INDONESIA 75 Leaving aside the fundamental question of whether the Third World countries like Indonesia should have embarked on the capitalist road in the first place (which would have rendered May's analysis useless), his main theme is inconsistent with his own facts. Evidently he does not realize, for example, that it is in colonialism and neocolonialism, to which he makes a number of passing references, that the truth about Indonesia's problem can be found, and not in any "state of mind". Unable, or unwilling, to understand its causes, May's argument rests primarily on the assumption that the apparent inertia of the Javan masses is innate. It is in this supposedly innate lack of "dynamism" (a virtue he assumes to be inherent in those of his race) that he vainly tries to find the answer why Indonesia fails to respond to "progress". To illustrate his point he broadcasts statements such as "the remarkable seizure of the Indies by a handful of Dutchmen'5 which, he claims, was not due to military superiority but to what, he euphemistically calls "culture" (p 5). It 'seems that May is ignorant of most of the basic historical facts. Decisive Role of Gunpowder In at least one respect Europe met the Third World on extremely unequal terms. Although in socio-economic terms the European merchant-adventurers did not have any edge over the Indonesians (and this was generally true of most of the Third World countries), the former had with them much superior instruments of violence than the latter. This is the key to their original ^success" in prevailing upon countries like Indonesia. For indeed, as Mao Zedong said, power is born out of the barrel of the gun. Their possession of much superior fire-arms compensated for whatever disadvantages they might have suffered from their smallness in number compared to the local people. As a mention of this fact invariably makes racists like May jump triumphantly in the thought of having their superiority complex substantiated, an expounder is not amiss. We must take note, however, that the notion of Asia's "failure" to produce more lethal weapons out of the gunpowder makes any sense only on the assumption that gunpowder, as a destructive power base, is beneficial to mankind. Because it is singularly on this footing that the standard cliche that "although China found the gunpowder, all she could produce from it was firecrackers" makes sense. On the non-racist assumption that the intelligence of the Asians was not sub-standard, it is completely out of the question that they were unaware of the lethal power of gunpowder. This