Recent past, distant memory

"So colonialism is about how brown people suffered and died for the ambitions of white men?"

I asked him. He replied, "Not necessarily, it's not about the skin colour, you see. The Japanese were not white, they also colonised us."

Colonialism is an attitude, it is a way of thinking. It is the imperial mentality that people under imperialism deserve to be subjugated simply because they are not born of the "superior" race.

I spent a lot of time in early February listening to stories of transnational activism, pre and post the Japanese occupation in South-east Asia, from the man himself, Dr Poh Soo Kai. Socialist activist, political prisoner, now the author of "Singapore: Living in a Time of Deception".

His book has been translated to Indonesian by one of the local publishers, Ultimus, and the launching of the book was done in one of my favourite cities of culture and activism, Yogyakarta.

Poh shared many stories. When we went to the beach for lunch, Poh told stories of what Soekarno did to the communists in Indonesia (Madium 1948), and how the communists supported Soekarno anyway, when he nationalised Indonesian assets to piss off the Dutch...