Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
opening up a file that honestly reads less like
a political biography and more like a national
myth. It really does. We're looking at a man
who didn't just, you know, lead a country. He
essentially conjured one into existence. Right.
Out of sheer will, a whole lot of speeches and
just thin air, it feels like. It sounds like
an exaggeration, but it's almost literally true.
I mean, think about it. You've got an archipelago
with over 17 ,000 islands. 17 ,000. Hundreds
of different ethnic groups, languages that have
almost nothing in common. And this one figure
somehow welds them all into a single identity.
We are, of course, talking about Sukarno, the
founding father of Indonesia. And looking at
this massive stack of documents you've pulled
together, intelligence reports, personal diaries,
speech. transcripts, even architectural blueprints.
It's clear this wasn't just a politician. Oh,
not at all. He was a civil engineer, a revolutionary,
a well, a notorious playboy, a political prisoner
and eventually a president for life. A president
for life who then dies under house arrest. That
whole trajectory is just unbelievable. And that
arc from the palace right back to the prison.
That's the heart of this story. He's often called
the father of Indonesia or. Bung Karno. Brother
Karno. Exactly. And that nickname is so important.
It suggests this intimacy. He wasn't some distant
king on a throne. He was the people's brother.
But as we're going to see, being a brother and
being a competent head of state are two very,
very different things. So the mission for this
deep dive is, I think, pretty specific. We want
to understand how he did it. How does one person
use theater, language, and even architecture
to build the Republic of Indonesia? And then
the flip side of that coin, why did this incredible
house he built eventually just collapse on top
of him? To understand the collapse, you have
to look at the foundation. Yeah. And with Sukarno,
the foundation is all about identity. He was
obsessed with it. Completely, starting with his
own. Let's start right there, because even his
name is a construction. Yeah. I was looking through
the early biographical notes. He wasn't actually
born Sukarno, was he? No, not at all. He was
born in 1901 in East Java, and his given name
was Quesno Sosro de Harjo. Quesno. Right. But
he was an incredibly sickly child. I mean, he
was constantly suffering from malaria, dysentery,
fevers. And you have to understand the Javanese
cultural context here. Okay. In Javanese mysticism,
there's this deeply held belief that a name carries.
Well, it carries weight. Spiritual weight. Exactly.
And if a name is too heavy for a child's spirit
to carry, the child gets sick. The name is literally
crushing them. So his parents performed a ritual.
A renaming ceremony. To save his life. They called
him Sukano, naming him after Karna, who is a
major warrior hero from the Mahabharata epic.
Wow. I mean, that's not a small choice. The Mahabharata
is a cornerstone of the culture in that part
of the world. It's huge. And Karna is a very
complex, very tragic figure in that story. He's
powerful. He's loyal. But he's also fated to
be on the losing side. He fights for the antagonists
out of a sense of duty, even knowing it's a lost
cause. It's almost like a self -fulfilling prophecy
for Sukarno's own life. You can absolutely read
it that way. It's uncanny. Something else I noticed
in the Dutch intelligence files you included.
His name is spelled S -O -E -K -A -R -N -O. But
later on, it's the modern U. Ah, right. That's
just the old Dutch orthography. The O makes a
U sound in Dutch. Later in his life as president,
Sukarno actually pushed to modernize the spelling
of the entire Indonesian language to sort of
decolonize it. So he changed the spelling for
everyone else. Yes, but, and this is a fantastic
little character detail, he kept the depth spelling
for his own signature. No way. Why? He just claimed
he was too old and too used to it to change how
he signed his name. So he's literally the embodiment
of that transition. A modern nation, but he's
signing his documents with a colonial pen. It's
a perfect metaphor. Speaking of names, I have
to ask about Ahmed. I saw it in several Western
diplomatic cables. Ahmed Sukarno. But that's
not his name at all. It's a pure invention, a
total fabrication. See, Javanese people often
just have one name. There's no first name, last
name system like we have in the West. And that
just broke the brains of Western bureaucrats.
