Could global justice save Indonesians?

The year hasn’t ended yet. If it had, I would nominate Rocky Gerung’s MA and Keadilan Global as the best essay of the year. Its substance I think will ring on in our minds for the longest time.

Before I came across to it last week, I’d been thinking of touching the very issue. But I’m just glad I didn’t, for I wouldn’t have come up with a piece half as good. He really did raise a few issues and scintillating arguments. Which explains my nomination. This, in spite of some misgivings and reservations.

Now, from a completely different angle, this posting wants to extend the matter at hand, and inquire if the energy Rocky called as global justice can save us all.

Global justice as an utopia seeming fine, many must think it an important one. But like every fiction, it has to be asked early on: Is there such a thing? Can there be such a thing as global justice? And what does it take so that we can get any closer to it?

I surmise we can only get some clues to it by returning to square one, and by this I mean we must return to the basic inquiries to the very nature of the state and the true causes of our impoverishment.

The real case at home itself, in fact, has been about man against the state, because MA belongs to the Indonesian state. And the state is run but by to a handful of individuals. And these individuals are backed up with the military and the police. And all this is obvious.

To me, it would be a mistake to isolate the issue as if it purely concerned one particular institution alone, which is the court, plus some people flocking around the institution. Moreover, the solution being approached, I fear, has been conceived without our thinking about the essential nature of the state. It has been conceived, instead, with an certain, firmly fixated notion about the state and its organs. It's the kind of Rosseauan or Hobbessian approach, which only overrules the fact that man can live without the state. Indeed, most of us are alike; for instance, at least, in the belief that no private court should be allowed to operate at all.

Yet, can it for a moment occur to us that, contrary to what we want to believe about it, the state is the greatest enemy to the people? If so, is there an easy way to make everyone realize that the state is the greatest enemy to our freedom?

I hold that only by such awakening would we Indonesians stop craving blindly for protection and care from the constitutional terror manufacturer and legal owner of coercion!

Besides, to quote Garett, didn't once upon a time we citizens take care of the state? Why in the end it's the other way around?

It is imperative to be reminiscent that without tackling our rudimentary problems, neither one state national nor ones global, can render us salvation.