Living in Protest

The political scientist Professor Herb Feith of Monash University was Australia’s first Indonesian expert. People found him a likable person, gregarious and egalitarian. After his death in an accident in 2001 his colleagues set up a foundation in his honour. One of its first projects was to commission a biography, which has recently appeared: Jemma Purdey’s From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith. My antennae were alerted when a reviewer wrote that it showed Feith was an opponent of President Soekarno. I had heard Feith speak at the University of Melbourne about 1963, a time when Soekarno was politically in decline, and his talk that day was a glowing endorsement of the President. The book, as we shall see, explains this apparent conundrum. The biography is readable, comprehensive, and favourable to Feith even though it admits his faults. It contains much fascinating new material both for those who were close to Feith, and for those who disagreed with him. The biographer is at some points almost naive in her breathless admiration of her subject, but this enables her to capture the flavour of the times and the type of person Feith was, and to provide an engrossing account of his manifold activities.

The picture the book reveals is symptomatic of certain breakdowns in public and academic life which have progressively made themselves felt over the last fifty years. Many scholars disregarded the principle that they should be objective, and not players in the activities they were analysing. This is particularly important for political scientists in their relation to contemporary politics. Analysts thought they could blithely transgress boundaries that had been established for good reasons, and a brave and better world would result. Looking back over the last half-century we can now see the disasters, summed up in the phrase “political correctness”, which ensued. Jemma Purdey is tone deaf to these considerations.

Another aspect is national interest. This book describes many events which have been, and still are, crucial for Australia’s security. Neither Feith nor Purdey however raise Australia’s national interest as a legitimate, not to say vital, factor in assessing these events.

Feith was the son of Viennese Jewish refugees who arrived in Australia in 1939. At university he mixed with the evangelical Student Christian Movement, married the Methodist Beth Evans (sister of Ray Evans), and for the rest of his life adopted a Quaker-like “social justice” perspective, in the belief that others shared his non-aggressive and generous instincts. He was an early graduate volunteer abroad, spending much of the 1950s working and researching in Indonesia, and completing a Cornell University PhD on the decline of constitutional democracy in that country. He loved Indonesian life in contrast to Australia, admiring the early days of independent and anti-colonial Indonesia, and its charismatic leader President Soekarno.

Problems began when President Soekarno downgraded the party system in 1957 and, like Vladimir Putin in Russia today, ran the country as a “guided democracy” with himself as executive ruler. Soekarno became increasingly unstable, and to distract attention as the economy declined, embarked on external adventurist campaigns such as taking over West Irian (West Papua) from the Dutch, and konfrontasi against Malaysia. In a series of seven articles in Nation in 1962, Feith and Jamie Mackie supported the West Irian incorporation, praising the Indonesian effort at integrating the province. Feith argued that Soekarno was not on an expansionist binge; but soon after he started pressuring Malaysia in the same way. When, as the decade progressed and West Irian was swamped with Javanese immigrants, it became clear this was a brutal Indonesia takeover, not a peaceful integration. Feith and Mackie then fell silent on the issue. At the time James McAuley and others rightly opposed the West Irian takeover, because it was not in our or the West Papuans’ interests. The West Papua issue has remained a running sore, and is still a potential danger to our security today. These considerations seem not to have registered with Feith, who displayed that blinkered habit of mind which believes that any post-colonialist regime ipso facto cannot act in a colonialist way.

Purdey’s book claims Feith wasn’t overall a supporter of Soekarno at this stage, but that in Australia he believed he had to defend him since we were so insular, ignorant and anti-communist it would have been giving comfort to the enemy to tell the truth. (Remember the fellow travellers who used the same rationalisation to defend the Soviet Union in the 1930s.) Feith displayed feelings of dislike of Australia throughout his career—he felt guilty about us. Not telling the full story about Soekarno was an early example of engaging in deception, which if continued can have a crippling effect on one’s thought processes and personality. 

