Foreign Affairs Desk
In case your news is being "filtered"
UPDATE 31AUG2025: The Jakarta homes of two more members of Parliament sacked and destroyed, while a mob burns a provincial Parliament building in northeast Indonesia, killing three.
The word “government” comes from the Greek kybernan (κυβερνᾶν) = “to steer, pilot a ship,” with the Latin suffix mens, the Latin noun mēns (genitive mentis) is a feminine, third-declension noun that means “mind, intellect, consciousness, will”. In other words, government is literally “mind control”.
This week started off with your usual Soros-funded mass demonstration against the boneheads who “serve” in Indonesia’s Parliament. A few tens of thousands gathered in cities across the country to express their dissatisfaction with the benefits politicians had voted for themselves.
You see, minimum wage in Jakarta is USD300/month. Even a fresh collage graduate can’t hope for much more than that if he or she can find a job in the first place. Meanwhile, the DPR (Parliament) had voted its “servants” well over USD8,000/month in food, housing and transportation allowances—all paid for by exorbitant taxes, fees and other nickel-and-dime pocket drainers.
We won’t even discuss the vast corruption exposed in the last couple of months. The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) says its jail is full of corrupt public “servants” who’ve amassed significant fortunes from bribes, kickbacks and plain old skimming. Heck, even the KPK is brimming with ethics violations.
One cabinet-level minster has allegedly been caught with a very nice car collection, piles of cash in various currencies, and a bunch of cell phones hidden in his ceiling.
Seems folks have a good excuse to be upset.
The protests would have petered out—after the Soros cash ran dry—around last Thursday or so with little more that the usual vandalism and pile of trash to clean up. Until the national police inexplicably plowed into the crowd in front of the DPR in an armored vehicle, crushing to death a 21-year-old motorcycle delivery man bringing a food order to someone at the protest.
Now folks didn’t need Soros’ money. Now they were really pissed off. A lynch mob is out to find and beat the APV driver to death. Mobs have been torching city halls and police stations around the country, including in my adopted home town of Tegal. Giant bonfires were lit along the toll road in city center, with looting at various malls along the way.
At the moment (Saturday), Jakarta is a ghost town, the main freeway through the city, that runs in front of the DPR, is shut down. Offices in the central business district are closed, and both employees and public “servants” have been put on work-from-home orders. A very large and restless crowd is encamped in front of the DPR.
Indonesia is not alone. These types of genuine angry protests are springing up worldwide for related reasons—governments no longer function in the interests of the governed, and the “servants” have turned themselves into elite rulers by literally robbing us peons at the point of a gun.
France and Britain are teetering on the brink of financial collapse, as fed-up constituents express their…um, dissatisfaction with the status quo and lawless immigrants. Germany is not far behind.
Côte d’Ivoire, Angola, Serbia, Moldova, Slovakia, and even Israel are facing angry mobs tired of being told what they want and charged for the privilege. In China, where demonstrators routinely disappear forever in the middle of the night, folks are instead “lying flat” (tǎng píng, 躺平), passively displaying their displeasure at an economy that only serves the privileged Inner Party Members, while no one else can earn a living wage.
Wonton destruction of property and looting are usually Soros-paid behavior to discredit protests and bring public scorn on the participants. So far in Indonesia, the protests are widely supported.
While the participants are usually students and low-income individuals looking for a quick buck, they are expressing a long-simmering displeasure with excessive taxation, endemic corruption, and a political class that has come to view itself as superior rather than servile.
These large-scale outbursts generally occur every couple of years and are funded by globalists looking to put a little fear in political hearts when certain legislation is pending. That said, the protests in Indonesia don’t usually involve police crushing participants, large-scale looting, bonfires, and torching of government buildings across the country.
As I write this, news has come in that one of the members of the DPR called the protesters “stupid”. Not long after that, a mob descended on his house in North Jakarta and began smashing the place up, including a collection of luxury cars (a common thing for some reason). Curiously, the article gives the precise address of the guy’s house, as if inviting further trouble.
Usually, these kinds of protests flare up, some rocks get tossed, and everyone goes home for dinner. For some reason, government types insist on throwing fuel on the fire by crushing innocent bystanders and denigrating the participants
Word is the protests are planned through the 5th of September. They will likely burn themselves out (poor but effective pun) long before then, unless another government type steps in it again. It’s a delicate row to hoe, though. A series of missteps can turn demonstrations into revolutions. Certainly, the global temperature favors such escalations. The weird thing about mobs is that they are infectious.
While I don’t condone theft and vandalism (by anyone), I have to say the impulse to put self-appointed political elites back in their subservient places is a healthy one. Orgies of violence ultimately do not solve anything, and rather empower the mind-control mechanisms, by giving them the predicate to clamp down ever further.
At some point it seems inevitable that the global population will realize they don’t have to tolerate being robbed, incarcerated and belittled. Once the cork is off the bottle, it will be nearly impossible to stuff it in again.
Late Incoming: President Prabowo has unleashed the military and national police, giving them wide latitude to react and suppress the protests. Yet another Big Mistake. APVs are surrounding local malls, especially where ethnic Chinese congregate, including just up the street from me. Like father-in-law, like son-in-law. Join our Telegram channel for updates as they come in.
=====
I figure a good cultural theme for today is greed, corruption and avarice, so I have chosen Frank Norris’ novel McTeague as our launching point. There are so many great films on topic, it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I’m going with A Simple Plan (1998), directed by Sam Raimi, and starring Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda. For more classical fare, how about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), with John Huston directing Humphrey Bogart? For the hardcore, if you can find it, is Greed (1924), directed by Erich von Stroheim, starring a personal favorite Zasu Pitts, directly adapted from McTeague.
We doan need no stinkin’ badges on the Far Side:
E-book: Paper Golem: Corporate Personhood & the Legal Fiction
Contact Bernard Grover: bernard (at) radiofarside (dot) com
Radio Far Side, published (mostly) every Sun/Wed at 7a CST/7p WIB, is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:
BTC wallet: bc1qth6drgzcyt7vlxxpvqh6erjm0lmaemwsvf0272
XRP wallet: rMSQzLyE3RHacCLwYPADBbq4RHQ71HpCzw
Like you, I don't much care for gratuitous violence and vandalism, I do hope to see some serious protesting come to a seat of government most every where. I tend to think the default postilion for humanity is freedom, and it does seem that good people every where have had enough of this "ruling" we've been putting up with for far too long now.
Our Man in Jakarta.
😎👍👍