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Aulia Masna /
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2024-08-17 15:25:43

Aulia Masna on Nostr: As a kid, the history lesson at school and what I read about World War 2 made for a ...

As a kid, the history lesson at school and what I read about World War 2 made for a confusing history because we saw Japan as the enemy which was defeated by the Allied Forces led by the United States, but the Allies were also the enemy because they tried to help the Dutch reclaim the colony and forced Indonesia to pay for independence. A payment so large for a new nation that it wasn’t fully paid until 2002.

The battle cry of Indonesia during the revolutionary war 1945-1949 was, “Inggris kita linggis, Amerika kita setrika”, which means, “We crowbar the English and iron the Americans”, because they sided with the Dutch.

The defeat of Japan, which was (questionably) promising independence to Indonesia despite enslaving the people during their occupation, gave the independence movement the opportunity to declare it for themselves without Japan’s assistance in August 1945, days after the atomic bombs dropped.

However, the Dutch forces returned with the Allies and launched their “police operation” to reclaim the colony as Dutch territory. We weren’t taught much of what happened in Europe so as kids we were mostly in the dark about the Nazis. The main stage of World War II was essentially a footnote in Indonesian school history books of the 80s and 90s as far as I recall. I learned about it from the movies and documentaries.

The US and the UK had promised the Dutch they’d have their pre war territories back until they realized it wasn’t going to happen with all the resistance, so all the parties sat down at The Hague in 1949 to hash out a power transfer, after multiple prior efforts failed. This time it worked and the United States of Indonesia was recognized by the end of the year. The name obviously didn’t stick and the make up of the country was changing for over a decade.

Long read on the brutality of occupation forces in Indonesia in the 1940s https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/archipelago-death-brutality-japanese-and-dutch-counterinsurgency-operations-indonesia
https://mementomori.social/@aulia/112977476823522914
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