Monday, Mar. 10, 1958
Djago, the Rooster
(See Cover)
On the tide of nationalism that swept the world after World War II, no young nation swam more proudly than Indonesia. Its 3,000 islands were rich with oil, bauxite, rubber, tin; its 85,000,000 citizens made it the world's biggest Moslem nation, sixth in population among all the nations of the world. In five years of fighting and negotiation, it had shaken off 350 years of Dutch rule and installed a working democracy pledged to merge its dozen ethnic groups and 114 different languages into a new "unity in diversity."
Last week Indonesia, racked by civil war, was in dire danger of splintering apart. Guns cracked in the jungles of West Java; government bombers winged over Pakanbaru in Sumatra and Menado in the Celebes, blasting radio transmitters and telephone exchanges; government patrol boats, cleared for action, blockaded rebel-held ports.
This was no rebellion by fanatical diehards. Its leaders were some of the army's most respected officers, flanked by some of the nation's most respected politicians. From their mountain headquarters in the Padang Highlands of Central Sumatra the voice of the rebels sounded calm and collected, and urged compromise. All the rebels asked was that Indonesia's President 1) behave himself constitutionally, 2) abandon his partnership with the Communist Party.
President Sukarno has never been a man who liked to take orders or even suggestions, however calm and collected the voice. From the start, he has held a mystic faith that he, and only he, speaks for the Indonesian people. "Don't you know that I am an extension of the people's tongue?" he demanded of a critic once. "The Indonesian people will eat stones if I tell them to." His charm can lay ghosts, his oratory stills critics, his famed "luck" has led him safely through imprisonment, exile, uprisings, attempted assassination and narrowly averted coups d'etat. When he tours the country, hundreds of thousands stand for uncomplaining hours in the tropic sun to glimpse him as he passes; when he speaks, they roar "Hidup Bung Karno!" (Long Live Brother Karno). "I don't like to be told that I am wrong," he storms.
Circling Islands. Indonesia's rebellion is less a revolution against Sukarno than a last attempt to shock the self-intoxicated President into a state of sober reason, and a hope that the appeal for a new government may lead him to cleanse his own.
Whether Sukarno listens is of major concern for the free world. Of the string of islands that half circle the great continent of Asia--Japan, Okinawa, Formosa, the Philippines, Indonesia--only Indonesia is not committed to the West. If, as seems possible, Sukarno leads his nation into Communism, the Communists will have made a gigantic leap across a strategic barrier. To the nations of SEATO, meeting in Manila next week, what happens in Indonesia is of vital importance.
Indonesia's wealthiest island, Sumatra, is bigger than California; Java has more people than the American Midwest. Mountains march down the spines of both islands, and a hundred volcanoes drift their smoke against the blue tropical sky. Indonesia bursts with resources, from copra and hemp to teak, tobacco and oil. The world's largest flower, rafflesia, with a diameter of 3 ft., blooms on Madura. The red-brown soil of Java (pop. 52,000,000), terraced with unbelievable ingenuity, produces two rice crops a year. The warm seas send long rollers crashing on the palm-fringed shores of Ternate, with its burgeoning fields of nutmeg and pepper; Sumba, with its fragrant sandalwood; Borneo, with its vast, barely tapped treasure house of oil.
It is a land where the centuries do not follow each other but run side by side. In the oil city of Palembang the streets throb with Cadillacs and motor scooters, while scarcely 50 miles away aboriginal Kubus still live in trees. There are modern textile factories on Java but. close by, a tiger may feast on a wild pig or water buffalo. Elephants trumpet in the rain forest; single-horned rhinos move like tanks through the deltaic swamps; the 10-ft. Komodo lizard looks out from thick underbrush like a dragon from the pages of Arthurian romances.
Bowl-Shaped Gongs. The people are lively, spirited, remarkably intelligent. The basic stock is Malay, with an overlay of Indian, Chinese, Arab and European blood and culture. More than 90% are Moslem, but in Indonesia the religion of the Prophet rests on a foundation of Buddhism, animism and assorted superstitions that date from prehistory. War has always been highly regarded and widely practiced. For centuries, native praus flashed out from inlets and rivers to send kris-waving pirates swarming aboard European merchantmen richly laden with the wealth of the Spice Islands. The conquering Dutch were never able to thoroughly subdue Atjeh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. In 1906 a Balinese rajah, his sons, wives, concubines and soldiers committed mass suicide rather than surrender.
