Sometimes, dead is better. But sometimes, silence is
worse.
The thing about revolutions—and Arrmanatha Nasir knew this
in his bones the way a man knows winter is coming by the ache in his joints—is
that they spread like cancer. One day you’re looking at a mole that seems
harmless enough, and the next you’re staring at something dark and malignant
that’s eaten half your body alive.
Deputy Minister Nasir sat in his Jakarta office, watching
the feeds from Nepal on three different screens, and felt that familiar cold
crawl up his spine. The same cold he’d felt as a boy when his grandmother told
him stories about the pontianak—those vengeful spirits that fed on the
living. But this wasn’t supernatural horror. This was something worse: human
nature unleashed.
The demonstrations in Kathmandu looked like something out of
Dante’s worst fever dream. Gen Z kids—Christ, they were just kids—moving
through the streets like a living, breathing organism of rage. The footage
showed them surging against police barriers, their faces lit by the orange glow
of burning cars, their voices rising in a chant that sounded almost like
prayer, if prayer could be weaponized.
“Stay away from politics,” Nasir had told Indonesian
citizens abroad. “Focus on your studies, your work. Keep your heads down.”
But even as he said the words, he heard the echo of his
grandfather’s voice from forty years ago, telling him about another time,
another place, when keeping your head down meant something entirely different.
The Ghosts of Perhimpunan Indonesia
The old-timers called it PI—Perhimpunan Indonesia—and if you
listened carefully on quiet nights in Amsterdam, some swore you could still
hear the ghostly clack-clack-clack of those ancient stencil machines in
the basement of student boarding houses near Leiden University.
Back in the thirties, when the world was going to hell in a
handbasket (though nobody knew just how big that handbasket was going to get),
Indonesian students didn’t have the luxury of neutrality. Fascism was spreading
across Europe like kudzu in a wet summer, choking out everything decent and
human in its path.
Parlindoengan Loebis had been just twenty-three when the
Gestapo came for him. Twenty-three, with his whole life ahead of him, studying
engineering and dreaming of the day Indonesia would be free. They found him
with his hands still black from mimeograph ink, evidence of the underground
newspaper that had been his life’s work.
Fuiten, they called it. The word itself was
rebellion—whistleblowing, truth-telling in a world that had made truth a
capital offense.
The Nazi camps took him—Dachau first, then Amersfoort. The
records were sparse, the way records always are when governments want to make
people disappear. But the facts remained, cold and hard as winter stones:
Parlindoengan Loebis died in captivity, along with R.M. Sidartawan and Djajeng
Pratomo. Three young men who could have kept their heads down, could have
focused on their studies.
Instead, they chose to print the truth until the darkness
swallowed them whole.
The Weight of Memory
Irawan Soejono was running when they shot him.
January 13, 1945—a date that should have been written in
fire across the conscience of the world, but instead gathered dust in
university archives. He’d been carrying a stencil machine, that ancient tool of
revolution, trying to get it to safety so the truth could continue its
underground circulation.
The Gestapo bullet caught him in the back, and he went down
in an Amsterdam street that probably looked just like any other street, lined
with narrow houses and winter-bare trees. But in that moment, as his blood
seeped into the cobblestones, Irawan became something more than a student, more
than an activist.
He became proof that some silences are more terrible than
any scream.
The Brussels Congregation
February 10, 1927. Brussels, Belgium.
Picture it: a room full of smoke and revolutionary fervor,
157 delegates from 37 countries gathered like some kind of political séance,
trying to summon the spirit of liberation from the grave of colonialism. The “League
Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression”—a name that rolled off the tongue
like an incantation.
Mohammad Hatta sat at the head table, his quiet intensity
burning like a slow fuse. At twenty-five, he already understood what many twice
his age never grasped: that freedom isn’t given, it’s taken, one careful,
calculated step at a time.
Five Indonesians from PI were there—Hatta, Nazir Pamontjak,
Ahmad Soebardjo, Gatot Taroenamihardja, and Abdul Manaf. They pushed for
resolutions that seemed simple enough on paper: abolish the death penalty for
Indonesian political prisoners, grant amnesty, recognize basic human dignity.