It absolutely did. They couldn't handle a blank
space on a form. It just it didn't compute. So
they just gave him one? Pretty much. And the
story goes that when he was visiting the Middle
East, an Indonesian student just added Ahmed
to his press materials to make him sound more
authentically Muslim to the Arab world, you know,
to build support for the new republic. And Sukarno
just... Went with it. He leaned into it. It shows
you how adaptable he was. If the Middle East
needed a Muslim brother, fine, he was Ahmed.
If the West needed a refined, Dutch -educated
intellectual, he could be that too. He was a
chameleon. He became whatever the audience needed
him to be. Let's talk about that education. Because
for a native, as the Dutch would have called
him, in the 1920s, his background was incredibly
rare. It was statistically improbable. His father
was a Javanese aristocrat. a muslim and his mother
was from a balinese noble family and she was
hindu so right there in his own dna he's a living
bridge between the two dominant cultures of the
archipelago exactly but his education was thoroughly
western he somehow managed to get into the hosier
burger school a dutch high school which was effectively
segregated highly he was one of just a handful
of non -europeans and this is where he masters
the tools of his oppressor he becomes a polyglot
We're talking Japanese, Sundanese, Balinese,
Indonesian, Dutch, German, English, French, Arabic
and later Japanese. I'm looking at a note here
from one of the reports. It says he had a photographic
memory. He had a truly precocious mind and he
didn't just learn the languages. He devoured
Western political theory. He's reading Marx,
Jefferson, Rousseau, Lincoln. all in their original
languages. Wow. So he could quote the American
Declaration of Independence and then turn around
and quote Das Kapital in the same breath. This
gave him a massive psychological advantage later
on because he often knew the Dutch colonial administrators
own history and laws better than they did. And
all this time, he's not studying political science.
He's studying to be an engineer. A civil engineer
and an architect at the Bandum Institute of Technology.
And this is the key metaphor for his entire life.
Sukarno approached nation building as an architect.
He wasn't just managing a country. He was designing
it. He actually ran an architecture firm for
a while. He did before politics completely took
over. He helped renovate the famous Preanger
Hotel in Bandung, designed private houses. And
you can see that obsession. later when he's president,
the National Monument, that massive Jalora Bung
Karno Stadium, the Istiql Mosque. Yeah. He literally
wanted to construct the skyline of modern Indonesia.
He believed a great nation needed great stages
to perform its greatness on. He saw the nation
as a physical structure. It needed a foundation.
It needed pillars, a roof. But before he could
build the physical monuments, he had to build
the ideological blueprint. And this is where
he really starts to diverge. from the traditional
Marxists of the time. Absolutely. This is the
famous Marhan story. Right. So traditional European
communism is all about the proletariat, right?
The industrial factory worker who sells their
labor to a capitalist boss. But Indonesia in
the 1920s didn't really have a lot of factories.
Exactly. It was a farming society. So the Marxist
model didn't quite fit the reality on the ground.
So one day, Sukarno is out cycling near Bandung,
and he stops to talk to a peasant farmer named
Marhane. Okay. Now, Marhane owns his own small
plot of land. He owns his own hoe. He owns his
seeds. So technically, by a strict Marxist definition,
he is not a proletariat because he owns the means
of production. But he's still incredibly poor.
Dirt poor. He has no power in the system. He's
just barely surviving. He's self -sufficient,
but he's destitute. And Sukarno has a lightbulb
moment. A huge one. He realizes he needs an ideology
for that guy. So he coins the term Marhainism.
It's a form of socialism that's tailored for
the agrarian, colonized little person. It was
anti -imperialist, anti -feudal, but it wasn't
strictly Soviet -style communism. It was distinctly
Indonesian. So he's really threading a needle
here. He hates the Dutch for their imperialism,
but he also rejects the old Javanese feudal lords
who kept people like Marhain down for centuries.
He wanted something totally new. He wanted modernity,
but on Indonesian terms, not Western ones. And
that was an incredibly powerful message. Which
the Dutch obviously did not appreciate. Not in
the slightest. From the late 1920s to the early
40s, Sukarno spent most of his life either in
prison or in exile. They sent him to the remote
island of Flores, then to Bengkulu in Sumatra.
