Racial aspects
of violence ignored

Does the American press do a miserable job explaining the root causes -- and even the crucial details -- when a foreign nation descends into crisis, thus breeding widespread ignorance of the real significance of such events? Or do news media merely respond to the observed fact that most Americans don't know or care much about overseas affairs, and would likely turn away from anything more than a "sports scorecard" on who's out, who's in, and whether any Americans were hurt?
The current mayhem in Indonesia is a case in point. Most Americans who read a newspaper or catch an occasional TV newscast know that the Indonesian capital of Jakarta is in flames, that rioters are looting shops and even making it difficult to get to and from the airport. Those who

have paid a little more attention know that the economic crisis is likely to cause the fall of Indonesian strongman Suharto.
But it would take a dedicated reader to have gathered from the coverage so far that most of this violence and looting is directed at Indonesia's Chinese minority, cited by some sources as representing only 8 percent of the archipelago's population, but controlling up to 80 percent of its retail shops and other private wealth.
Yes, Indonesia's economy is a mess. And President Suharto has been widely criticized for refusing the pledge of "firm economic discipline" which the International Monetary Fund has been trying to extract in return for more "bail-out" loans (largely from U.S. taxpayers.)
Of course, part of that "fiscal austerity package" comprises harsh taxes on the average citizen, in order to allow Indonesia to continue repaying high-risk, low-interest loans from large Western banks.
Wouldn't a free market limit such destabilizing

 
loans -- which only encourage foreign potentates to indulge their "mausoleum complexes" -- through the firm discipline of default? Is it really right to loot an entire people through taxation, to make good a bunch of bad paper pushed on a murderous dictator?
Regardless of the merits of that case, some of the Indonesian people seem to have found a solution to their own micro-economic plight: take it out on the wealthy ethnic minority. It's going to be hard for a Chinese money-lender to collect your loan after you've burned down his shop, and either murdered him or driven him from the country.
Such acts are a frightening echo of the way Jewish merchants and money-lenders have been treated in many a European pogrom -- up to and including the German Kristallnacht of the late 1930s. They also bring to mind the way mob violence was directed at Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles only a few years ago. Why, even the reports of Indonesian army troops mixing easily with the rioters make little sense -- until we recall that Nazi police did nothing to prevent the looting of Jewish shops, and that the LAPD sent no help to besieged Korean shopkeepers during the Rodney King riots, leaving them

to defend their property with the very kind of semi-auto, imitation "assault weapons" which our political powers-that-be are now intent on banning.
Initially, America's media didn't do a very good job reporting the selective ethnic nature of the Los Angeles violence -- or the extent of the burgeoning Holocaust in Germany in the 1930s and '40s -- either.
By now, we should have learned the lesson of those omissions.
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Meantime, on a related subject, how about India setting off those atomic tests, and the resultant widespread calls to punish this "rogue state"?
Give me a break.
This precisely parallels the Clinton-Horiuchi administration's hypocritical concept of domestic "gun control," which could be summarized as: "We take away YOUR guns, we keep all of OUR guns, and then you get to guess who's left in 'control'."
Harry Truman made us the only nation to use nukes in war, ruling that they are acceptable tools for peace.
Fine: I and lots of other Americans whose fathers, uncles and grandfathers could well have died in a resisted invasion of Japan believe Mr. Truman