Quoth our honorable moderator: > When a dictator falls to popular forces we seem to always get the same > dreary outcome. From the Philipines to South Africa to Haiti, leaders > come to the fore spouting slogans of people power, only to fall in line > with the forces of neo-liberalism. > > Indonesia is a bigger country in terms of population. Is there any way > that it could resist falling into the same pattern? First of all it is we that should resist falling into an automatic expectation of this standard scenario. Indonesia is not only a bigger country but a vast archipelago whose apparent political integrity should hardly be taken for granted; separatist movements could suddenly emerge on some of the major islands, where resettlement schemes for land-hungry Javanese peasants were experienced as foreign intrusions in the '80s. What do we really know about the pre-Dutch history of this entity? It's time for some input from the world systems people. According to travellers, except for parts of Sumatra the influence of Islam is fairly shallow; we have to know more about the classical civilization that the Dutch found there and whether a resurgence of it is possible. Considering the art I've seen out of Indonesia, I doubt that it suffers from the kind of cultural/historical amnesia that Mariategui sought to dispel among the Indians of Peru. Let's not be too quick to minimize Indonesia's revolutionary options. valis