He was isolated. For all intents and purposes,
he was neutralized. Until the whole world broke.
World War II. The Japanese invasion of 1942.
And this changes everything. This is a part of
the file that gets really, really murky. I think
for a lot of people, the idea of a revered independence
hero collaborating with the Japanese Empire,
which was absolutely brutal, is shocking. It
is. But the sources suggest that Sukarno and
his partner, Muhammad Hadda, actually saw this
coming. They predicted it. In a way. There's
an ancient Javanese prophecy, the Joyoboyo prophecy,
which predicted that yellow people from the north
would come and rule Java for the lifetime of
the maize plant, a very short time. And after
they left, Java would be free. So they saw the
Pacific War through this almost mystical lens.
A very pragmatic one, too. They believed the
Dutch were just too strong to be defeated from
the inside. They needed an outside force, a sledgehammer,
to crack the colonial shell. And for them, Japan
was that sledgehammer. So when the Japanese arrive,
kick the Dutch out in a matter of weeks and occupy
the islands, Sukarno doesn't fight them. He joins
them. He makes a deal with the devil. There's
just no other way to put it. We have a famous
quote from him from this period where he says,
The Lord be praised, independent Indonesia can
only be achieved with day nippon. With day nippon.
With Japan. That implies a partnership. What
did he get out of this deal? Access. The Japanese
needed to control millions of people to support
their war effort. They didn't speak the languages.
They didn't know the culture. They needed a mouthpiece.
And Sukarno became that mouthpiece. In exchange,
they gave him a radio, a microphone, and the
freedom to travel the entire archipelago, spreading
the idea of Indonesia. He was using their resources
to build his nation. So he was basically spreading
nationalist ideas under the guise of Japanese
propaganda. It was a double game, absolutely.
He'd give these speeches that, on the surface,
praised Japan's war effort, but the subtext was
always about Indonesian unity, Indonesian pride,
but the cost. My God, the cost was horrific.
You have to talk about the Romusha. We do. These
were the forced laborers. The Japanese needed
millions of men to build airfields, railways,
defenses across Southeast Asia to fight the Allies.
And Sukarno, he was the chief recruiter. So he
was on the radio telling young men that this
was their patriotic duty. Yes. He gave speeches
telling them it was an honor to work for the
greater East Asia co -prosperity sphere. Millions
were recruited. And the conditions were... What?
Basically slavery. Worse in many cases. Starvation,
disease, brutal beatings. Thousands upon thousands
die. They were treated as disposable biological
machinery. And Sukarno knew this was happening.
Did he ever? Did he ever reckon with that role?
In his autobiography. written much later he admitted
to the deep shame of it he tried to frame them
as necessary sacrifices for the greater goal
of independence he coined slogans like let's
iron america and bludgeon the british i mean
he was fully integrated into their war machine
it's the darkest stain on his entire legacy without
a doubt it's something his critics rightly never
let him forget It brings us back to that architect
metaphor again. You know, if you're building
a skyscraper, you account for a certain number
of workplace accidents. These weren't accidents.
These were millions of human lives sacrificed
for the structure of the nation. It's a ruthless,
chilling calculus. And yet, amidst all this darkness,
he lays what becomes the philosophical cornerstone
of the country. June 1st, 1945. The Pancasila.
The Five Principles. This is still the official
state ideology of Indonesia today. But looking
at the early drafts in our source stack, this
almost caused the country to fracture before
it was even born. It was the ultimate high wire
act. The Japanese had set up this investigative
committee for independence, the BPUPK. And Sukarno
gets up and proposes five founding principles,
the five pillars for his national house, nationalism,
internationalism, or you could say human rights,
democracy, social justice and belief in God.