But Indonesians love peace as well. In the soft scented night each village resounds with the rhythmic, curiously tuneful gamelan music of bowl-shaped gongs, bamboo flutes, metal keys, two-stringed violins. Fluid-fingered dancers will hold an audience enchanted all the night long; wayang puppet shows, telling the heroic legends of the past, run from sunset to dawn. Yet together with the industriousness and mannered behavior of the Indonesian is the wild agony of the amok, when a man for no clear reason will throw off all restraint and race through his village wielding his razor-sharp parang against everything in his path.
Quicksilver.
Indonesia last week seemed on the brink of running amok. No one could say which of the nation's characteristics would triumph: that of halus, the ability to adjust passively to circumstances and thereby dominate them, or that of kasar, the blind, rough, uncivilized plunge into brutal action. If the decision rests with anyone, it is with President Sukarno, who, at 56, moves with deceptive lightness through domestic crises and international power plays. His mind and personality are quicksilver; there is a nowhere, now-there quality to his thinking and actions that bewilders his friends and enrages his foes. A Dutch negotiator, after too long an exposure to Sukarno, cried in bafflement: "He is utterly unreliable, one day a fascist, the next a Communist; one day a friend of the white man, the next a violent enemy." No one admires such diversity more than Sukarno himself. On his s6th birthday last year, he told a crowd of well-wishers: "I was born under the sign of Gemini, and I am destined to live a double life according to astrologers. I am a Marxist but I love religion. I am a scientist but I am also an artist.
Some-times I'm serious, sometimes I horse around. I can mix with Communists and Socialists, Moslems and Christians, revolutionary nationalists and compromising nationalists.
Without the Indonesian people I'd be nothing but an ordinary person. It's only in the name of the people that I am an occupant of palaces at Merdeka and Negara, Bogor and Tjirpani."
Most of all, Sukarno wants to be loved and admired. He is happy when surrounded by schoolchildren; it delights him to keep statesmen waiting while he listens patiently to a ragged old woman's complaint. He likes the traditional things of his national life, from Indonesian painting to puppet shows to dukuns (soothsayers). His favorite dukun, a ripe female named Madame Suprapto, last week offered him a particularly explicit prophecy: "The first big bomb will fall in Indonesia in March. The United States will intervene in the struggle between Padang and Djakarta, then the Soviet Union will intervene in turn, and World War III will be under way." The result: the U.S., the Soviet Union and all of Europe will be destroyed, and Red China will emerge as the world's foremost power. Indonesia, the forecast concludes, "will play a major part in the reconstruction of Asia." Sukarno reportedly pays as much attention to Madame Suprapto as he does to most political advisers.
Backward Teachers. Sukarno was born in a small village about 60 miles from the seaport city of Surabaja in 1901, the only son of an impoverished Javanese schoolteacher named Sukemi* and a high-caste Balinese mother, Ida Njoman Rai.
From his father, Sukarno learned the Moslem faith and the seeds of nationalism; from his mother, the long cycle of Hindu epics that have sustained Bali in its centuries-old resistance to the Mohammedanism of the surrounding islands.
The combination left him securely dedicated to no faith. As a member of the priyayi, or gentry, the class that monopolized the few bureaucratic jobs left open by the Dutch to natives, he was socially far above the marhaen, or peasants, who were to become his most ardent followers.
As a precocious child, he soon got the nickname of Djago (Rooster or Champion). He could run faster, jump higher, learn more quickly than anybody else; when he felt arrogant, which was often, he would learn more than the teacher knew, then tell the teacher how backward he was.
At 14, his father sent him to live as a foster son with a Surabaja businessman named Tjokroaminoto, a pioneer nationalist and writer who drew his political ideas from Islam, Marx and George Bernard Shaw. Tjokroaminoto's home was a meeting place of revolutionaries--one of whom, Muso, a Communist, was later to die leading the Madiun uprising against Sukarno--but the quick-witted young Sukarno was soon Tjokroaminoto's favorite. His foster father brought Sukarno up to be a politician, trained him in oratory, nationalism, political organization, and gave him his daughter, Siti Utari, in marriage. In 1920 Sukarno became one of the first dozen Indonesians admitted to a new Dutch technical college in Bandung.
