HE WHO HOLDS THE GUN

Christopher J. Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously (New York: Penguin Books, 1978, 1995) ("Hamilton had a hard, essentially simple cast of mind; he never lost sight of the notion that power in the state resides with the man who holds the gun. And all through the year he would simply keep asking who held. it. Intellectuals and experts more subtle than he was failed to do so, and for that reason proved to be wrong." Id. at 39. "The West asks for clear conclusions, final judgments. A philosophy must be correct or incorrect, a man good or bad. But in the wayang no such final conclusions are ever drawn. The struggle of the Right and the Left never ends, because neither side is wholly good or bad. The kasar can have noble qualities; the alus, mean ones. So it was with you, Bung Karno. Unlike Arjuna, you failed to heed the advice of Krishna--that advice which Billy was so insistent about. All is clouded by desire: as fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust . . . Through these it blinds the soul." Id. at 249.).