Revelations and a new interview

Hello subscribers!

On Wednesday a new Blog post went up about Indonesia. It was inspired by two more or less recent revelations. One was the announcement of the relocation of the seat of government from the present capital city Jakarta to a new purpose-built capital city in East Kalimantan in the Indonesian part of Borneo. The location is more or less in the centre of the whole Indonesian archipelago – and the name of the new capital, Nusantara, apparently translates as that – ‘archipelago’.

The other revelation concerned the brutal anti-communist purge in Indonesia after the takeover of power by right-wing general Suharto in 1965, in which between 500,000 and possibly over 1 million people were murdered (this is also the topic of the remarkable movie “The Act of Killing” by Joshua Oppenheimer). Documents recently released by the UK National Archives now provide evidence of a deep and active involvement of the British Foreign Office and MI6 in the propaganda that incited the mass killings! There are now calls for an independent inquiry into this. We’ll see …
  

And as if that was not enough to tarnish Britain’s reputation for me, I also came across another revelation of yet another dark chapter of British history that I had not been aware of in this form: the mass internment of German and Austrian refugees as “enemy aliens” in 1940. The very worst internment place was Warth Mill in Bury near Manchester. I took this as inspiration for another new Blog post, which I uploaded yesterday. It gives more details of this dark story and a few photos of other industrial mill buildings from back in the days when I lived and worked in England. The photo above shows Salts Mill in Saltaire, Bradford, West Yorkshire, seen from the towpath of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal that runs right through the complex.
  

Also new this week was the publication of an interview I did recently with the Thinker’s Garden website. It also features a bit of promo for my book Atlas of Dark Destinations, but most of the interview is not about the book as such but about certain angles of dark tourism in general, including geopolitical and environmental questions.

I also did another interview for the Matador Network website & newsletter, but that’s not yet out. I’ll send the link when it appears, hopefully soon.
  

But so much for this time.

Have a good week.

Best,

Peter