Honoring The Past

"Also, I paid for him with a bull when he was accepted. The worth of a bull is little, but Bagheera's honor is something that he will perhaps fight for," said Bagheera in his gentlest voice.

"A bull paid ten years ago!" the Pack snarled. "What do we care for bones ten years old?"  

- The Jungle Book

The dialog above was taken when the wolf pack wants to kill Mowgli, although his safety has been bought and vouched by their elders 10 years ago. How fast the young forget. Or perhaps, they never understand the cause from the start?

This probably speaks true for these youngsters that opens a cafe in Bandung, Indonesia which stated as the only cafe in the world with decorated WW2 German. Or as a blogger says: a cool place to hang out for fans of Third Reich. A period of mass killing, of cruelty and distress, and these - children - thought it was just a cool era. It was especially laughable because Indonesia never even experienced direct effects of the Nazis. It seems it was just fun and games for them, like cos play or donning costume not unlike fans of Star Wars or Japanese Manga. But the thing is, they never have to shed blood. Once they are done play acting, they will be back in the comfort of their home, the normal daily routines that dearly safeguarded by the government. They never feel the real terror that it evokes.

Even though I have ideas on how bad the Nazi era is by means of reading and watching documentaries, I myself never feel that horror, I was lucky enough to be born in stability. But 2 generations before me experience what we called PKI Massacre, in which the Indonesian attack and killed people (suspected to be) affiliated with the Communist Party Indonesia. It was Salem witch hunt in a grander scale. My grandfather witness one of the killing, when a couple of his fellow sailors killed by the rest of the crew on the boat they were sailing on. There was no escape, he can only view helplessly else he got killed instead. It ruined him for good. At times he will have that trapped and panic look in his eyes and mum will swiftly tell us to go somewhere else, sometimes he will sat with us and launch a tirade on how bad communism and some incoherent conspiracy theories, or stuffed papers underneath my door chock filled to the brim with his writing in, again, incoherent conspiracy. He had to stuff his ear with cottons because he was "hearing voices". This is what living in terror is all about.

A commentator in the blog wrote: If they want to reenact something, why no reenacting the PKI era? Touche. I guess they couldn't though, not without seriously offending a lot of people. It goes the same with reenacting the VOC/Dutch colonialism era or the brief but deathly Japanese era, and saluted/honoring their cruel deed. This is what makes me strongly believe they are nothing but children playing with their toys. Yet can ignorance really be forgiven? I can't imagine how damaging it was, how hurtful it must have been to people that have lived and experience the actual horror, to saw their source of grievance played casually in child's hand.

I agree that there are always two sides of everything. The amazing Sun Tzu or Alexander the Great which greatly admired and hailed for their brilliant war tactics might have been a real terror to their opponents, or to anything that stands in their way for that matter. Yet time heals all, and perhaps a few hundreds years from now people can see and admire the brilliantness of Nazi's tactic as we do with Sun Tzu's. Of course, the fact that Sun Tzu's and Alexander the Great's conquest was solely to unite and expand their kingdom is probably consider slightly more acceptable than Nazi's Aryan supremacy which entitles with genocides to purified their race.

To Indonesian people that thinks this Nazi stuff is okay, I just want to kindly informed you that race supremacy is alive and well. As many commentators in the article have pointed out, if the Neo Nazi gets your ass, or heaven forbid, rules again, you better run for your life since you are definitely not Aryan. My previous employer casually cuss about "Fucking Balinese" with the most disrespectful tone ever in a project meeting with another foreigners even though I was there next to him, a true blue Balinese. The client was not impressed and needless to say we didn't got that project. And this guy has lived in Bali for almost 9 years. This is but a few of my experiences in "race supremacy", which thankfully is not many yet enough to give me an understanding that for some people no matter how good or how skilled you are you will still be considered as "less" just because you are not of the same race. This, is the real life cos play boys.