Sukarno graduated as a civil engineer ("The most promising student we ever had," said his Dutch professors) but turned down engineering offers from several Dutch firms. In a characteristic scene that was to be often repeated in his life, Sukarno broke with his mentor, Tjokroaminoto, divorced his young wife, and promptly married another one, a well-to-do widow named Inggit Garnasih.
"Above Such Foolishness." It was then that he began his long association with Dr. Mohammed Hatta, who was everything that Sukarno was not--scholarly, sober-minded, steeped in Western culture, profoundly democratic. Hatta's family had been wealthy enough to send him to study economics in The Netherlands. He returned home, as passionate a nationalist as Sukarno, but aware also that there were other currents of thought in The Netherlands than colonialism, and other white men than imperialist oppressors. Sukarno and Hatta have differed most of their lives, and the history of Indonesia's politics is largely a history of their quarrels and their reconciliations. But their friendship has run steady through it all.
The Dutch spotted Hatta first. When Hatta was arrested, Sukarno used his "martyrdom" to unite several revolutionary factions under his own leadership. At 26, he became the best-known nationalist in Indonesia, a position he has never relinquished. He was also such a frequent patron of Bandung's brothels that his fellow conspirators, who were mostly good Moslems, argued that his behavior would ruin him and the movement. Sukarno replied that his personal life was no one's responsibility but his own, and went off to another brothel to prove his point. "Even then," recalls an associate, "discipline was for other people, not for him. He was above such foolishness."
The Dutch got around to Sukarno in 1929, and after a four-month trial, sentenced him to four years in prison. But they had also given him a nationwide forum: in an impassioned courtroom speech. Sukarno denounced the "vile evils of colonialism" and promised Indonesians that he would serve them as the instrument of "historic necessity." On his release in 1931, Sukarno was greeted by applauding crowds, flowers, gifts. He asked for only ten patriotic youths aflame with love for Indonesia, and "with them I shall shake the earth." The Dutch, already in the long shadows of a dying empire, promptly exiled him to Flores in the Outer Islands, where with thousands of other political detainees he continued his revolutionary education, reading insatiably in Dutch, English, French and Indonesian and drawing new conclusions from an odd compost of Lenin, Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, Otto Bauer, Abraham Lincoln. He took time out-to divorce his wealthy widow and marry a young and beautiful Javanese girl named Fatmawati. He had no doubts about the future. "I entered prison a leader and I shall emerge a leader," he said.
The Collaborator. He emerged in 1942 when the Japanese landed on Indonesian soil. Sukarno, released from prison in Sumatra, quickly made his way to Djakarta, where he met with the two other top revolutionary leaders, Hatta and the Socialist. Sjahrir.
Both Sukarno and Hatta believed that the Axis would win; Sjahrir was convinced the Allies would win. It was therefore easy to apportion the jobs for the next phase of their struggle for independence: Sjahrir would head the underground resistance against the Japanese occupiers, Sukarno and Hatta would collaborate with them. The Dutch administrators and businessmen were herded into Japanese concentration camps, and native bureaucrats, who had never been allowed above the lower rungs of government, took charge under the guidance of Japanese officers. Sukarno was at last in his element, free to roam the country and make countless broadcasts. "America we shall iron out, England we shall destroy," he cried. He urged Indonesians to enlist in defense forces recruited and armed by the Japanese; he helped supply his Japanese masters with romushas, or slave laborers, most of whom were never heard of again.
The surrender of Japan came so suddenly that it was six weeks before the British could get together enough forces to land on Java. In that time, Sukarno got a government in operation. It was creaky, inefficient, poorly administered and defended by a ragtag military force armed with everything from Japanese machine guns to bamboo spears, but it was a going concern.
For four years the Dutch tried vainly to re-establish themselves in Indonesia. They tried it with two major military campaigns, which only proved that they could seize any city they wanted but they could not control the countryside. At one time (1948) Dutch paratroops captured President Sukarno and every member of his Cabinet except Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who was in Sumatra and continued the fight. In 1949, worn down by Indonesian resistance and world opinion, the Dutch gave up. All of their old island possessions except West New Guinea became the Republic of Indonesia. Sukarno and his fellow revolutionaries had won independence.
