Leaders

That unspeakable Suharto has finally croaked it. There’s a good piece by Tom Fawthrop, here of all places, which sets things out pretty well with regard to the mass slaughter of suspected communists on which his rule was founded, the subsequent decades of kleptocracy to which he subjected Indonesia and the support he received from the UK and the United States

Citing Benedict Anderson, Fawthrop  points out that the Republic of Korea has made vastly more progress than Indonesia, having started from a similar level in the early 1960s, and a lot of the responsibility for this failure must be put down to the dead tyrant.  Quite right. However, he doesn´t mention that much of the ROK’s startling economic progress during this period was made on the watch of another autocrat with a military background who enjoyed the unwavering support of the United States, Park, Chung Hee. Though Park didn´t spare the rod on the working class his rule was kid-gloved by comparison to that of Suharto, he led a relatively austere personal life and he contributed to his Korea leaping from near-African levels of poverty to being a world economic power with high indices of human development in scarcely more than a generation.

Summarising heroically, the influence of the United States has been a disaster for Indonesia and a blessing for the Republic of Korea. The outcomes of imperialism depend as much on the quality and moral fibre of the local leadership as they do on the desires or depravities of the hegemon.