during the economic crisis after the First World War. When I came back to the Netherlands on May 1, 1922, after being exiled from Indonesia, I found that Tuan and Nyonya D had parted and were now divorced.64 There was no chance of their being reunited. Nyonya D, whose ideals regarding the marital relationship were very high, was shattered by the goings-on of her husband, which she considered a betrayal of the relationship that should exist solely between husband and wife. She had no security, not even financial. I was happy for the opportunity to repay her good will, but after I left again I heard from my friends in the Netherlands that she was in pitiful circumstances. However, I later heard that the former Nyonya D was working on a ship that sailed to America. This news made me a little happier. “She did not want to sit around waiting for assistance from men . . . simply accepting all these goings-on of her husband [but she rolled up her sleeves and took on all kinds of jobs] in order to reject what she felt to be a violation of ideals and disrespect for women.”65
I think I know myself well enough to say that I am not a person who easily violates the rules of respect and behavior towards older people, particularly one as polite as Tuan Fabius, who was willing to give assistance according to the terms of his own morality. On the other hand, I felt that Tuan Fabius’ pressures had shown a lack of respect for me, especially considering that my connection with the scholarship fund had been implemented with no prior knowledge, let alone consent, on my part.66
[39] Apparently, Tuan Fabius was unable to let the matter drop and to wait until I was in a situation where I could repay the debts as I had promised. He wrote to my teacher, Horensma, in Indonesia, telling the story. I do not know what he said, but one night I was visited by one of Horensma’s brothers-in-law who came to tell me that Horensma had answered Tuan Fabius’ letter with great anger. In his letter he said that he had known his former pupil long enough to believe firmly in his honesty, but together with this letter he was sending 4,000 guilders to repay with interest the money owed the scholarship fund represented by Tuan Fabius.67
Now I felt even more bound by these material and moral debts. I owed money to the Engku of my own kampung and to my former teacher—an amount totalling some 6,000 guilders. Furthermore, I got a letter from my mother and father reminding me of my promise before I left that I would come home quickly and would be away for only two or three years.
Although the war had ended, it was still hard to get a berth on a ship. However, because I had secured a job in Senembah Mij., one of the largest estates in Deli, the problem of securing and paying for passage on a ship was no longer mine to solve.68 I was to be an assistant supervisor for all the schools for coolie children of Senembah Mij. The task was to devise a system appropriate for these children, and I was to work with a Dutch teacher who had studied Indonesian under me in Amsterdam. I received an initial “equipment allowance” of 1,500 guilders and was promised a wage of 350 guilders a month together with free accommodation, water, electricity, and transport. Also, on the ship I was to teach Indonesian to several people, including the director of Senembah Mij. himself, Dr. Janssen, together with two of his relatives.69
This was a satisfying resolution of my difficulties, both physical and emotional. From the point of view of finances, during the journey to Indonesia alone I would earn almost enough money to settle my debt with the Engkufonds. And from the point of view of ideology and my life’s interest, I would have the opportunity 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
