Wanda 
Praising a white male, a descendant of colonisers no less, for having a semblance of self-awareness about the structural privilege he has over native Indonesians he saw in his time visiting Bali, who narrated his experience as some sort of epiphany he just had that day in a one-minute Instagram reel, would be the very last thing I'd do before I die.
His reel is another flavour of colonial gaze, really.
"travelling is genuinely the fastest way to realise how much you've been taking for granted" is the most jarring part and my comment is actually a lot milder than what I actually had in mind.
You're telling me that nobody taught him, a fkn Dutch person, about what his country did? Be serious.
Since I'm pissed off, and I'm autistic, I'll just dump my frustration here.
The VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) was the world's first multinational joint-stock corporation, and the Dutch have leaned into that framing with considerable comfort for centuries. Framing it as a commercial enterprise rather than a colonial state project is enormously convenient, isn't it? 🤓 because it allows the violence to be attributed to corporate excess, to the greed of shareholders and wayward governors-general, rather than to a sustained national project of extraction and domination. The state gets to step back. The atrocities become a matter of poor corporate governance. Boo hoo 😢 corporations bad! colonialism? We don't know her!
HOWEVER, ironically, that's how you get Dutch museums that celebrate the Golden Age (Gouden Eeuw) as an era of merchant genius, artistic flourishing, and global trade, while the forced labour, the mass killings, the cultuurstelsel that reduced entire Javanese communities, my maternal ancestors, to subsistence while their crops fed European markets, exist as footnotes in the margin of a success story. I wonder how they frame the human trafficking of the Javanese labourers they sent to Suriname, AFTER the abolition of institutionalised slavery, hmmm 🤔
The “politionele acties”, the military campaigns of 1945 to 1949 to crush Indonesian independence, were literally called "police actions."
You know what our history calls that? DUTCH MILITARY AGGRESSION, two rounds of it.
Those are not two perspectives on the same event. They are two entirely incompatible political claims about what Indonesia was at that moment, a sovereign republic being attacked, or an "unruly territory" being administered.
A matter of restoring order. The semantic work being done by that phrase is staggering.
The entire 350 years of Dutch colonisation of Indonesia was being framed as part of commercial activities, a corporate excess.
The violence was outsourced to a company, the profits were nationalised into a ✨Golden Age✨, and the rebranding has been running ever since.
And a Dutch man in Bali in 2026 experiences a travel epiphany about the structural privilege "he's taken for granted" 😢💔
It's his entire conscience that he's taken for granted, actually, in favour of the common sense shaped by the Dutch garbage ruling class. Get out of our land, coloniser. Please choke, respectfully. 💀
I've said this before, and I'll say it again and again. The Dutch are not h8d enough.
#history #colonialism #colonialgaze #Dutch #Indonesia #Bali #politics
GemsOfINDOLOGY
Stefaniia Sidorova