A new witch-hunt?

Back in 1923, in an address to the London School of Economics students union, the prominent British philosopher, mathematician and man-of-letters, Bertrand Russell, with more than a little bit of sarcasm, commented on Marxism and Communism that Marx's Das Kapital "is in essence a collection of atrocity stories designed to stimulate martial ardor against the enemy. Very naturally, it also stimulates the martial ardor of the enemy. It thus brings about the class-war which it prophesies."

Undoubtedly, in the 1920s and 1930s Marx's theory of historical materialism exerted a powerful attraction on people who were fighting for justice and a fairer distribution of wealth. Pioneers of the Indonesian independence movement of that time -- from Tan Malaka to Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta who made the establishment of a free, just and prosperous Indonesia their ideal -- made no secret of the fact that to some greater or lesser extent they too had come under the influence of Karl Marx's works.

It is hard to deny that, as a thinker and theorist and nothing more, Karl Marx has contributed significantly to the philosophy of history, particularly as it relates to the distribution of wealth among people. This is not to say, however, that he was right in all his hypotheses. In fact, history has since proved that, translated into the language of real-world realities, Marx was wrong in almost all his propositions.

"The idea that a completely planned or directed economic system could and would be used to bring about distributive justice presupposes, in fact, the existence of something which does not exist and has never existed, a complete moral code in which the relative values of all human ends, the relative importance of all the needs of all the different people are assigned a definite place and a definite quantitative significance," Friedrich August von Hayek, the Vienna-born British economist and, together with Gunnar Myrdal, winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in 1940.

It is thus not at all surprising that communism as an ideology, an economic system and system of government has failed and collapsed almost everywhere in the world. And in most of those few places where it still prevails -- China is a prime example -- communism has changed its face and continues to exist in name only.

Nevertheless, suspicion of communists, real and perceived, and also the "martial ardor of the enemy" against communism, to quote Lord Bertrand's words, remains strong in this country. The reported intention of the organization calling itself the Anti- Communist Alliance (AAK) to raid Jakarta's bookshops on May 20 -- the Indonesian National Awakening Day -- proves this reality.

The newsmagazine Tempo reported that only a few weeks ago the Alliance symbolically burned copies of a book titled Thoughts of Karl Marx, by Franz-Magnis Suseno, to signal the impending start of the campaign to destroy all "leftist" books or at least have them removed from the shelves. Among the books targeted for destruction are all those written by Indonesia's foremost writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer and other books which are considered to "corrupt the younger generation" of Indonesians.

A special team of the Alliance is reportedly at present combing Jakarta's bookshops to compile an inventory of "leftist" titles that are to be either destroyed or removed. As a natural result, bookshops all across the country have started to remove those titles from their shelves for fear that they will become targets of the Alliance's self-appointed censors. To make matters worse, others have begun to join in the action. Students in Bandung several weeks ago also started burning books, including, of all titles, Chicken Soup for the Soul and a number of comics, presumably to persuade students to spend more time reading officially prescribed textbooks.

Unless checked in time by the authorities, such arbitrary action could signal a beginning of a senseless pogrom the kind of which this country has not seen since -- ironically -- the 1960s, when communist cadres ransacked bookshops and libraries in search of what they considered undesirable reading material.

Marxism and communism are still banned in Indonesia under legislation dating from the early days of Soeharto's New Order regime. That being the case, there may be a legal argument for banning certain material from being published and circulated. However, the government should be the one and only institution entitled to perform such actions. The government has not only the authority, but also the experts that are needed to sift the scientific from propaganda. Allowing private parties or organizations to raid bookshops and ban books according to their own dictates would be tantamount to allowing Indonesia to be turned into a lawless totalitarian society.