Crisis 22: Part 4. Puppet Masters

Down South

Introduction - Section Overview - Puppet Masters - Rushdie

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Introduction

The Year of Living Dangerously isn’t as obviously germane to Putin and his war as are Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, and The Master and Margarita. Yet this is precisely why throughout Section 4. Puppet Masters I use this novel: it takes us away from the European orbit, and looks at the Cold War from a perspective that’s connected in terms of Cold War chronology yet disparate in terms of geography and culture. Also, Year uses a paradigm that’s helpful if we want to assess Putin’s claim to be a champion of the Global South. By using the global, southern paradigm of the shadow theatre, which is steeped in the religious values of both Hinduism and Islam, we can see that Putin falls far short of the ideals of both North and South.

The Year of Living Dangerously also gives us an intimate yet distanced look at large-scale conflict. Its characters are easy to relate to, especially for a Western audience. The movie version multiplies this ease, given the powerful performances by its main actors (Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hunt, and Bembol Roco), the haunting score by Maurice Jarre, the rich cinematography by Russell Boyd (it was filmed in the Philippines) and the gripping pace created by director Peter Weir. We can also also relate to the job of the two main characters, Billy Kwan the cameraman and Guy Hamilton the journalist. Both characters are less interested in repeating government propaganda than reporting on what’s really happening. Yet the world they’re trying to report on is at once foreign (Indonesia) and vast, including the great powers of China, Russia and the West. It’s also a secretive world of politicians, diplomats, and spies. Still, they try to see behind the veils that hang in front of them. They try to see behind the screen that separates the puppeteer from the audience.

Koch sees the political crisis in 1965 Indonesia (when the left-wing Sukarno lost out to the right-wing Suharto) through individual characters and a metafictional narration. His novel thus gives us a personal and intimate, as well as a philosophical or mythic, look into at least six things that are very relevant to the present crisis in Ukraine: 1. the collateral human damage of superpower conflict (that is, how large scale politics affect average people), 2. the use of distortion and propaganda (Sukarno and Putin are masters of the art), and 3. the inability of outsiders to understand what’s going on at the highest levels of power, especially during a proxy conflict. How much do we really know about what the Kremlin and Pentagon are planning?

I also use Year to look into 4. the ongoing question of how the West might better understand the previously colonized countries in the global south. Many of these ‘southern’ countries (most notably India) nominally support Russia. They tolerate what Russia is doing, largely because of historical and economic reasons. Instead of brushing off their minimalist or non-aligned allegiance, we might determine to understand these countries more deeply. Koch’s depiction of Cold War Indonesia is a good place to start, since it not only looks into the four things I just listed, but also 5. contains both Western and Eastern perspectives. In the compact and easily-digested form of a novel, Koch goes into structural and cultural detail about how one might see politics from both Western and Indonesian points of view. Perhaps more importantly, he gives us a sense of how to deal with our own inability to penetrate the depth of other cultures.

As an example of what I mean, we see Guy Hamilton at the end of the novel, his eye bludgeoned by Jakarta’s Palace guards, his mind finally accepting that he doesn’t know what’s going on. He tries to give advice to his assistant Kumar, who he knows to be an agent for the communist leader Aidit:

Hamilton said into his darkness, knowing it was useless, ‘Don’t follow that bastard Aidit: they’ll kill you out there along with him. I’ve already told [the Australian Broadcasting Service] you’re the best man we could possibly have. You deserve… He broke off. It was stupid, trying to tell Kumar what he deserved. 

‘Thank you but I will follow Comrade Aidit. His day will come. Think of me when you are sitting in some nice café in Europe.’ The voice became softer again. ‘In my dreams, I am always sitting at a table by the footpath, drinking coffee, with flowers growing in tubs.’ The hand was withdrawn, and the voice, with perhaps a note of irony, used Hamilton's name for the first and last time. ‘Good-bye, Guy.’

His footsteps went quickly to the door, which opened and closed with discreet quietness.

Koch’s novel also 6. leads historically and geopolitically into the treatment of the Cold War catastrophes we see in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1954) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1968).

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Section Overview

Puppet Masters contains the following pages:

⚔️ The Dangerous Years takes a more in-depth look at the narrative structure of Koch’s novel, illustrating how it might be used to understand the Ukraine Crisis.

🌪 The Eye of the Storm argues that Putin pretends to be a champion of a new world order, yet he effectively stirs up havoc and violence all around him, slaughtering Ukrainians and harming the very people he pretends to help. In this, he exhibits the worst of both the left-wing propagandist Sukarno and the right-wing strongman Suharto.