Bury the Parties. But it is easier to make a revolution than to guide it toward order and prosperity. A month after independence, a Dutch adventurer named Captain Westerling tried to overthrow the government with a mixed force of European mercenaries and native dissidents. The Darul Islam fanatics, who want to set up a theocratic Moslem state by force of arms, took over most of the mountainous area southwest of Bandung in Java; a separatist republic was established in the South Moluccas; the Amboinese, who had long supplied native soldiers to the Dutch, rose in rebellion; the people of Atjeh in Northern Sumatra, who fight everybody, fought the government.
The nation Sukarno precariously governed was precariously split politically. There are four major and nearly equal parties: 1) the Nationalists, created by Sukarno and sustained by a horde of underpaid government bureaucrats; 2) Masjumi, a Moslem party of small traders and urban businessmen with a pronounced Western outlook; 3) the Orthodox Scholars, a village-based and deeply conservative Moslem group dominated by religious teachers; 4) the Communists.
With no party strong enough to rule, there was a succession of coalition Cabinets. Each Cabinet minister was responsible to his individual party and had to run back to headquarters for voting instructions and policy directives. The years went by, governments came and went, but the total result was inaction. In exasperation, Sukarno once cried: "Let's bury the parties!"
The Colonels. His was not the only voice raised in protest. To the impatient military commanders of the Outer Islands, nothing seemed to come from Djakarta except the sound of falling Cabinets and the noise of futile oratory. These young, vigorously anti-Communist colonels were a new factor in Indonesia's tumbling political confusion. The Outer Islands, and Sumatra in particular, produce nearly 100% of Indonesia's exports, while overpopulated Java has always been a deficit area. The profits earned by their products went to Djakarta and, it seemed to the colonels, never came back. Sukarno believes not in economics, but in people--and Java had most of the people.
In effect, Sukarno spent the Outer Islands' earnings on Java. In early 1955 Colonels Sumual and Warouw in the Celebes began shipping out copra and collecting their own taxes on the trade. Instead of sending the revenue to Djakarta, they used the money for local schools and roads. In Central Sumatra veteran Colonel Ahmad Husein followed their lead, took over the regional administration, soon was exporting rubber to Singapore. Tall, efficient Colonel Simbolon in North Sumatra and scholarly Colonel Barlian in South Sumatra also went into the business of army-managed barter and invested the profits in schools, roads, barracks. The operation was scrupulously honest. When Djakarta challenged Simbolon's operations, he produced bank records to show that he had not diverted a single rupiah to his own use.
Missing Gardner. All this was too much for Bung Karno. By now he had taken a fourth wife--a young, lissome divorcee named Hartini--without bothering to divorce Fatmawati, the mother of his five children. Sukarno took off for a tour of the world's capitals, shopping for new ideas. The tour became a triumphal procession and a tonic for the dispirited President of a mismanaged nation. He arrived in the U.S. quoting Abraham Lincoln, got a ticker-tape welcome in New York City, saw Hollywood (he was disappointed to miss Ava Gardner, who was off in Spain), made an address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. He told the Congressmen that "we of Indonesia are in the stage of national turmoil through which America passed some 150 years ago. We ask you to understand," and won hearty applause by dwelling on the many similarities between the American Revolution and that of Indonesia against the Dutch. He charmed the U.S. President and press. But Sukarno was not overly impressed with the U.S. Americans are too tense, he said when he got home ; they work too hard, they obviously lack halus, or spirituality. They have a good production system, but they don't know how to distribute what they make.
Scarcely three months later, Sukarno was in the Soviet Union and delighting his new hosts by implying a close identity the Soviet struggle against capital ism and Indonesia's against colonialism. The Russians spared no effort, furnished his Aeroflot plane with a pretty, blonde stewardess and interpreter named Valentina Reshetnyak. Sukarno imperially arranged for the interpreter to visit him in Djakarta, where she still remains.
But the peak of stage management was achieved by Red China. Hundreds of thousands lined the roads as Sukarno passed; schoolchildren paraded, youth groups cried "Hidup Bung Karno!" Flow ers and confetti and drums and songs greeted his every appearance. Chou En-lai personally showed him factories and bridges. After Russia, Sukarno had observed dubiously: "One can see the price of their achievement in the faces of their people." But here were Communists who smiled.