And it's that last one, belief in God, that caused
all the friction, right? Precisely. Because Indonesia
is a majority Muslim country, but it also has
very significant... Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist
populations, especially in the eastern islands,
the hardline Islamists on the committee wanted
the first principle to explicitly state an obligation
for Muslims to follow Sharia law. And that was
actually written into the draft, the Jakarta
Charter? It was. And if that had stayed in the
final constitution, Indonesia would have effectively
become an Islamic state. And the eastern islands,
which are largely Christian, would have almost
certainly refused to join the republic. They
would have split off. The nation would have been
stillborn. Sukarno and Hadda realized this at
the absolute 11th hour. The day after they declare
independence, August 18th, they meet and they
scrub that Sharia clause. They changed it to
the much more inclusive belief in one supreme
God. Wow. That is a massive pivot. He chose national
unity over religious dogma. He did. And it saved
the nation from fracturing, but it also created
a permanent enemy in the radical Islamist factions.
They felt betrayed. And that tension, that betrayal
never really went away. It just simmered under
the surface for decades. OK, so let's fast forward
a bit. August 1945, the atomic bombs have been
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrenders,
and suddenly there's a complete power vacuum.
The perfect moment. The Dutch are gone, the Japanese
are defeated, and the Allies haven't arrived
yet. It's the window of opportunity he's been
waiting for his entire life. But Sukarno? He
hesitates. Why? Why would he hesitate now? Fear.
Or maybe pragmatism. He's in Jakarta. The Japanese
army is still there, still fully armed, just
waiting for the Allied handover. He's terrified
that if he declares independence without their
permission, the Japanese will just massacre the
nationalists to maintain order. He wants to go
through the official channels. But the Pemuda?
They're not having it. They want revolution,
and they want it now. Which leads to one of the
most dramatic episodes of the entire story, the
Rengis -Denglok incident. It's like something
out of a crime thriller. At 3 .0 a .m. on August
16th, a group of young, radical nationalists
basically break into Sukarno's house. They kidnap
him and Hada at gunpoint. They kidnap their own
leader. Yep. Threw them in cars, drove them to
a military garrison outside the city in a place
called Rengizdenklok. They sat him down and said
essentially, We are not going back to Jakarta
until you promise to declare independence right
now. We are done waiting for the Japanese. They
completely forced his hand. Talk about revolutionary
peer pressure. And it worked. Sukarno realized
the momentum was just unstoppable. He goes back
to Jakarta that night. They all go to the house
of a sympathetic Japanese admiral, Admiral Maeda,
because it was one of the few safe places in
the city. And they pull an all -nighter. Literally
drafting the proclamation of independence on
his dining room table. And the next morning.
August 17th, 1945. At 10 .00 a .m., Sukarno stands
on his own front porch. There's a small crowd.
He reads the proclamation. It was incredibly
simple, short, hasty. We, the people of Indonesia,
hereby declare the independence of Indonesia.
And that was it. And then the real war began.
Because the Dutch didn't just say, OK, our mistake.
Good luck with the new country. No, the Dutch
treated it as a joke. They came back, backed
by the British, fully expecting to just resume
colonial rule as if the last four years hadn't
happened. What followed was four years of absolutely
brutal warfare and intense diplomatic chess.
The sources really highlight a division of labor
here. You've got General Suderman in the jungle
leading a guerrilla war. And you have Sukarno
in the cities fighting the diplomatic war. He
knew they couldn't beat the Dutch military head
to head. They were better armed, better trained.
So he used the international press. He charmed
foreign journalists. He charmed the Americans.
He framed Indonesia as the underdog, as a victim
of old world imperialism. He made the Dutch look
like bullies on the world stage. And it was the
United States that eventually tipped the scales,
wasn't it? It was. The Marshall Plan. The U .S.
was pouring billions into rebuilding post -war
Europe, including the Netherlands. When the Dutch
launched another major military offensive and
captured Sukarno, the U .S. finally had enough.
They threatened to cut off all Marshall Plan
funds to the Netherlands if they didn't stop
the war. Money talks. Money talks louder than
guns sometimes. The Dutch folded almost immediately.
In December 1949, sovereignty was officially
transferred. Sukarno moved into the old Dutch
governor general's palace and renamed it the
Merdeka Palace. Palace, Freedom Palace. He had
one. So the architect has finally built the house.
