From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
statements of both the accused and the accuser had to be weighed and compared by a judge, according to the law.
Indeed, significant progress was achieved by the great French Revolution in the area of a citizen’s right to self-preservation. However, we do not yet know perfection in any part of the universe or any branch of life. What we regard as perfect today will tomorrow be overturned by the more perfect. In turn this more perfect state will likewise be overturned, and the process will go on unceasingly. The motion of thesis-antithesis-synthesis goes on everywhere and at all times.2 Let us not be angry or disappointed by this fact. On the contrary, let us be happy and satisfied because in all fields of endeavor things are becoming ever more perfect, for ourselves and for our descendants. This is life-constant motion, change, and improvement in nature’s bounty: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Improvement is not an empty, meaningless thing, and to pursue improvement is not a futile task like chasing a fata morgana.3 Was not feudalism clearly superior to a society based on head-hunting?
[18] In the matter of individual rights we can regard feudalism as the thesis, opposed by the antithesis of the third estate, giving rise to the bourgeois synthesis of the democratic rights to self-preservation. But this synthesis achieved by the bourgeoisie in its struggle against feudalism has now become the thesis, and it is confronted by the antithesis of the proletariat and the dark-skinned and colonized nations, a conflict that generates the following questions:
1. Of what meaning are established means of arrest—by whom, on whose behalf, on what basis and whose instructions—if in capitalist society over 55 percent of the citizens and in colonial countries over 99 percent of the inhabitants are constantly oppressed by economic crisis, unemployment, war, hunger, and famine? When 99.9 percent of the violations of law are rooted in the terrible condition of society itself and in the ignorance and poverty of its members?
2. Of what meaning are regulations for investigation and public trial, to take place with defense lawyers and under the scrutiny of a judge, if the accused are poor people who have neither the education nor the knowledge to defend themselves nor the money with which to hire slick lawyers who know how to blacken white?
3. Of what meaning is justice when even the most just lawyers are imbued with the interest, education, and philosophy of the bourgeoisie? And what does it mean when, for quite a section of democratic capitalist society, modern prisons give more protection (food, clothing, and accommodation) than does society at large?
Chapter 5
RETURN TO INDONESIA
[19] The weather had cooled, rain drizzled down, and the wind blew gently. It was November 1919.1 With a roar, the big ship weighed anchor and engaged its propeller, churning water more impressively than a whale as it begins to swim. Slowly we left the city of Amsterdam behind until all we could see were indistinct little groups of houses in the mist.
Amsterdam is a large city of about a million inhabitants, but at heart it is only a small town.2 Scattered here and there are small factories that make jam, sweets, chocolate, bread, and biscuits. The city is full of winkels—little stores that are very neat and well stocked, but small for a metropolitan port. The Dutch admire the Beurs building as a symbol of modernism in architecture.3 But it is not a skyscraper—strong, firm, soaring into space, a symbol of the spirit and activity of a young country with a will of steel. The Beurs is a nest of brokers—termites and bedbugs busy bargaining away stocks, shares, and such deeds to the soil of other nations. Just as the Taj Mahal is a synthesis of architecture, wealth, and pure perfect love, so the Beurs is a synthesis, or, more correctly, an architectural jumble, filled with the spirit of colonials and kruideniers, whom we know well enough.4
Slowly the ship sailed from the port of Amsterdam to the fishing city of Ijmuiden on the shore of the North Sea. We passed through the Ijmuiden Canal, fearful that the ship’s wake might overflow the dikes.5 Slowly, carefully, cautiously we proceeded . . . voorzichtig . . . dan breekt het lijntje niet.6
[20] It was appropriate enough to the Dutch character: Holland op zijn smaalst.7 Not only is the country here at its narrowest, but the farming enterprises are tiny businesses owned by individuals: potato farms, strawberry farms, and of course the bulb farms. They are not worked on a large scale with machines of a thousand and one horsepower, but with human hands and animals. Everything is small, moderate, gradual: “je kunt het nooit weten” [you never know what might happen]. To work on a large scale for a distant objective with great risk is definitely not in the character of the Dutch.
It is true that at the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch and their sailing ships left their shores, navigated the North Sea, went past South Africa, turned north, sailed along the coast of Africa, Arabia, India, Burma, and came to Indonesia. However, it was not the Dutch who pioneered this route to Indonesia, but the Portuguese. Although what is now New York used to be named New Amsterdam, it wasn’t Jan or Piet who risked his life to obtain America, but Columbus. Dash, adventure, the search for the new on the basis of calculations that still contain the “x” factor, the unclear, the unseen, and the risky—these qualities have never been Dutch characteristics, and in all probability never will be.
It is not impossible that the Netherlands may gradually acquire heavy or medium-scale industry with factories to make machines for ships, trains, or airplanes. And of course with changes in the economic base the psychology of the people would also change. But the Dutch don’t have what they need to pose a commercial challenge to the large nations such as England, America, and Russia: raw materials such as iron, bauxite, alumina, tin, nickel, and other elements needed for today’s alloys. They have to get these things by wielding the iron fist. But this will be impossible if the Indonesian people continue to resist the Dutch and to oppose them with a heart of steel even when armed with only bamboo sticks and hand grenades.
We had left the Netherlands behind, and our ship was heading for Indonesia through the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Gibraltar Straits, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and finally the Indian Ocean. It was six years since I had traveled through these same places in the opposite direction. How many changes had I experienced within myself, mainly due to the unhampered influence of events in the world around me: the outbreak and conclusion of the First World War, the social revolution in Russia, and the establishment and reverberations of the Third International. I had traveled this way at the end of 1913, but how different were the impressions I gained at the end of 1919!8
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the night’s stillness was broken only by the sound of the bow cleaving the water. Memories of the past six years ran like a film through my mind’s eye as the Netherlands receded ever further.
[21] The story was more bitter than sweet. The huge, unresolved conflict within myself had been enlarged and exacerbated by the conflict within the European society that I was leaving and the sharp contradictions of the society towards which I was headed.
I had not been long in the Netherlands before I felt the contradictions in my physical situation. My payment of 30 rupiah (Rp) a month to the Rijkskweekschool [Government Teachers Training School] hostel meant that I couldn’t get food suitable for an Indonesian even if I was prepared to sleep in the attic.9 At that time there were no other Indonesian students who paid less than Rp 50 a month to the hostel, and most of them paid more. However, Rp 30 a month was as much as I could pay from my monthly allowance of Rp 50. Apart from room and board, I also had to pay Rp 11.50 insurance, leaving me Rp 8.50 for my daily needs.10
I had been close to my teacher, Tuan Horensma,11 the deputy director of the Kweekschool in Bukit Tinggi,12 both in the classroom and outside, in the Kweekschool orchestra and in the orchestra for Europeans in Bukit Tinggi, of which Tuan Horensma was the conductor and I the first cellist. It was this relationship and the high level that I attained in my final exams at the Kweekschool that prompted Horensma to go with me to meet the controller in Suliki, where I was born.13 An Engkufonds was established, with my family’s possessions being pledged as security and with contributions from the Engku of Suliki.14 The fund was to collect Rp 50 a month to assist me