Three-Legged Horse. Sukarno came back to Djakarta full of wonder. "I've seen the answer in China," he told inti mates. "Now we must do something. Ev ery country in the world seems to make progress but Indonesia." His new political idea: "guided democracy." It was based, he said, on the ancient village idea of gotong-royong, mutual help, a sort of village meeting where all the elders discuss and discuss a proposition until they are in unanimous agreement. There was no vote, because votes produce majorities and minorities, and such division of the people leads to unhappiness and opposition. Under Sukarno's new conception, the elected Parliament would be in tandem with a National Council, selected by the President, and containing representatives of the various groups in the nation: youth, business, labor, women, the arts and professions.
When Sukarno hand-picked its 45 members, the National Council proved to have four known Communists and twelve or 14 other left-wingers. It is Sukarno's position that since the Reds win votes, they should a proportionate place in the govern ment. "I don't want to ride a three-legged horse. We can't ignore the voices of 6,000,000 people!" he cried. Mohammed Hatta answered: "Then keep them in the opposition. Oil and water don't mix." As for a premier and cabinet, Sukarno got around the nuisance of conferring with political parties by appointing an earnest engineer named Djuanda as Premier without consulting Parliament.
"Guided democracy" was too much for Dr. Hatta. He resigned as Vice President of the nation and the crisis deepened. In the Outer Islands, the colonels were stirring restlessly. Colonels Husein and Sim-bolon in Sumatra took over the civil administration of their regions. In the Celebes, Lieut. Colonel Sumual followed suit.
Typically, Sukarno reacted to this crisis by creating a diversion. Loudly, he warned that unless the United Nations forced the Dutch to cede West Irian (West
New Guinea) to Indonesia, events would happen that "would startle the world!" When the U.N. rejected even a mild pro-Indonesian resolution, Sukarno ordered that all Dutch assets -- ships, banks, plan tations -- be seized and all Dutch nation als expelled.
Sukarno set up a "West Irian Liberation Committee," which included Cabinet members. It proceeded to issue its own orders, which frequently contradicted the government's. Masjumi leaders tried futilely to remonstrate with the President. But Sukarno merely exhorted Indonesians to prepare for hard times: "We must dare! We must start from the bottom! In the next few years we may be short of clothing!" No criticism would have mattered so long as Sukarno felt secure in the hearts of his people. But when someone hurled several hand grenades at him he was visibly shaken. He took off on a 41 -day "vacation" tour of Africa and Asia, while rebellion festered behind him.
Geisha Delights. Police and pemuda (youth action groups) took over the streets of Djakarta. Sections of the city were cordoned off and a house-to-house search made for dissidents. Mohammed Natsir, the titular head of the Masjumi Party, and Sjafruddin Prawira-negara, ex-governor of the Bank of Indonesia, found themselves harassed by threatening phone calls at all hours of the day and night; armed hoodlums tramped through their houses and the police ignored their complaints. In fear of their lives, they fled Djakarta for the clearer air of Padang. Colonel Sumual flew in to Padang from the Celebes and Colonel Barlian from South Sumatra. Dagger-bearded Colonel Zulkifli Lubis, onetime deputy chief of staff and probably the shrewdest of the Padang rebels, appeared also, although the police were searching for him in Djakarta as a prime suspect in the attempted assassination. Snapped Lubis: "I didn't do it. If I had planned it, .it would not have failed." An ultimatum was dispatched to hand-wringing Premier Djuanda in the capital: unless a new anti-Communist Cabinet was formed under Hatta or the Sultan of Djogjakarta, the rebels would establish a counter-government of their own. Two of the colonels flew to Japan to deliver the ultimatum personally to Sukarno, who was busy renewing an old acquaintance with a 29-year-old geisha whom he had known under the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Said Sukarno: "How can you behave this way? Aren't we old friends?"
Six days after Sukarno's return to Djakarta, the rebels got Sukarno's answer--bombings of their communications by government planes, blockade of their coasts by government warships. The men who had made the revolution together were at war.
