Last week his journey took Michael Portillo to Java, the beautiful, fertile Indonesian island which includes its capital, Jakarta ,and other major cities. A place which, you might believe, as I do, was created by a benign God, so that that’s its inhabitants will not be disconcerted when they leave it for an even more beautiful heaven. I’ve described how one million people were murdered there in 1965, in a coup orchestrated by Britain and the USA, and how between 1945 and 1950 the Dutch, recently liberated at home from the German Occupation, waged bloody war on Indonesia. Last month, (see BLOG “King Willem Regrets) the Dutch King belatedly acknowleged those shameful years.
What emerged from Michael Portillo’s programme was that, in the best of times under the Dutch, the inhabitants were enslaved and died in their droves of famine whilst their country was robbed. Portillo, a highly intelligent and cultured European, showed empathy with the people, and did nothing to underplay the inhumanity of the Dutch settlers and the capitalistsback in Holland who grew rich from that criminal enterprise.
The week before, Michael Portillo was in Vietnam, another beautiful country whose people suffered from Imperialism, French, Japanese, French again, then American with their Australian hangers-on. Portillo was a sympathetic guide, and his questioning about Ho Chi Min confirmed the impression I got reading TIME Magazine (on a flight from London to Dublin in the 1960s when Irish Newspapers were on strike) that Ho was essentially a Sinn Feiner at heart, and Communism an instrument to gain freedom for his people. Until then,like most of my generation in Ireland, I had swallowed a lot of Western Cold War propaganda.
It seems to me that Indonesia suffered more under the Dutch in any five year period than the Dutch did under five years of Hitler. And that Vietnam suffered more under theFrench in the five years after D Day than France did under Hitler and his French collaborators together.
The sufferings of Indonesians and Vietnamese under Western Liberal-Democratic regimes were comparable to those of Poles and Russians under occupation or attack bythe Nazis. And none of the Western despots had the decency shown by Hitler when he shot himself. Portillo appears to me as a chameleon, who hitched his wagon to Margaret Thatcher’s star, and posed as a soul-mate of the appalling Norman Tebbit. Of Tebbit it was said ,(by Michael Foot) – “every time he rises, he gives his famous imitation of a semi house-trained polecat.”
I’m not myself convinced it was merely imitation in Tebbit’s case. But I think it was a pose with Portillo, who, freed from Parliament ,and the ambition of further promotion in that sphere, has found happiness as a paid up member of the human race.And released from old political cronies he is free to conduct himself as a paid-up member of the human race.
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