The tenants have all moved in. Yeah. But now,
now the roost starts leaking. The 1950s in Indonesia
sound absolutely chaotic. Chaotic is an understatement.
They tried to implement a Western style liberal
democracy, you know, a parliament, elections,
a prime minister. But this is a nation of thousands
of islands and dozens of competing ideologies.
You had Islamists, communists, nationalists,
regional separatists all fighting for power.
And the government was just paralyzed. Completely.
Cabinets were collapsing every few months. There
were rebellions in the outer islands. It was
a mess. And Sukarno is the president, but he's
watching all this and he hates it. He despises
it. He called it. 50 % plus one democracy. He
argued that Western democracy was all about conflict,
about fighting to get a bare majority. He said
that wasn't the Indonesian way. He felt it was
tearing the architectural integrity of his nation
apart. So he proposes his own solution, guided
democracy, which, let's be honest, sounds a lot
like a dictatorship with a better branding team.
That is absolutely the criticism. But his sales
pitch was culturally brilliant. He used the metaphor
of the traditional Indonesian village. He said,
in a village, we don't vote and fight. The elders
gather, they discuss Musyawara until they reach
a consensus mufakat. And in this grand national
village, who is the head elder? Sukarno, of course.
In 1959, he issues a decree. He dissolves the
parliament, tosses out the constitution, and
concentrates all power in his own hands. He becomes
the great leader of the revolution. And to hold
this unstable chemical mixture together, he invents
another ideological concept. Massacombe. Nasikom
is the absolute peak of his political high wire
act. It's an acronym for nationalism, nationalism,
agama, religion and communism. Communism. OK,
hold on. Those three things are fundamentally
incompatible. Communism is officially atheist.
Religion is, well, religion. And the nationalists
in Indonesia were mostly the army who absolutely
loathed the communists. How on earth do you mix
oil, water and fire? By shaking the bottle really,
really hard. Sukarno believed that his charisma,
his force of personality, was strong enough to
force these three opposing groups to work together
under his guidance. He needed the army, the nationalists,
to keep order. He needed the religious groups
for moral legitimacy. And he needed the communists,
the PKI, for mass mobilization. The PKI was huge
at this point, right? The third largest communist
party in the entire world after only China and
the Soviet Union. And Sukarno started leaning
on them more and more, specifically to balance
out the growing power of the army, who he correctly
feared was getting too powerful and might be
plotting against him. And this is where the West,
especially the U .S., really starts to panic.
It's the height of the Cold War. And here's Sukarno,
the leader of the fifth most populous country
in the world, openly cozying up to the communists.
And he wasn't quiet about it. He steps onto the
world stage and basically tries to flip the entire
script of the Cold War. In 1955, he hosts the
Bandom Conference. This is the birth of the non
-aligned movement. He stands up and tells the
nations of Asia and Africa, you don't have to
choose between Washington and Moscow. He had
his own terminology for this, too, didn't he?
Nifo and Old Defo. That's right. the new emerging
forces Nifo versus the old established forces
Oldefo. He saw the world not as East versus West,
but as the oppressed versus the oppressors. He
wanted to unite China, Indonesia, the African
states into a whole new power bloc that would
challenge the old colonial powers. And his foreign
policy became extremely aggressive. Unbelievably
so. Look at Confrontasi the Confrontation. When
the British helped form the Federation of Malaysia
in 1963, Sukarno took it as a personal insult.
He called Malaysia a British neocolonial plot
designed to encircle and weaken Indonesia. So
he launched a low -level war against them. He
sent paratroopers into Borneo. It was a huge
international incident. And then when the UN
officially recognized Malaysia and gave them
a seat on the Security Council, Sukarno just
quit. He pulled Indonesia out of the United Nations.
