The Ghosts of Brussels

 

There are some promises that smell like death from the moment they’re made, and Prabowo’s words at the UN had that particular stench clinging to them like cigarette smoke in a closed room. Standing there in his pressed suit, speaking into microphones that carried his voice to empty seats and indifferent delegates, he offered up the same old song that Indonesian politicians had been humming for decades: We’ll recognize Israel, sure enough, just as soon as they recognize Palestine.

It was the kind of promise that sounded reasonable in the harsh fluorescent light of international diplomacy, but any fool with half a brain could see it for what it really was—a political two-step that would keep everyone dancing until the music stopped and the lights went out forever.

But this isn’t really a story about Prabowo or his empty promises. No sir. This is a story about ghosts—the kind that don’t rattle chains or moan in the night, but the kind that whisper in the corridors of power, reminding us of what we used to be before we got so damn comfortable with compromise.

The Brussels Haunting

Picture this: February 10th, 1927. Brussels in the dead of winter, cold enough to freeze the marrow in your bones. The Palais d’Egmont squatted in the heart of Belgium like some great stone beast, its windows glowing yellow against the gray sky. Inside, something extraordinary was happening—something that would have scared the holy hell out of every colonial administrator from London to Jakarta if they’d truly understood what they were looking at.

They called it the Congress of the League Against Imperialism, but it might as well have been called the Day the Worms Turned. One hundred and seventy-four delegates from thirty-four countries, most of them from places that existed only as colored patches on European maps, had gathered to do something that empires throughout history had worked very hard to prevent: they were going to talk to each other.

Willi Münzenberg, the German communist who’d organized this little get-together, stood at the podium with the fervor of a revival preacher. His eyes burned with the kind of intensity you usually see in men who’ve stared too long into the abyss and found it staring back. “We want to form a sacred alliance,” he declared, his voice echoing off the ornate walls, “we, the underdogs of white, yellow, black, and other colors… for the liberation of all who suffer.”

Sacred alliance. The words hung in the air like incense, or maybe sulfur.

In the audience, young men who would later reshape the world sat shoulder to shoulder with labor organizers and intellectuals who’d traveled thousands of miles to be there. Jawaharlal Nehru, future Prime Minister of India, leaned forward in his chair. Mohammad Hatta, all of twenty-five years old and burning with the quiet fire that would help birth a nation, took careful notes.

Even Albert Einstein had lent his name to this gathering, though the great physicist was safely tucked away in his study, probably working on equations that would unlock the secrets of the universe. Smart man, Einstein. He understood that some kinds of knowledge were safer examined from a distance.

The Indonesian Shadows

In that crowd of revolutionaries and dreamers, the delegation from the Dutch East Indies—they weren’t calling it Indonesia yet, not officially—stood out like teenagers at a church social. They weren’t the biggest group, weren’t the loudest, weren’t backed by millions of followers back home. Hell, there were only about twenty members in their whole organization, Perhimpoenan Indonesia, scattered across European universities like seeds on rocky ground.

But sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

Mohammad Hatta was their spokesman, and if you’d seen him walking down the street in Leiden or The Hague, you might have mistaken him for just another colonial student, grateful for the privilege of a European education. You would have been dead wrong. Behind those wire-rimmed spectacles burned something that the Dutch colonial authorities had learned to fear more than armed rebellion: the unshakeable conviction that his people deserved to be free.

The boy—and he was just a boy, really, despite his serious demeanor—had already figured out what it would take most of the world another forty years to learn: that colonialism wasn’t a problem to be solved through negotiation or reform. It was a cancer that had to be cut out, root and branch, before it killed its host.

“No matter how different our races and political colors,” Hatta told the assembled delegates, his voice carrying the weight of centuries of oppression, “in our goals and aspirations, we are of one mind.”

The applause that followed was more than mere politeness. It was recognition—the sound of people who had spent their lives being told they were less than human suddenly hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud by someone who understood.