In the mid-1960s, with the economy, the political system and his own popularity in serious decline, Soekarno turned to the rapidly expanding Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) for support to balance the army. For months the PKI, encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party, publicly flexed its muscles. During this period Feith published articles saying that Soekarno and the PKI were close, that the PKI was in a strong position, but that the outcome was uncertain, all of which was true. But Purdey reveals that Feith was writing privately to his Cornell mentor and supervisor George Kahin: “I see the PKI as something of a hope”, and to another colleague, Clifford Geertz, that he was worried “about the question of whether one shouldn’t see the PKI as the least of the available evils”.

In September 1965 the expected happened: with the help of an officer, Colonel Untung, the PKI staged a coup in which six senior generals were kidnapped and murdered in order to decapitate the army high command. But one, General Nasution, escaped and with General Suharto managed to rally the army and put down the coup and the PKI. This is the most generally accepted explanation of what happened, though some details remain murky. The Cornell academics however soon claimed, without first-hand knowledge, that it was an army internal faction fight, but the army in its Machiavellian way had made it look like a PKI coup. Testimony in investigations after the coup revealed massive PKI involvement, but anti-Suharto academics claimed these were produced under duress. The Cornell group, who were anti-Western and anti-anti-communist, didn’t want the PKI to be seen as the villain. Another version of the coup was that the PKI moved first to forestall an impending army coup.

Professor Justus van der Kroef, who had written a history of the Indonesian Communist Party, published a series of five articles in Quadrant from 1967 to 1969 on Indonesian political history in the 1960s, documenting the attempted Communist takeover, and explicitly challenging the Feith and Cornell version of events. These articles were the best-known Australian contribution to the orthodox interpretation at the time, but Jemma Purdey doesn’t even cite, much less consider them, nor the first authoritative account of the coup, the American journalist John Hughes’s The End of Sukarno, which won a Pulitzer Prize. She is still today so caught up in the Cornell way of thinking she heads a section of her book, “The Communist Bogey”, as though there was no communist threat in South-East Asia. What is the point of a vast “scholarly” apparatus of footnotes and bibliography if only one side is cited? Not considering a variety of viewpoints is another instance of academic breakdown.

Purdey does reveal that Feith, to his credit, privately disagreed with the Cornell whitewash. In letters he wrote, for instance, that the “PKI-Untung links can’t just be assumed to be non-existent”. For this disagreement he was threatened with ostracism. His three closest Cornell colleagues wrote appalling personal letters attacking him, two even suggesting that he was, by analogy, like a person who supported the Nazi holocaust, the worst accusation that can be made against a Jew, and totally untrue. This was a chilling early example of what we now know as political correctness used to enforce an intolerant position. These were his academic patrons threatening his future. In the event Feith sadly succumbed to the pressure and came to accept the Cornell line. We should be sympathetic here to Feith, who had acted properly—the whole episode was a tragedy for him. He turned his attention instead to the hundreds of thousands killed in the aftermath of the coup, blaming the army and Suharto, the new villain, but not Soekarno nor the PKI for instigating the turmoil.

The 1965 coup was not just any old happening. I can’t think of a more important event for Australia’s destiny since the Second World War than the failure of the 1965 communist coup in Indonesia. At that time the dominoes were falling in Indo-China, the Chinese Communist Party was in its rampant and aggressive “cultural revolution” phase, and the communist threat in Philippines was still present. Our future was in the balance. The Suharto fightback began the reversal of the process. As the Duke of Wellington said of another pivotal moment in history, it was a close-run thing. We, as well as the whole of South-East Asia, were the beneficiaries when Suharto stabilised the situation in Indonesia and brought decades of economic progress. It is strange that political scientists like Feith and Purdey could be so blind to the importance of raisons d’état. Frank Furedi understands (Weekend Australian, December 31, 2011) that interests are legitimate in politics: 

Politics is righty associated with interest … One of the principal features of this [Western] protest is its self-conscious disavowal of the politics of interest. Protest is conducted through a rhetoric that seeks to represent the pursuit of interest as an act of the morally depraved.  