Yes, in 1965. To this day, it's the first and
only time a nation has ever formally withdrawn
from the UN. That is a bold, almost reckless
move. And he definitely wasn't making any friends
in Washington. The relationship with the U .S.
became toxic. When they threatened to cut off
aid because of his aggression towards Malaysia
and his friendship with the PKI, Sukarno stood
up in a massive stadium speech and just shouted,
Go to hell with your aid. Go to hell with your
aid. I mean, that's a quote that must have reverberated
around the world. I can see why the CIA had a
file on him thick enough to be a doorstop. They
desperately wanted him gone. And this leads to
one of the more... Well, bizarre chapters of
the Cold War. The honey traps. This was my favorite
part of the research. It's almost comical how
badly the intelligence agencies misread the cultural
context. It really is. I mean, it was no secret
that Sukarno was a womanizer. He had nine wives
over his lifetime, countless affairs. He styled
himself as the great lover. So the Soviet KGB
thought they could use this against him. During
a visit to Moscow, they allegedly filmed him
in a hotel room with some flight attendants that
they had planted there. Classic blackmail stuff.
Do what we say or we release the tapes. Exactly.
So they present the tapes to him, expecting him
to be terrified and compliant. Instead, the story
goes that Sukarno watched the footage, burst
out laughing, and asked if he could have a few
copies to take home. He wanted a copy. He wasn't
ashamed at all. In Javanese culture, that kind
of virility, that shakti, was seen as a sign
of spiritual power and charisma. Being a ladies'
man didn't hurt his poll numbers. It helped them.
It showed he was full of vitality. And the CIA
tried the same thing, didn't they? The CIA went
one step further and produced a fake pornographic
film hiring a Sukarno lookalike. They planned
to release it to discredit him, but it failed
for the same reason. He was just Teflon when
it came to these kinds of scandals. But Teflon
eventually wears off. And by 1965, the country
is in a terrible state. The economy is in absolute
freefall. Inflation is at something like 600%.
People are queuing for rice. He's fighting an
expensive, pointless war with Malaysia. And physically,
he's falling apart. Kidneys were failing. He
was in constant pain. And that delicate political
balance, that nasicum mixture, was about to violently
explode. The army and the communists were ready
to kill each other. Sukarno was the only thing
holding them back. And his grip was slipping
fast. And then comes the night of September 30th,
1965. The G30S movement. This is the turning
point, the event that changes everything. It's
still one of the most debated and mysterious
events in modern Asian history. What exactly
happened? In the middle of the night, a group
of mid -level soldiers calling themselves the
30th September Movement kidnapped six of the
top army generals in Jakarta. They were taken
to an Air Force base, murdered, and their bodies
were thrown down a well at a place called Lubang
Buaya Crocodile Hole. And who are these soldiers?
Who are they working for? That's the mystery.
They claimed to be loyalists who were protecting
Sukarno. They said they were launching a preemptive
strike to stop a CIA backed coup by a council
of generals who were planning to overthrow Sukarno
on Army Day just a few days later. So they claimed
they were actually saving Sukarno from the army.
That was their story. But the next morning, the
optics were terrible. So Carno, for reasons that
are still unclear, went to the Halim Air Force
Base, which was the rebel headquarters. This
made it look like he was involved or at the very
least complicit. He didn't condemn the murders
right away. He seemed confused, hesitant. He
was losing control. And this is where the villain
or the hero, depending on which history book
you read, enters the stage. Major General Suharto.
He was the head of the army's strategic reserve,
and for reasons that are also still hotly debated,
he was not on the assassins' hit list. He seized
control of the army almost immediately, and he
pointed the finger squarely at one group, the
communists. He blamed the entire thing on the
PKI. He spun a narrative that the communists
had masterminded the whole thing as an attempt
to take over the country. And he launched a counterattack.
And not just a military one. No. A purge. This
part of the file is just chilling. It was a genocide.
Over the next few months, the army, with the
help of local religious and vigilante groups,
hunted down and killed anyone even suspected
of being a communist or a sympathizer. The death
toll is debated, but the most common estimates
range from 500 ,000 to over a million people
killed. The rivers in Java and Bali were literally
clogged with bodies. And Sukarno, the great leader
of the revolution. Where was he in all this?
completely powerless to stop it. He tried. He
gave speeches saying the generals' murders were
just a ripple in the ocean of the revolution.
