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Sample of Soekarno's oratory: "Our ideal is an automobile for everybody. . . ." (At present few cars travel Java's pot-holed roads.) "I've just received a letter from a young girl who wants to be an airplane pilot. . . . That's right, hitch your aims to the stars. . . . We can laugh, we can eat and some day we can have clothes. . . . But our ideals will not be realized easily. We must struggle for them...
...could do with a nickname. Soekarno is his first name, and it is almost as common in Java as Hans is in Holland. Indonesians are careless about surnames, and Soekarno lost his somewhere along the rocky way of a life that began humbly in Surabaya. Young Soekarno was one of those bright, indifferent students who frequently turn out to be politicians...
...civil engineering, which entitles him to put Ir. in front of his name (Ir. is a contraction of ingenieur, Dutch for engineer). Soekarno's architectural career was as short as his professional title. He designed a few Chinese homes and was commissioned to do a Moslem mosque (most Java mosques are hideous tin-roofed stucco monstrosities, in contrast to the lovely ruins of the vanquished Hindu temples...
...still on Flores when the Japs attacked the N.E.I. In eight days the Dutch lost Java. Gallant but inept, the Dutch Navy bungled into calamity and the Dutch air force was destroyed. Thereafter, it would have been pointless, militarily, for the Dutch Army to attempt resistance. To the Indonesians, however, the Army was the symbol of Dutch rule. When the Army did not fight and Dutch Governor General A. W. L. Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer* fled to Australia, the Indonesians lost all respect for the Dutch. Millions of Indonesians swallowed the Jap slogan "Asia for the Asiatics...
Meanwhile British diplomacy, first in the person of Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (now Lord Inverchapel), who was succeeded by Lord Killearn, continued its efforts to bring the Dutch and the Indonesians together. Former Dutch Premier Willem Schermerhorn, who had blamed van Mook for dealing with collaborators, came out to Java and soon found himself discussing the situation over Scotch & soda with Soekarno, whose Mohammedanism is not so rigid that he scorns a drink...