by: BONO BUDI PRIAMBODO
The Activist End Game: Literacy as Intellectual Subversion
Why did YOI and local NGOs choose to drop this massive intellectual payload between 1993 and 1995? The timeframe is crucial. In the mid-1990s, Suharto’s New Order regime was at the zenith of its institutional control, yet it was also exhibiting deep paranoia. In 1994, the regime aggressively banned major progressive publications like Tempo, Editor, and Detik. Censorship was tightening, and direct political criticism of the palace was exceptionally dangerous, often resulting in immediate subversion charges.
In this claustrophobic environment, publishing Arendt was a calculated act of intellectual smuggling and an exercise in what Antonio Gramsci termed a war of position. Because The Origins of Totalitarianism was famously critical of Stalinism, the regime’s anti-communist censors could not easily dismiss it as Marxist propaganda. Furthermore, having a prominent, anti-communist figure like Franz Magnis-Suseno author the foreword provided an ironclad intellectual shield. It allowed dissidents, student activists, and academics to introduce a radical critique of authoritarianism right under the nose of the state apparatus.
The strategic utility of Arendt for the Indonesian opposition operated on three fronts:
| Strategic Front | New Order Practice | Arendtian Conceptual Counter-Weapon |
|---|---|---|
| Language of Control | Monopoly on Javanese values like Kekeluargaan (Family State) and Musyawarah (Consensus) to label all dissent as “un-Indonesian.” | Terms like atomization, ideological fiction, and de-politicization to reframe “harmony” as forced civic silencing. |
| Ideological Traps | Automatic branding of any systemic state critique as communist (PKI), triggering total social and legal death. | An anti-totalitarian lens that critiques both extreme right and left, creating a safe zone for general critique. |
| Grassroots Passivity | Enforcement of the Floating Mass (Massa Mengambang) policy, banning grassroots political activity to keep citizens passive. | A stark warning that a passive, politically isolated populace is the precise raw material from which monsters are born. |
The Taxonomical Overreach: The Real Character of the New Order
However, an acute tension exists between this activist strategy and strict historical accuracy. To put it bluntly: comparing the New Order to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or the Khmer Rouge is an analytical mismatch—a historical overstatement. The New Order, even at its most oppressive, was fundamentally a developmental, military-backed authoritarian regime, not a total terror-state intent on fundamentally altering human nature. It did not construct death camps, it did not abolish private property or money, and it possessed no desire for global territorial conquest.
To deploy Arendt against Suharto was the intellectual equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb on an enemy when a conventional threat would have sufficed. The precise, surgical scalpels needed to diagnose the New Order existed in the localized scholarship of figures like David Jenkins, Peter Burns, and R.E. Elson. Their works offered a highly realistic, grounded understanding of the state without resorting to the asymmetrical overkill of European totalitarian theory.
David Jenkins and the Pragmatic Sergeant: In his landmark empirical research, including Suharto and His Generals and Young Soeharto, David Jenkins completely demystified the regime. Contrary to scholars like Benedict Anderson—who viewed Suharto as a traditional Javanese monarch playing court politics out of a modern Kraton—Jenkins demonstrated that Suharto was fundamentally an anak desa (village child) from Kemusuk whose entire worldview was forged by two colonial frameworks: the KNIL (where he absorbed disciplined, orderly Dutch NCO bureaucracy) and PETA (where he underwent tactical, authoritarian Japanese military training). Jenkins proved that the New Order was not a totalitarian monolith driven by ideological zealotry, but a complex, factionalized web of military patronage, rivalries, and highly pragmatic institutional administration. It ran on the cold, calculated efficiency of a colonial sergeant scaled up to manage a nation-state.
Peter Burns and the Adat Myth: In The Leiden Legacy, Peter Burns provided a vital legal critique by tracing how Dutch colonial scholars invented and codified the “myth of adat” (customary law). Burns showed how elite legal ideas were constructed to maintain an artificial sense of harmony and indigenous containment. The New Order eagerly inherited this legacy, utilizing the language of customary tradition and communal obligation to override individual constitutional rights. Burns’ work sufficed to show that the regime’s power was rooted in legal manipulation and elite convenience rather than an overarching totalitarian ideology.
R.E. Elson and the Fragile Ideal: In The Idea of Indonesia, R.E. Elson articulated the most profound critique of all: that Indonesia is essentially a miraculous, fragile, intellectual project constructed out of thin air by a small nationalist elite in the early 20th century. This “Idea” was rooted in liberation from colonial subjugation, structural modernity, and an egalitarian civic belonging that transcended thousands of islands and ethnic divides. Elson’s work demonstrates that Sukarno’s Guided Democracy and Suharto’s New Order were not the fulfillment of this idea, but its perversions. Both regimes hijacked the fragile construct of Indonesia to enforce top-down stability, stripping away the liberating, egalitarian promise that made the nation-state worth inventing. To critique Suharto, one did not need to import the horrors of Auschwitz; one merely needed to hold the regime up to the light of its own foundational promises.