Simple words. But words, as any writer knows, have power.
They can build worlds or burn them down.
The Contemporary Plague
Now, in 2025, the plague of unrest had spread again. Nepal
first—always the small countries that light the fuse—where Prime Minister KP
Sharma Oli’s resignation felt like the first domino falling in a game whose
rules nobody fully understood.
Timor Leste followed, students blockading parliament over
government cars while people starved. The Philippines erupted over flood
control corruption—billions of pesos disappearing like morning mist while real
floods drowned real people. Australia saw thousands marching through Melbourne
and Sydney, pepper spray creating temporary blind spots in the vision of
democracy.
Even France—sophisticated, civilized France—had forced Prime
Minister Bayrou to step down. Turkey’s Erdoğan faced his own uprising. Thailand’s
Constitutional Court had dismissed Prime Minister Shinawatra like a teacher
erasing an equation that refused to balance.
And through it all, Deputy Minister Nasir’s voice echoed
across Indonesian embassies and consulates: “Stay silent. Stay safe. Stay out
of it.”
The False Prophet of Silence
Prayogi R. Saputra had a theory about silence, and like most
theories born in academic think tanks, it carried the weight of uncomfortable
truth. The X-Institute director understood what Marx and Engels had written
about false consciousness—the way societies train their citizens to mistake
surrender for virtue, defeat for wisdom.
“Silence is golden,” people said, as if repetition could
make it true. But golden for whom? For the comfortable, the powerful, the ones
who’d already won their wars and wanted to keep their victories undisturbed.
For everyone else, silence became a kind of spiritual
cancer, eating away at the soul one swallowed word at a time.
The proletariat—God, how that word had aged, but the concept
remained as sharp as a fresh-honed blade—learned to call their chains jewelry,
their cages homes. They learned to smile when they wanted to scream, to nod
when they wanted to shake their fists at heaven itself.
The Weight of Now
Police Chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo had said it plainest: “Our
country and the global situation today are far from being in good shape.”
Understatement of the century, right there. Like saying the
Titanic had a small leak, or that Chernobyl experienced a minor technical
difficulty.
Seventy-four Indonesians evacuated from Nepal, their dreams
of education or work cut short by the simple human need to survive. They came
home carrying stories that would probably never make it into official
reports—stories of tear gas that burned like acid, of police batons that fell
like hammers, of young voices raised in songs that sounded like both prayer and
war cry.
And in Jakarta, in comfortable offices with air conditioning
and coffee that actually tasted like coffee, officials wrote memos about the
importance of political neutrality.
The Question That Haunts
The old Indonesian students in the Netherlands—the ones who
died in concentration camps, who ran through Amsterdam streets carrying stencil
machines like sacred relics—they faced a world coming apart at the seams.
Fascism rising, democracy dying, colonialism grinding human dignity into dust
fine enough to blow away on the wind.
They could have stayed silent. Could have focused on their
studies, their personal advancement, their individual survival.
Instead, they chose to make noise in a world that
desperately needed to hear the truth.
Today’s world isn’t so different. The uniforms have changed,
the technology has evolved, but the fundamental choice remains the same: speak
up and risk everything, or stay quiet and lose your soul one compromise at a
time.
In hotel rooms from Kathmandu to Melbourne, Indonesian
students and workers watch the news and feel that familiar cold crawl up their
spines. They think about Irawan Soejono, running through Amsterdam with his
stencil machine. They think about Parlindoengan Loebis, dying for the simple
belief that truth matters more than safety.
And they ask themselves the question that haunts every
generation: When the world catches fire, do you grab a bucket or do you run?
The answer, as any student of history knows, determines not
just who lives and who dies, but who gets to call themselves human when the
smoke finally clears.
Sometimes, dead is better. But sometimes, silence is the
only thing worse than death.
Because in the end, we all die. But not all of us get to die
knowing we spoke the truth when it mattered most.
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