated into the Islamic states ended up paying less taxes in the Islamic state than they had under their Christian and Jewish rulers.

Non-Muslims were not deprived of their property

List them? But FD, we’re up to Malaya

You want attention, old chap. I get that, I really do. But you really must learn to address the substance of an argument if you want to be taken seriously.

And we all know you do, poor dear. We all know you do.
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