Tomorrow, we have a national holiday in Indonesia, May Day, and you can bet your boots the workers will be out in force, a big procession through Jakarta, with lots of speeches and exhortations to flex their ( admittedly none-too-strong ) industrial muscle to improve their lot.
———————
May Day, a few years ago, in Jakarta
- —————–
- They are free to protest, to slam the regime, to publish their angry posters and bulletins. They are free to strike too.
About five years ago, things got out of hand on May Day, fighting between demonstrators and police. It happens – but there was no ferocious crack-down. Some arrests, and that, I think, was that.
Compare and contrast.
A few hours on a plane takes you to Vietnam, where the ruling junta styles itself, laughably, as a ‘party of the working class.’
But workers in that totalitarian hell-hole have none of the rights that our good lads and lasses on the parade tomorrow enjoy.
=====================
===============
No right to strike, no free labour unions uncontrolled by the tyrants, no freedom of the press, no right to parade criticism of the dictatorship.
–

–
And OF COURSE no free elections – what Communist oligarchy would risk THAT?
Turned on the news after a while out sunning myself in the front yard, and lo, a wretched spectacle in Saigon – I choose not to use the city’s current name, which honours a despot.
The camera recorded a cowed people forced to observe their strutting oppressors, the Vietnamese equivalent of the Waffen SS, parading to ‘celebrate’ the Fall of Saigon.
Living in a country which came very close to a Red take-over in 1965, it is always a consolation, whenever frustration sets in at abuses of power by bureaucrats or politicians, to remember how much worse it would be if those evil PKI SOBs had got away with their kudeta.
————————————————————-
————–
Yet still today, we have comsymp creeps in the English-language media, on whom we have reported all too often, bemoaning the fate of those marxist malignants who survived their failed power-grab fifty years ago!
.
Corruption is here, and yes, it’s nauseating. But I’ve heard it said the Vietnam communist cops are the ‘best police money can buy.’
Injustice, yes, that’s here too. But a free press and the handful of honest pols and the NGOs can raise their voices and fight it.
–
Aidit, the PKI Fuhrer who adored North Korea
——————
Had that unlamented old hypocrite Pramoedya, and his patron DN Aidit, risen to rule this archipelago, we’d all be in the same endless nightmare that still grips Saigon.
My Indonesian friends and neighbours might even be dragooned onto the streets tomorrow to cheer their oppressors.
Twas President Reagan who called the Vietnam War a noble cause, and so it was. The tragedy was the defeat of ARVN. America and the Allies.

Thank God Indonesia smashed the PKI!
And may the cruel communist clique that holds Vietnam in servitude share their fate some day.
–
Like this:
Like Loading...
Reply