From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
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to study the part of Indonesia known as “Deli het goudland” (“Deli the land of gold”) and to mix with the very poorest and most oppressed Indonesians, known as “contract coolies.”
[40] While I was reliving my six years in the Netherlands, our ship was leaving that country far behind. I have deliberately selected only a few episodes to illustrate the origin and outline of the philosophy that I developed and with which I faced a future full of difficulties. Even so, what I have written for this section has exceeded what I had planned, so I am forced now to summarize my impressions of the parts of the globe that I was now visiting. We had already entered the gateway to the Mediterranean, Gibraltar (Jabal Tank). We were sailing toward the Suez Canal, Mount Sinai, and the Red Sea.
Many books—boxes and even warehouses of them—have been written about the history of the few nations around the Mediterranean: Egypt, Phoenicia, Judea, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Rome, Arabia, Spain, Italy, and France. It is from around the Mediterranean that we inherit our most important cultural elements. We respect this inheritance and use it in building the endless ladder of progress in technology, science, and ethics. It took nearly ten thousand years for us to advance from the use of human and animal energy harnessed by the Pharaohs for building the pyramids, to electricity and the atom bomb. And most of this progress took place around the Mediterranean.
Although progress in science and technology has gone apace with the years, this has not been the case with morality as disseminated by the three world religions that were born around the Mediterranean: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even if we have not actually suffered a decline in morality, which forbids killing and stealing but commands such things as love for one’s fellow human beings, we can’t say that we have advanced. Witness the unchecked oppression and cruelty of capitalism and imperialism—class against class, nation against nation—and the outbreaks of world wars, which directly or indirectly have caused an incalculable waste of human souls and human possessions through mass looting, raping, and killing.
[41] In any case, it is the Mediterranean Sea that has been the cradle of most of technology, science, and morality. Also around the Mediterranean Sea the less irrational and more comprehensible wars among the nations have occurred: the travels of Alexander the Great to the Ganges in India, the battles of Julius Caesar right up to England and Germany, Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the wars of Islam under Arab and Turkish leadership, and the victories of Napoleon at the time of the French Revolution.
But it is through different-colored glasses that I now look at the wars of days gone by. When I began to read with great pleasure histories of the world, they opened new vistas to me, and my attention was held by the strategies and victories of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and Genghis Khan. But my interest in Napoleon’s glorious ideals and the force of his personality was limited by the question, for what purpose and for which class were all these wars and killings carried out?
Such questions are generally not even posed, let alone answered, by most bourgeois historians, who focus their attention on individuals. And when they do advance reasons, they are only superficial ones. The reasons for the reasons, the deeper causes, are never analyzed in the history books that are used in a systematic and consistent fashion in bourgeois schools today.
What I mean by the purpose of the wars is the aims that arise from the needs of production, owned or controlled by a particular class in a state and operated in the interest of that class. In the twentieth century, we know that the Germans became aggressive because of their need for raw materials and markets for the bourgeois-feudal class in Germany. Similarly, wars in the future will arise from the need for markets and the desire to buy and sell raw materials and products or to increase the capital of the capitalist class. Diplomats practice diplomacy, and politicians lead and devise the “isms” for which soldiers fight: all this is done to defend class interests.
For those willing to understand, it is clear, for example, that Egypt or Syria attacked neighboring states with the intent of looting their human power. The inhabitants of the conquered states became slaves. Those considered likely to fight back were killed, together with the women and children.
[42] However, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, or Abderrahman no longer acted in this fashion.70 They were considered enlightened despots and ksatria.71 Certainly there were other, deeper reasons than noble emotions involved. These reasons must be sought in the needs of production, which had changed in character because of changes in technology and the corresponding changes in the class structure of society. For example, increases in the production of a state may require it to have neighbors who are sufficiently prosperous to buy the products; i.e., it needs markets. Conquered neighboring states that are immediately emptied by the sword do not provide the market that such a victor nation seeks. It is enough now if the conquered nation is ruled and supervised and even better if it can be made a relatively prosperous province able to keep buying the products of the oppressor nation.
Such was the situation in Greece at the time of Alexander, and in Spain at the time of Abderrahman. But history written by the bourgeoisie cannot look in the direction of changes in production. It concentrates on wars from the point of view of individuals—in particular, the will, ability, and intelligence of the individual. For the bourgeoisie, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are the crucial factors. For us what is crucial in the final analysis, besides the state, is which class has control of production in a society. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are only instruments of a class in society, even though they may be intelligent, brave, able, and exalted by their class.
Among the city-states of Greece, we know Sparta as an example of a state based on autocracy and aristocracy. We shall take Sparta as the thesis and the city-state of Athens, based on democracy, as the antithesis. Even though these city-states were formed from the same nation, they were for many years in a state of conflict, enmity, and war. It was during this period of continual conflict that the Macedonian empire arose under the leadership of King Philip, an aristocrat. But his son, Alexander, was educated by the greatest philosopher of the Greek era, Aristotle of Athens. Alexander united Sparta and Athens, aristocracy and democracy in one kingdom, forming the synthesis. Alexander the Great had the desire to unite East and West, an even more advanced synthesis. However, this attempt at a national and cultural fusion of East and West had only begun when he died at a young age.
Caesar was faced by two conflicts. Internally, conflict and great enmity raged between the patricians (aristocrats) and the plebeians (the poor) of the Roman republic. Externally, there was conflict between the Romans and the foreign barbarians.
[43] Alexander first settled the conflicts within Greece, and only then went abroad to settle those with foreign nations. Caesar acted in reverse. First he dealt with the foreigners around the Roman republic from the Mediterranean up to England and Germany; only then did he come home with his experienced forces, cross the Rubicon, and proceed to settle the conflict within the republic of Rome itself. He came from the aristocratic class (thesis); he adopted the philosophy of democracy and led the plebeians (antithesis). Finally, he destroyed his enemies, the aristocratic parties of Sulla and Pompey, with the aim of establishing his empire, which took the form of the synthesis.72 Caesar was killed by his enemies when he was on the point of becoming emperor, but even though he was physically destroyed, his spirit lived on in the synthesis of the Roman Empire.
Like Caesar, Napoleon first settled the conflicts of France with its neighbors. Only after securing power and popularity by virtue of his victories did he come back to deal with the internal conflicts between the Jacobin-proletariat alliance on the left and the bourgeois-aristocracy on the right. It was by destroying these two opponents that Napoleon, who in his youth had been a Jacobin, was finally able to establish the Napoleonic empire as the synthesis.
But it is not always easy to achieve a synthesis, nor does it, once gained through struggle, have eternal life. Normally the synthesis, once achieved, eventually becomes the thesis that gives rise to another antithesis and so the process continues.
With the destruction of the city-republic of Thebes, Alexander completed the subjugation of his entire nation. The empire he established by the sword naturally gave rise to rebellions and other attempts by nations to free themselves from this enforced synthesis. Caesar and Napoleon waded through oceans of blood to