THE NATIONS: So Moves the World

About the year 1560, the people living near Jogjakarta in Java found a strange creature on the beach. It looked like a man, except that it was white. They chained it to a big square stone outside of town where all could watch and laugh at its antics. They called it “the white sea monkey.”

The “white monkey” chipped away at the stone, glowered at the people, and finally died, still chained. Years later, other white sea monkeys came to Jogjakarta and read what the first one had carved on the rock. In Latin he had written : “Laugh at your own stupidity, but do not laugh at the misfortunes of a poor man.” In French, Italian and Dutch he had repeated (soon after Copernicus and before Galileo) a sentence so as to form a circle: “So moves the world.”

The newly arrived white sea monkeys conquered Java, and before they were done, three-fourths of the globe. Then the world moved on in its circle. The long ground swell of anti-Westernism rose to a tidal wave after Pearl Harbor. It ebbed with Japan’s defeat, but nowhere in Asia did the white man regain his prewar position.

Last week a Western nation won a quick, clean-cut victory in Asia. The Dutch had grasped the nettle. At Jogjakarta, where the square rock still stands, they had seized the top Indonesian Nationalist leaders (TIME, Dec. 27). In ten days after their attack, they had captured every major city of Republican Java.

With China falling, Burma in chaos and Indo-China locked in civil war, the West might have been expected to rejoice at the Dutch victory. Instead, W. R. Hodgson, representing Australia at the United Nations, cried: “[This] is worse than what Hitler did to The Netherlands.” This immoderate expression went further than the official stands of the Western powers. Nevertheless, adverse criticism of the Dutch move was widespread.

London thought the Dutch were, not “playing cricket.” The U.S. State Department was “irritated” and U.S. economic aid to The Netherlands East Indies was cut off. The U.N. Security Council adopted a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire order intended to dislodge the Dutch. Not even the Dutch themselves celebrated their victory. Queen Juliana deplored the violence. Said she: “It is a tragedy of human society that makes force the necessary reaction to force . . . We are all in God’s hands.”

Horrified Look. Many of the Security Council members returned grudgingly to Paris from their Christmas holidays to take up the Indonesian case. The shivering Council met on the cold stage of the Palais de Chaillot; all week long the U.S.’s Philip Jessup sat huddled in his overcoat and muffler. The atmosphere was strained. The Dutch knew that their fellow U.N. members were about to jump on them with both feet. Said one Dutch delegation member: “That was a calculated risk we had to take.” The Dutch also knew that the risk was not too great; had not the British themselves sent several units of the Guards Brigade to Malaya to suppress a Communist rebellion? Were not the French and their Foreign Legion fighting a war in Indo-China?

The Western powers were confused. Their stands ranged from Australia’s violent attack on the Dutch to mild censure from the British, to an embarrassed French claim that the Council was not competent to deal with the issue. No one (except Russia’s Yakov Malik who had flown in from Berlin) felt happy sitting in judgment over the Dutch, a decent, democratic people and one of the firmest links in Western Europe’s common anti-Communist front.

Malik, however, went to town. He attacked everyone—the Dutch for being imperialist, the U.S. and its friends for not being harsh enough with the Dutch, and the Indonesian Republic for being antiCommunist. (Two months ago Premier Hatta’s government had put down a Communist-inspired revolt.)

Indonesian Representative Dr. L. N. Palar pleaded with the Council to take steps against the Dutch, who, he said, had perpetrated “a second Pearl Harbor.” The Netherlands’ case was presented by Jan Herman van Royen, an able Foreign Ministry official, and a Socialist. Said he: “The surprise is not that The Netherlands intervened, but that The Netherlands did not intervene much earlier.”

Stripped of diplomatic niceties, the Dutch behind-the-scenes argument ran something like this: “The U.S. got its head out of the sand, took one horrified look at China, and thereupon tried expensively and unsuccessfully to defeat the Communists through Chiang Kaishek. Simply because that method failed does not mean either that you shouldn’t try to defeat Communists or that you can’t.”

Dreadful Pattern. The gloom, doubt and condemnation that greeted the Dutch action was a sample of the West’s confusion about its relationship with the “backward” peoples of Asia. In the mid-19th Century, nothing had seemed more certain to the West than the beneficence and high moral purpose of its imperial rule. By the early 20th Century, most right-thinking people in the West were certain that imperialism was oppressive, morally wrong—and probably a waste of money.

Partly because of native pressure and partly because of the trend toward self-sufficiency at home, Great Britain abandoned position after position in the Orient. The U.S. cut loose the Philippines. All the powers gave up their special rights in China. These progressive steps had unexpected results, and a dreadful pattern began to emerge in Asia. Westernization led to anti-Western nationalism which led to independence. Some independent Asiatic governments proved incapable of governing, and fell into chaos. Communist power rushed in to fill the vacuum. There was no reason to suppose that Indonesia would not follow the same pattern.

The U.S., not itself an empire, nevertheless had an enormous stake in the solution of the Asiatic crisis. Unless a new basis for relations between the “forward” and “backward” peoples could be found, the balance of world power in the next generation would be tipped against the coalition of free nations headed by the U.S. The old imperialism had been discarded. Independence was failing in more places than it was succeeding. The U.S. apparently had no ideas of a third formula.

In their heavy-footed but shrewd way, the Dutch had rushed in. The other nations were able (or thought they were able) to postpone the issue; but to the Dutch, some kind of close relationship with an orderly, non-Communist Indonesia was a matter of economic life or death. They had found themselves urgently faced with the same situation which in the long run will inescapably present itself to the whole Western world.

With Asia against it, the West might some day be as helpless as the white sea monkey on the beach at Jogjakarta.