Word: sukarnoism
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...China, while the poet's father briefly served as Mao's personal physician. The family fled the Chinese civil war for Jakarta - where Lee was born in 1957 - and were forced to move again, in 1959, after his father landed in jail during the course of one of Sukarno's anti-Chinese pogroms. This gritty past informs almost all of Lee's work, including a 1995 prose memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and now his latest collection of poems, Behind My Eyes...
...remember the day president Sukarno died. It was June 21, 1970, and I was in a taxi going from Jakarta's airport into town after completing a tour of the U.S. as a student leader - a trip made possible through a program initiated by Suharto, Sukarno's successor. The streets were quiet and I asked the driver why. He replied in a neutral voice that Sukarno had just passed away. After the chaos and isolationism of the Sukarno years, my student movement had supported Suharto's vision of stability and economic growth. Nevertheless, I felt a sad sense of passage...
...dismissal and was jailed for a while, and my TV talk show was banned. Suharto's New Order was precisely that: if not a police state certainly a policed one, with everything kept in check - political parties, religious (and especially Islamic) groups, activists and dissidents, writers and artists. After Sukarno, there was complete regime change...
Stability had been Suharto's gift to his country. He had come to power at the head of a junta of generals in 1965, overthrowing the country's flamboyant and charismatic first president, Sukarno, whose friendship with Beijing and predeliction for Communists in the government had brought the country to the brink of economic collapse and civil war. Ensconced in power, Suharto proceeded to purge the country of Communism and anyone suspected of Communist sympathy. No one knows how many died. One estimate has it at 500,000 - among them many Indonesians of Chinese descent. The Communist Party was outlawed...
...pacified country ruled by a new President -Suharto - with a practiced beatific smile, anti-Communist credentials which a Cold War-obsessed America would reward, a secular philosophy that tamped down religious extremism, and a military that no one could question. He brought an end to the hyperinflation of Sukarno's reign and eradicated the country's widespread hunger by establishing Indonesian self-sufficiency in rice. Stability attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment. "Suharto built Indonesia and we have him to thank for modern buildings, ports and harbors," says Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, a former mines and energy minister under Suharto...