The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe

Author:Keith Lowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

The New Order

The Second World War did not directly cause most of these events, and yet none of them would have happened without it. It was the war that had weakened the European powers to a point where they could no longer dominate their colonies. It was the war that had also created the right environment for Asian nationalist movements to expand and flourish. And it was the war that armed them, and propelled them into positions of power.

But perhaps the greatest changes brought about by the war were psychological. A whole generation had been introduced to the experience of violence, as well as the idea that radical change could be produced by violent means. The hardships produced by the war – occupation, martial law, inflation, shortages, starvation – left many people feeling that they had nothing left to lose; but the atmosphere of optimism that came with the war’s end generated a conviction that, after all the hardship, something new and good must be about to happen.

Underpinning all these hopes and desperations was a belief in the concept of ‘freedom’. This had been the watchword throughout the war, and was now the rallying cry of every politician and resistance fighter in Asia. According to former revolutionaries in Sumatra, merdeka was the one word on everyone’s lips, ‘but what this merdeka actually was we didn’t know yet, we didn’t understand independence’. All they did know was that ‘whatever was independent was not colonized’.26

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