Mixed Feelings. On paper, the rebels seem doomed. Sukarno has a tiny navy and a small air force (twelve bombers, 20 fighters); the rebels have neither. Sukarno can muster some 85 battalions of troops, the rebels scarcely 14. But the rebels are prepared to fight if attacked, and the army and navy have shown little enthusiasm for turning their guns on brother Indonesians. Military commanders in such outlying spots as Borneo, Timor, Flores, Sumbawa, the Moluccas hastened to promise loyalty to Djakarta but with the proviso that, unfortunately, they had no forces to spare for an invasion of the rebel areas. The only dependable government arm is the air force of General Sukarni Suridarma, who has Communist sympathies and a tall, good-looking Eurasian (and Communist) wife.
The rebels must avoid being strangled economically. Their agents in Singapore are dickering for patrol boats to help break the naval blockade of rebel ports, and have reportedly purchased six transport planes that can be used either as courier planes or bombers. In Padang, machine-gun posts are protected by sandbag revetments, and Sumatran youth are being drilled in guerrilla tactics. In the Celebes, Colonel Sumual has recaptured Gorontalo from the government forces that seized the city and boasts that he can raise 30,000 men against a government invasion.
What the rebels need most is allies, and here they are experiencing the most difficulty. Natsir lingers in Padang still uncommitted, but still the probable candidate for President, if the rebels are forced to disavow Sukarno. A key man is Colonel Barlian, commander of South Sumatra. His area includes the rich Stanvac and Shell oilfields and refineries at Palembang, which supply most of Djakarta's gasoline. Padang's Colonel Husein is his closest friend, and he is with the rebels in spirit but, so far, hesitates to disown Djakarta. Possible reasons: his region is heavily settled by migrant Javanese who in recent municipal elections gave one-third of their votes to the Communists; one of his four battalions is made up of Javanese troops. To underline his neutrality he last week had his officers and men swear allegiance only to him.
Bomb in August. At week's end Sukarno seemed to be treating his latest dilemma as airily as those of the past. He chucked schoolgirls under the chin, pursed his lips over the prophecies of his latest favorite soothsayer ("A great bomb will drop in August! There will be trouble everywhere"). His wife, Hartini, gave birth to a son at the presidential summer palace 35 miles south of Djakarta, making Sukarno a father for the seventh time. Because his own Nationalist Party was rapidly losing touch with the masses, Sukarno has leaned increasingly on the Communists. He admires their dynamic ability to organize monster demonstrations with all of the theatrical effects--banners, chanted slogans, parades, fiery speeches--which have always been his weakness. But the Communists frighten him too. Says an intimate: "If they staged rival rallies in, say, Surabaja, I am convinced the Communists would outdraw Sukarno. This would kill him. He knows the Commies can outdraw him, and so he has to stay with them."
The police in Djakarta rounded up Sumatrans thought to be sympathetic to the rebels, threatened prosecution of anyone caught listening to rebel broadcasts. Dr. Bahder-Djohan, president of the University of Indonesia and a Sumatran, asked to be relieved of active duty in protest at the bombing of his homeland. Other Sumatrans on the faculty and in civil service were threatening a walkout that would further cripple the government, since the vigorous, active Sumatrans make up a disproportionately large percentage in the nation's intellectual fields. With the disruption of trade consequent on the seizure of Dutch property, the price of rice had risen precipitously, and with it. criticism of Bung Karno. Muttered a Djakarta housewife: "We starve, and he spends our money on women. His women will kill us all."
Dying Corpse. With a display of kasar, rebel Premier Sjafruddin called Bung Karno a coward "who strutted and wore medals but had never fought a war, a man who was so frightened that he wouldn't even go to the bathroom without a bodyguard." The rebels were also disappointed in the inactivity of Mohammed Hatta (who in the midst of last week's maneuvering was discovered quietly lecturing on Islamic history at the University of Indonesia). "Hatta is the undertaker," said Sjafruddin bitterly. "He'll sit quietly while the corpse dies, then conduct a post-mortem."
But even at this late date the rebels would probably consent to keep Bung Karno if he subsided into a constitutional President. So would the U.S., though in a statement two weeks ago Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had hinted that Washington would be more pleased with a more constitutional government in Indonesia. Sukarno is still Mr. Revolution to Indonesians, and his displacement would mean a lot of trouble in the villages--where 80% of Indonesians still live. For the foreseeable future, the shape and future of Indonesia is in his hands.
*Indonesians take a detached view of first names, middle names and surnames--adopting or discarding them on whim.
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