freediver wrote on May 5^th, 2014 at 12:31pm:


Please FD, give us all a jolly laugh and conjure up some fairy tale about how the US was responsible.

The UN, eh?

That’s a relief. I was worried you were going to say the Ayotollah there for a second.

Which part of the UN was in Iran in 1906, FD? And why did they ignore 12,000 people having a peaceful sit-in for demokracy?

Oh, I know - they were Muslims. The UN wanted to make them wait for another couple of centuries. That’ll teach them.

You go to the back of the queue, Muselman. You can wait until Mother and Uncle are good and ready for Freeedom and demokracy.

We’ll have a bit of fun with them first, eh FD?

That's nice, FD. I like the part about us helping them to transition to demokracy. You know, like Iran, like Indonesia, like Egypt. And who knows? Maybe even Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think the old boy summed up your point well, no?

Soren wrote on Apr 30^th, 2014 at 8:05pm:

freediver wrote on May 6^th, 2014 at 12:30pm:


Indonesia is a demokracy today because Indonesians protested against Suharto on mass during the Asian Financial Crisis. Ultimately, Indonesians are responsible for their demokracy, but the shift was not without Western influence.

It was the IMF who put the final arrow in the heart of Suharto's presidency. They made their rescue package conditional on free and fair elections. And believe me, they were hanging on the results of those elections. Golkar's presidential nomination of the technocrat B.J Habibie was a favour to both the Asian financiers and the Western financial institutions. His presidency was about getting Indonesia's house in order - a house that saw the rupiah's value halved within weeks, the price of imports doubled, and the interest on Indonesian debt spiraling out of control. Many Indonesians lost their shirts in that crisis, and many didn't have a shirt to lose in the first place.

The election of Indonesia's first demokratically-erected president in 1998 marked the end of the West's 30 year support of one of the richest dictators in the world. Suharto and his family had been found to have frittered away 537 million of IMF and World Bank loans. His presidency threatened  investment in Indonesia and the loans of Asian and Western banks. Debt was mounting daily, and the entire financial system was at risk. Suharto had to go.

The West were fine when Suharto spent Indonesia's money. It was a different matter when he spent theirs. Ultimately, of course, no one in the West did anything to bring demokracy to Indonesia, they simply made IMF loans conditional on Suharto's departure. After all, lending Indonesia money and leaving Suharto in power would have been throwing good money after bad. Suharto had gone from providing security to Western investment to being a huge sovereign risk.

How does the case of Indonesia factor into your demokracy and wealth creation idea, FD?

I'm interested.

polite_gandalf wrote on May 6^th, 2014 at 1:22pm:


Ah.

Others - here, Jews - have no problem honouring their soldiers:

Melanias purse wrote on May 6^th, 2014 at 9:08pm:


And there is a lesson on Islam for all of us.

As with socialism (predicted by its fathers to occur in the most advanced industrial societies like England, it actually occurred in the most backward European society, Russia), Islamism, the creed of the downtrodden and colonised (Islam is of course the biggest coloniser in history but whatcha gonna do about propaganda?) will take root in the most advanced societies because they are the ones ho can't bring themselves to have life-saving cultural surgery - the strength of their supposed freedom of speech.

SO while Egypt revolts against Islamists, in England and the West generally, they march through the institutions like their Marxist fore-runners did because everyone is too afraid or timid and brow-beaten to call Islamists supremacists by their name and to call a halt to the culturally corrosive influence of a wholly alien, wholly detrimental creed that is anathema to everything that defines the West.

Quote:


If you go back a few centuries, the dominant political model was the Divine Right of Kings. It takes the most monstrous vanity to ignore the tyrannies imposed on the developed world by the West in the last half century alone. Even a Punch-fancier like the old boy acknowledges this and shamelessly promotes it as the White Man’s Burden.

We would not be having this debate if we weren’t at a particular stage in our political-economic development. Reagan, Thatcher and Hawke/Keating ushered in a new era that changed the old Cold War schema for good. Globalization and neoliberalism became the inescapable global paradigm. Financial movement and migration were central to this shift, and it is these two phenomena that the old boy set are reacting against today, from Islamists to first world reactionaries.

Suharto’s Indonesia is crucial to this shift, along with Pinochet’s Chile, These places were the crucible of Milton Friedman’s economic experiments in neoliberalism. This is no fiction - the Chicago School travelled and set up shop in both countries. Suharto and Pinochet had senior Chicago School advisors, and uncontested dictators were crucial in implimenting the initial experiments in economic shock therapy. Both countries developed under the entirely new model of neoclassical economics in the 1970s. This model was then ushered in by the West in the 1980s, eventually taking over the entire global financial system. It was a new economic model that totally changed the way governments and the global order worked.

The system responded in a series of important economic crises. Wall Street crashed in 1987, in what became known as Black Monday. The Asian Financial Crisis hit ten years later. These causes of these shocks were complicated, but they were the inevitable result of neoliberal economic policies. The Asian crisis finally brought down one of the principal players in this story: Suharto.

During the 1990s, populations around the world responded to neoliberalism and globalization, in what some have described as "culture wars". Australia saw the rise of Pauline Hanson. Similar sentiments arose in other places, interpreted through the prisms of their own culture. As a reaction, the new global order saw the rise of Islamicism, neoconservatism, fundamentalism. Media, and media ownership, responded and monopolised. Fox News came into being. As finance globalized, reactions intensified. We got a War on Terror.

We never exported Freeedom, the rules of the game merely changed, same as they always have, same as they continue to do. Blame Islam? But of course!

The rules might have changed, but the game is the same. Suharto had to go for the very reason he was needed in the first place. The game only tolerates Freeedom in very small doses, and for a tiny minority of players.