As I gazed at David Van Reybrouck talking about the struggle of Indonesian freedom fighters at a session discussing his superb book Revolusi and the Birth of Modern World (2024) at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) 2025, the thought came unbidden: how frivolous and evil the plan of the current Indonesian regime with its works to wipe out some of the most important periods in the country’s history just to protect some people at the top of the food chain.
It is ironic that while foreigners are working hard trying to restore our history, the very people who should protect us, are trying to erase it. And attempts to remake the narrative, especially by awarding corrupt and authoritarian leader, like Soeharto, a legitimate hero status, have already begun. This is the same Soeharto who oversaw the mass killings of countless Indonesians with impunity during his reign.
Listening to Van Reybrouck’s calm, respectful voice, translating Malay and Dutch testimonies, reading out letters from villagers, ex-soldiers, and Dutch administrators, I found myself thinking of home, of the stories my mother and aunties used to tell me about the darkness that descended on Makassar during the years of the revolution. It was there, in South Sulawesi, that Captain Raymond Westerling and his men slaughtered thousands of villagers in cold blood between 1946 and 1947, branding entire communities as rebels and wiping out lives in the name of restoring order.
Those stories lingered in my family like ghostly echoes, whispers about men taken at night, about women hiding in silence as gunfire crackled through the coconut groves. Van Reybrouck writes about that massacre too, carefully and without sensationalism, and hearing him speak in Ubud made me realize how rare it is that our own nation discusses those wounds openly. His book opens up a panorama of voices, of pain, of hope, voices that in Indonesia are too often silenced, forgotten, or sanitized.
But even as I sat there, the shadow of another project hovered, our own government’s push, led by Fadli Zon, the culture minister under President Prabowo Subianto, to produce a new “official” version of Indonesian history. That project, ambitious and troubling in equal measure, claims to correct distortions and “recenter the Indonesian perspective.” Yet many historians, activists, and survivors fear the opposite: that it will be used to justify the old order and protect those who once held unchecked power. Critics note how it glosses over dark episodes, the 1965–66 massacres, the kidnappings and killings of 1998, the repression in Papua, and how it flirts with rehabilitating the image of Soeharto as a national hero. In a nation still haunted by unresolved trauma, rewriting the past is never a neutral act. It is an act of control.
Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi stands in stark contrast to that impulse. As a Belgian writer, he approaches Indonesia’s independence not as a victory parade but as a chorus of human stories: the farmers who took up bamboo spears, the Dutch conscripts who doubted their orders, the women who carried coded messages in their sarongs. He listens more than he explains. He gathers testimony instead of issuing judgment. Reading him, I was reminded that history, when told honestly, is always polyphonic, it has many voices and does not obey a single authority.
But that kind of honesty demands humility, something often missing in state-sponsored histories. Our current regime’s attempt to “tidy up” the past resembles the colonial archives Van Reybrouck once had to dig through: selective, bureaucratic, and full of redacted pain. The irony is bitter. A European writer travels halfway across the world to recover Indonesia’s forgotten voices, while our own leaders seem eager to silence them again. The difference, perhaps, lies in purpose. Van Reybrouck’s book seeks to understand; the government’s version seeks to command belief.
I cannot forget the veterans I interviewed during my early years as a reporter, men now in their nineties, living in modest homes in South Sulawesi, their medals dull and their memories sharp. They spoke of the revolution not as myth but as survival: the hunger, the fear, the confusion of fighting an empire with barely any weapons. None of their names appear in official textbooks. Some were dismissed as sympathizers of the wrong faction, others quietly erased after 1965. Yet they, more than anyone, carried Indonesia’s spirit of independence. If the state now decides which of their stories deserve to survive, it will once again betray them.
When Van Reybrouck spoke in Ubud, he posed a simple question: “Who gets to tell the story of revolution?” His answer was quiet but profound: everyone. Everyone who remembers, everyone who listens. In that festival tent, people from across Indonesia nodded. Students, writers, foreign guests, survivors, all sat together, unafraid to question the past. It was messy, emotional, and beautifully alive. That moment of shared conversation stood in painful contrast to the opaque committees drafting the new “official history” in Jakarta, far removed from the voices of those who lived it.
To rewrite history is not inherently wrong. Every generation has the right, and the duty, to re-examine its past. But to rewrite history without openness, without acknowledging the complexity of our wounds, is to replace one propaganda with another. Indonesia’s past cannot be rebuilt through decrees and ministerial panels. It must emerge from dialogue, debate, and empathy. That is the lesson of Revolusi, and of the revolution itself.
The danger of the government’s current approach is not merely academic. It breeds distrust. When history becomes a tool of power, citizens stop believing it. They retreat into silence or cynicism. The young no longer ask; the old no longer speak. And when that happens, we lose more than facts, we lose the connective tissue of a nation that once believed in freedom through truth.
Perhaps this is why Revolusi resonates so deeply now. It reminds us of what honest storytelling looks like: slow, patient, unafraid of contradiction. Van Reybrouck does what many of our institutions have failed to do, he gives space to ordinary Indonesians, not to glorify them but to let them exist as they were. His work is not flawless, and some will rightly question whether a European author can ever fully escape the colonial gaze. But at least he attempts what we often avoid: to confront the past without fear.
As I left the festival that afternoon, the sun setting over the Ubud hills, I wondered what Indonesia might become if we treated our own history with the same openness. What if our ministries, our schools, our museums embraced the chaos of truth instead of polishing it into myth? What if our children learned not only about heroes but also about the mistakes, betrayals, and regrets that shaped our independence?
If the rewriting of history is done in an open manner, like that discussion in Ubud, where everything is on the table and everybody can speak their mind, Indonesia can begin to truly trust itself again. We can start to heal the fractures that decades of silence have left. We can restore not only the past but also the future, rebuilding a nation where honesty is not feared, where history belongs to the people who lived it, and where remembering becomes an act of freedom rather than obedience.
The editorial is written from the first-person point of view of Omong-Omong’s Editor-in-Chief, Abdul Khalik.
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Omong-Omong Media’s editorial is also published in The Jakarta Post every Monday.