Several pages on Year are not yet online. 🎙️ Words of Folly and Wisdom contrasts propaganda and religious distortion with words of understanding, reconciliation, and peace. ⚔️ Battle of the Puppets looks at the way people turn against each other, betray each other, and prepare the world for slaughter.

✨ The Dark Which Has No End (in progress) suggests a literary and mythic way of contextualizing and understanding apocalyptic violence. One can of course look at cataclysm or apocalypse in many ways: a complete annihilation of anything human, a Rapture in the Christian tradition, or an infinite stretch of space that loops in and out of existence, as in the image of Vishnu in cosmic space, creating universes (which are eventually destroyed) and resting on the eternal snake Shesha:

This image may seem strange, but that’s the point: it’s the type of different paradigm that we might consider — if, that is, we’re going to understand and communicate with those in the global south who are more familiar with Krishna than Christ.

By using The Year of Living Dangerously I hope to suggest a very different way of looking at the present crisis. In the West we often fail to understand the experience of those who were once colonized and who are now sometimes referred to as the global south. For instance, after the Indian Prime Minister visited Putin on July 9, 2024 much was made of their bear-hug — a truly cringe-worthy moment where we saw the leader of the world’s largest democracy tightly hugging the leader of Europe’s largest country fighting democracy. Yet little was made of the critical, deeply emotional words Modi spoke to Putin about the death of children, and about the tragedy of war:

Whether it is war, conflict or a terrorist attack, any person who believes in humanity is pained when there is loss of lives […] But even in that, when innocent children are killed, the heart bleeds and that pain is very terrifying […] Amidst guns, bullets and bombs, peace talks cannot be successful.

Modi’s words weren’t made behind the scenes in a private meeting, but in a televised forum. His words came just hours after Russia bombed the children’s hospital in Kiev. While I wish Modi would more directly criticize Russia for its aggression, I found some comfort in watching Putin nervously wriggle his feet as he’s being told, once again by his Indian friend, that violence isn’t the way to go.

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Rushdie

In 🇮🇳 India & the Many-Headed Monsters and 🇵🇰 Pakistan & the Fall of the Poet (both still in progress), I explore the way Salman Rushdie at once educates and entertains us in the largest and most consequential region of the global south: the Indian subcontinent. I’ll look at two of his early novels, Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), which together form of sort of history of the subcontinent from around 1915 to 1980. I’ll also look at his later children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

Koch and Rushdie both explore the following subjects, all of which are relevant to the Ukraine Crisis: 1. manipulative autocracy and brutal dictatorship, 2. propaganda leading to internecine war, 3. the collateral damage caused by political and military conflict, 4. complex layers of narrative and ambiguous layers of understanding, and 5. paradigms used to understand politics and society in the global south — the Wayang in Koch and the conference of the birds and the ocean of stories in Rushdie. One might even conflate the Indonesian shadow theatre paradigm with the paradigm Rushdie uses in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: an ocean of narratives that are continually changing, dividing, and fusing. This conflation urges us to see from both sides of the screen, to shift our views if necessary, so as not to get stuck in the same old story.

The first three of above subjects are obviously applicable to the Ukraine Crisis, while the last two are more subtle. Being subtle, they are quite malleable and can be applied very widely. For instance, they can help us understand different ways that geo-political and cultural situations are understood outside of the West. They can also be used to understand and communicate with nations in the south which are democratic and respect national sovereignty yet are subject to Russian economic pressure and anti-colonial rhetoric.

Finally, they can be used as mechanisms to get a conceptual distance from the present Ukraine Crisis. They can present us with a way of seeing its complexity without getting stuck in the details of our own paradigms. For example, most Western readers don’t have a specific point of view in regard to Attar’s conference of the birds, in which all divisions are obliterated in the unity of God, or Somadeva’s ocean of stories, where all narratives are mixed and altered. On the other hand, most Western readers tend to have a specific bias for or against the Garden of Eden or the Rapture. By seeing the Kremlin’s point of view as an errant flight that the infinite sky will end, or as a muddy stream the ocean will subsume, we might think about how the Kremlin line can be diffused or rendered less muddy. We also might avoid falling into our own paradigms of Garden and Rapture, which tend to urge us to see the Russian narrative as evil and serpent-like, and as a harbinger of a pre-ordained Apocalypse.

The ocean of stories is like the universe itself: tugged and pulled by the forces of darkness and light.

In the battles [the power-hungry asuras] gained control over the three worlds. The [benevolent] devas sought Vishnu's wisdom, who advised them to treat with the asuras in a diplomatic manner. The devas formed an alliance with the asuras to jointly churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality, and to share it among themselves. However, Vishnu assured the devas that he would arrange for them alone to obtain the nectar. (From Wikipedia).

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