But revolutions, like houses in Stephen King stories, have a way of becoming haunted by their own history.

When Dreams Turn Sour

The thing about sacred alliances is that they’re only as strong as the people who keep them sacred, and people—well, people have a tendency to let power go to their heads like whiskey on an empty stomach.

By 1928, the warm glow of Brussels had begun to flicker like a dying bulb. Joseph Stalin, that Georgian bank robber who’d somehow clawed his way to the top of the Soviet hierarchy, decided that the “united front” strategy was for suckers. Capitalism was dying, he declared, and revolution was just around the corner. Anyone who didn’t see it that way was either blind or a traitor.

The moderates and bourgeois nationalists who’d been welcome in Brussels suddenly found themselves persona non grata. Social democrats became “social fascists.” Reasonable men like Nehru and Hatta, who’d dared to suggest that maybe—just maybe—there might be more than one path to freedom, were branded as sellouts and imperialist stooges.

It was like watching a family dinner turn into a knife fight. The very people who’d stood together against their oppressors began tearing each other apart with the viciousness that only former allies can muster.

By 1929, when the League held its second congress in Frankfurt, the atmosphere had changed completely. Where Brussels had felt like a communion of the oppressed, Frankfurt felt like a show trial. The warm handshakes and thunderous applause had been replaced by suspicious glances and ideological purity tests.

Willi Münzenberg, the same man who’d spoken so eloquently about sacred alliances just two years earlier, now stood at the podium denouncing bourgeois nationalists as traitors. The revolution, it seemed, was eating its own children.

The Slow Death

What followed was the kind of slow-motion disaster that horror writers know intimately—the gradual corruption of something pure and hopeful until it becomes its own opposite. The League Against Imperialism, once a beacon for the oppressed of the world, became just another tool of Soviet foreign policy.

The non-communist leaders who’d given the movement its moral authority were systematically pushed out or driven away. The organization that had once represented millions of colonized people shrank to a handful of communist loyalists meeting in increasingly shabby rooms in increasingly obscure European cities.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the League’s secretariat began a pathetic migration from Paris to London, like refugees fleeing a war that had already been lost. By 1935, Stalin had changed his mind again—imagine that—and decided that maybe alliances with non-communists weren’t so bad after all.

But it was too late. The trust that had been built in Brussels over those five cold February days had been systematically destroyed by the very people who’d benefited from it most. In 1937, the League Against Imperialism was formally dissolved, though by then it had been effectively dead for years.

The Ghost in the Machine

And that brings us back to Prabowo, standing in that UN assembly hall nearly a century later, mouthing the same comfortable platitudes that diplomats have been reciting since time immemorial. The ghost of Mohammad Hatta—the young man who’d once believed that there could be no compromise between oppressor and oppressed—must have been watching from somewhere in the shadows, shaking his spectral head at what his country’s leaders had become.

Because that’s the real horror story here, isn’t it? Not the dramatic collapse of revolutionary movements or the betrayal of sacred alliances. It’s the slow, insidious process by which the fire of conviction gets banked and smothered until all that’s left are the cold ashes of pragmatism.

The men and women who gathered in Brussels in 1927 understood something that we’ve somehow forgotten: that some things are worth fighting for, even if—especially if—the fight seems hopeless. They knew that freedom isn’t something that can be negotiated or bargained for like a used car. It’s something that has to be taken, claimed, declared in defiance of all the reasonable voices that counsel patience and compromise.

But ghosts, even the most insistent ones, tend to fade over time. The voices that once spoke truth to power become whispers, then echoes, then finally just the wind rattling through empty halls where important people once said important things that no one bothers to remember anymore.

And in the end, perhaps that’s the most frightening thing of all: not that we might fail to learn from history, but that we might forget there was ever anything worth learning in the first place.

The dead rest easy in Brussels these days. The living have learned to sleep just as soundly.