The 1965 coup events seem to have changed Feith permanently. Adopting the false Cornell analysis he didn’t believe seems to have had a disintegrative effect on him. His failure to resolve this dilemma may partly account for the drop in his academic output, and for the psychological ailments he suffered later. He wrote a chapter in a book on the late Soekarno period, but completed few substantial research or publication projects over the next three decades, though he went on a great many research trips. He often suffered from writers’ block and depression. This was the time of the counter-culture. He grew his hair long, and became a vegetarian and bike rider, confiding to himself: “Turning 40, worry about being imprisoned in my professional role and rank … Insufficient charisma, wondering whether growing my hair longer isn’t a superficial attempt to recapture youth and vigour. Being in a rut.” One can sympathise with his self-awareness of his dilemma if not with his attempts to overcome it. He took up a series of causes. At a Monash graduation ceremony address in 1970, as a Professor of Politics he urged the audience to join him afterwards in a Moratorium march. This was improperly crossing a boundary that exists for very good reasons. It also revealed a breakdown in the university’s authority structure in that he was not pulled into line over this transgression.

I was at Monash during the Moratorium, teach-in and student riot years. It was the most radical of Australian universities, where the pressure to conform to the new orthodoxies was overwhelming; staff members who didn’t were sometimes hissed and insulted as they walked around the campus. At this period Feith moved further to the Left, not towards communism but to neo-Marxist theories of Third World development The former communist Rex Mortimer was a strong influence, and they latched on to a current left-wing theory that Western modes of development didn’t apply to Third World countries. This idea, strongly opposed by the economist Professor Heinz Arndt of the Australian National University, conveniently enabled them to discount Suharto’s economic successes as meaningless.

I had thought of Feith as a strong personality, a leader and an original thinker. But this book shows him wracked by self-doubt and guilt, lacking a firm centre, and seeking a series of anti-capitalist gurus, like Ivan Ilych, to sit at their feet and develop new “visionary” ways of thinking. He spent decades fruitlessly looking for new theories as his original ones were now considered outmoded by the fashionable Left. If you keep taking up trendy theories they are soon superseded by newer trendier ones—this is in the nature of trendiness—so you are hoist by your own petard.

Feith spent much of the next decades denigrating Suharto. He argued that Indonesia was being re-colonised by being absorbed into the global capitalist system. When Suharto visited Australia in 1972 Feith published in the Age an “Open Letter to Suharto” condemning his rule. The letter began, “Mr Suharto, your critics are your friends”, which was both disingenuous and untrue. This propaganda stunt was an example of an academic improperly trying to become an actor in the political game. The Monash group formed the anti-Indonesia lobby by depicting Suharto as a ruthless militaristic dictator who suppressed freedom and ruined Indonesia. This is now a given of every uninformed commentator. Attacking Indonesia on all occasions, a risky gambit for us given our strategic situation, has now become an automatic response, as the live-cattle-export fiasco demonstrated. Suharto’s two genuine failings were his East Timor takeover and the family nepotism of his later years. But he was not in world terms excessively repressive. Feith for many years supported the wrecker Soekarno and condemned the successful Suharto.

Feith opposed the Indonesian takeover of East Timor. There were arguments both ways. He and Purdey don’t consider the Whitlam, Coalition and Foreign Affairs argument at the time—that as Portuguese power collapsed, allowing the pro-communist insurgency group Fretilin to take over would be bad for the East Timorese people. Moreover it was not in Australia’s security interest to have a potential Cuba on our doorstep destabilising our immediate environment. I remember attending a small Quadrant dinner in a cellar in Sydney at which Andrew Peacock, then shadow foreign affairs minister, put this position. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the takeover, people of our persuasion underestimated just how bad Indonesian rule in East Timor would be.

But Feith’s position had its own problems. It is true that West Irian was part of the old Dutch East Indies and East Timor was not, but one suspects that, for Feith, when Soekarno became expansionist it was all right, but when Suharto did the same it was to be condemned. More recently he (rightly in my opinion) supported the West Papuan resistance movement, whose way of life is being extinguished by Javanese overlords, but he never to my knowledge explained the contradiction that he had supported that takeover in the first place. Both he and his biographer, who clearly documents his support for the West Irian takeover, seem to have had amnesia on this point.