He was desperately trying to downplay it to save
his nasicum concept, to save the balance of power.
Calling a massacre of his top generals a ripple
probably didn't sit well with the public or the
army. It destroyed his credibility. The students,
who used to adore him, took to the streets. But
they weren't chanting long live Boncarno anymore.
They were chanting for the price of rice to come
down and for the PKI to be banned. Sukarno was
losing the street. He was still technically president,
but Suharto now held the gun. And then came what's
called the slow motion coup, the Super Samar.
March 11th, 1966. The presidential palace was
surrounded by protesters and unnamed troops.
Sukarno was forced to sign a document, the Surat
Perenta Sabelis Moret, or Super Samar, the order
of March 11th. It gave Suharto the authority
to take all measures considered necessary to
restore order and security. It sounds like a
blank check. It was. It was the legal instrument
of the coup. Suharto used that piece of paper
to officially ban the PKI, arrest Sukarno's loyal
ministers, and just slowly, methodically, he
tightened the noose around Sukarno's neck. Was
Sukarno forced to sign it at gunpoint? That's
the million -dollar question that historians
still fight over. Some accounts say three of
Suharto's generals cornered him and forced him.
Others say he was just exhausted, sick, and thought
signing it would calm things down and that he
could regain control later. But once he signed
it, it was over. By 1967. He's officially stripped
of his powers and the end of his life. It's just
so tragic. It's heartbreaking. This is the man
who hosted Queen Elizabeth and JFK, who charmed
Khrushchev, who literally built the nation from
scratch. And he was placed under house arrest
in a villa in Bogor. Suharto's new regime isolated
him completely. And they denied him proper medical
care. For his failing kidneys, yes, he wasn't
allowed to see the people he had liberated. He
was interrogated constantly about his role in
the 1965 events. The architect was now a prisoner
in the very house he had built. When he died
in June 1970, millions of people still lined
the streets for his funeral procession. They
wept. Even Suharto showed up for the funeral,
but it was pure political theater. For the next
30 years, the New Order government tried to bury
his legacy. They wanted to remember him only
as the proclamator of independence. But forget
the president who leaned left and challenged
the West. They banned his books. They demonized
his politics. But you can't really bury a figure
that large. No. History has a way of correcting
itself. After Suharto fell, his legacy was slowly
rehabilitated. His daughter, Megawati Soekarnoputri,
eventually became the fifth president of Indonesia.
And just recently, in 2024, the government officially
revoked the 1967 resolution that stripped him
of power, effectively clearing his name of involvement
in the G30S coup. A vindication more than 50
years too late. But a vindication nonetheless.
It brings the circle to a close. So as we look
back at this just massive life, how do we sum
it up? What's the final verdict on Soekarno?
I think you have to see him as the visionary.
The artist. He could dream up a nation, design
its philosophical soul, and convince a hundred
million people that they were all one family.
He gave them an identity and a sense of pride
when they had none. But he couldn't manage the
checkbook. He couldn't deal with the boring,
gritty reality of economics, of logistics. He
was a spectacular revolutionary, but a terrible
administrator. He gave them pride. He told them
they were great people at a time when the rest
of the world told them they were colonial subjects.
Exactly. He made them stand tall. But standing
tall doesn't put rice in the bowl. And in the
end, empty bellies often matter more than even
the most inspiring rhetoric. And that leads me
to a final thought for you, our listeners, to
maybe chew on. Sukarno was obsessed with this
concept he called birdicari, which means standing
on your own two feet. He truly believed that
real independence meant rejecting all foreign
reliance, even if it meant economic ruin. It's
the whole philosophy behind go to hell with your
age. A very powerful, very nationalistic sentiment.
So the question is. In today's hyper -connected,
globalized world, where every single nation relies
on intricate trade deals and supply chains, was
Sukarno's vision of total self -sufficiency a
noble dream, or was it just a dangerous delusion?
Is it better to be poor and proud, or rich and
dependent? That is the question that I think
every developing nation is still struggling to
answer today. Indeed. Thanks for joining us on
this deep dive into the life of Sukarno. We'll
see you next time.