Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

15 страница из 91

Whether they liked it or not, however, surfers—mostly young Westerners who routinely traveled where few other foreign tourists bothered to visit—inevitably found themselves enmeshed in the practical realities of U.S. foreign policy. This is perhaps truer of no place more than Indonesia, the vast archipelago north of Australia considered the premier surfing destination on the planet. What had, in the 1950s, been a leading Third World proponent of nonalignment in the broader Cold War struggle became, by the late 1960s, a staunch American ally in Washington’s ideological competition with China and the Soviet Union. It was in 1965 and 1966 that Indonesia’s neutralist Sukarno government was essentially overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that culminated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In the decades that followed, Indonesia stood out as a leading recipient of U.S. military aid and diplomatic support, whether in Jakarta’s brutal and consistent repression of internal dissent or in its 1975 invasion and genocidal occupation of East Timor. As chapter 3 examines, it was shortly after the massacres of the mid-1960s that Indonesia began to capture the attention of American and Australian surfers, who discovered on its thousands of islands some of the finest waves in the world. With the cooperation of the Suharto regime, which boosted international surfing contests and even sponsored an outer-island junket for visiting foreigners, surfers helped promote tourism across the island chain. Surfing magazines regularly published features on Indonesian “surfaris,” while filmmakers captured the nation’s waves and people in a host of productions. In such features, whether print or filmic, the nation was represented not as a site of dictatorship and state repression—which was how too many Indonesians experienced life in their country—but as an exotic paradise with primitive locals who welcomed the West’s interest in their homeland. Empire in Waves examines both this discursive erasure and surfers’ collaboration with the Indonesian authorities, illustrating how the touristic impulse that is virtually intrinsic to the sport of surfing has inevitably been imbued with political meaning.