The thing Feith most wanted in later life was for East Timor to be free. Helen Hill, Kirsty Sword and Damien Kingsbury are mentioned as part of the East Timor group he worked with. East Timor’s liberation came about in a large measure because John Howard encouraged President Habibie to conduct a referendum on independence, and because after the vote the Australian government sent in a peacekeeping force to save the fledgling state from Indonesian militia violence. I don’t think Feith ever thanked or praised Australia, his own country, for this. He had developed the notion that we Australians were consumer-driven militarists, whereas he was a peace-loving, vegetarian cyclist. But on East Timor we were not the militarists—far from it. I find it hard to get my head around the idea that we Australians are an inherently militaristic people. At first sight it seems to go against all the evidence, but doubtless some complicated theory, along the lines of “repressive tolerance”, can be dreamed up to prove the thing that was not.

Feith became an activist trying to discredit the Suharto regime. This involved another level of deception. When conducting interviews on his research trips to Indonesia, did he tell his interlocutors his real agenda? They thought they were dealing with a detached academic observer, not one seeking information for purposes of destabilising their country. Government money is righty available for study leave for independent analysis, not to subsidise players in some political arena. Feith also, on the evidence of this book, encouraged some of his graduate students in the field to become activists under the cover of academic research. 

Feith adopted an extraordinary number of trendy political causes—peace studies, anti-nuclear activities, pro-euthanasia ones, progressive schools, anti-militarism, Pax Christi—as well as supporting the Kurds, Bangladeshis and Burmese, a roll-call of the progressive causes of the last decades. He spread himself widely. In most of these causes he was active in organisations, going to many meetings, his home became a centre for producing leaflets, his children were active protesters. But how can you have time for the proper study that you are being paid to do, when all this is consuming your energies? What was his day job?

In a 1980 article, “Towards a New Peace Movement”, Feith wrote of his basic stance: 

All of us learned in the 1970s that living with integrity involves living in protest and living in openness to change. As I see it, we have all been affirming organisational principles which point to a way out of the general crises of late capitalism, late industrial, late statist society.  

Every day one had to make an effort to “live in protest”. Just what did that mean? It must have entailed an enormous expenditure of energy, not to mention a waste of it, to be constantly reaffirming one’s permanent protest, a sort of endless existential adversary stance, where personal indignation must always be kept up, even though the objects on which it was directed may change. The guilt he often felt was a strange one, since he was feeling guilty on behalf of our society—we were awful Western consumerists gobbling up the world’s resources. The crisis-ridden “late statist” society he was protesting against actually gave him many privileges. He was in reality “affirming the organisational principles” of a new establishment, the progressive establishment. Just as a post-colonial regime can never be imagined as colonialist, so the progressive mind can never admit that the Left may itself form an establishment. Feith’s “living in protest” was a species of false consciousness.

Feith gradually lost his authoritative reputation in Indonesian studies. He dropped teaching it in favour of a course on peace studies. Richard Posner’s study Public Intellectuals notes that “many public intellectuals are academics of modest distinction fortuitously thrust into the limelight”. It is not generally realised that with a combination of sabbatical leave, annual leave, long service leave, conference leave and three months without teaching over the Christmas break, academics can contrive to have an annual overseas trip. But how can you concentrate on long-term work among all this cultural tourism? Like many other academics Feith was swanning around the world, which was at odds with his self-image of an ascetic person sacrificing himself for the underprivileged.

Isolated in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Monash’s Centre of South-East Asian Studies, with its anti-Indonesian and anti-Western rhetoric, monopolised the field for a time. But the ANU centre, with academics like Heinz Arndt, came to present a more satisfactory option. Jamie Mackie transferred to the ANU from Monash and moved away from the Feith position. The ANU group understood economics better, and were in contact with Foreign Affairs and government figures, who had to consider the national interest and make realistic choices.

This biography is important not so much for the particular case of Herb Feith, but because it unwittingly shows how a whole generation of academic commentators went off the rails when they jettisoned the rules about the separation of political life from analysis of it. Jemma Purdey is herself both an example and a victim of these breakdowns. She has probably never been told there is another way of doing things. 

Patrick Morgan, who lives in Gippsland, is a frequent contributor to Quadrant.