Our Kid and I checked out the Indonesian Book Fair in the Convention Centre in central Jakarta today. I won't bore you with details of how far the bus stop is from the entrance but how if you enter through the workers entrance (labelled Karyawan) and keep going around the left of the building you end up walking through the area where they 'groom' the potted plants. Nice.
Inside it's the cacophony that one might expect and the first stall we came across had hordes of f;lk scrapping for book bargains in English. Naturally we joined in and got loads of novels, mainly Japanese, plus a few Pokeman comics for thank-you-very-much prices.
What got my goat, however, was a prominent display of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, a book that remains a key component of white supremacists' propaganda.I remonstrated with the keeper of the stand, but backed off before I made a total prat of myself. I managed comments - naturally in my fluent Indonesian ~ about Hitler being responsible for the genocide of umpteen millions of undesirables such as Jews, Romanies, non-Aryans such as the vast majority of Indonesians (but unlike Jakartass) and physically or mentally handicapped folk, and pointed out that my parents' generation had fought a World War against Hitler for blatant racist crap like this, so what the fuck is it doing being sold openly in a country like Indonesia which preaches Unity In Diversity .......... etc. etc.
And he told me that Indonesians had a right to know.
I responded that this was akin to Islamic fundamentalism which allows stupid ignorant fools to set off bombs in Bali and elsewhere and besides, this philosophy was/is much more dangerous than that espoused in Karl Marx's Das Kapital which had been banned etc. etc. ....
Our Kid and I then went off to get drunk ~ him on Diet Coke, me on Bintang ~ because, what the fuck ....???
