Spelling reform

        In 1968, the Indonesian government spearheaded a reform of the spelling system, ostensibly to put it more in line with Malay. It made all sorts of orthographic sense - roemakoe (my house) became rumahku, the pronunciation remaining the same (roo - ma - koo); Djakarta became Jakarta. But, according to Benedict Anderson in his obituary of Suharto (Soeharto) in 2008, the spelling reform had a more sinister purpose: it meant that it would be immediately obvious to identify when something was written, and whether it was officially sanctioned or not. It was an aspect of the general policy of the Suharto government to control the interpretation and dissemination of historical knowledge, especially with the point of justifying his takeover from Sukarno in 1965, the central part of which involved the wholesale slaughter of anywhere from 1/2 million to 1 million people throughout Indonesia. Those people, supposedly, were connected to the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, who were blamed for murdering six senior generals in attempted coup; to this day, the degree to which the Communist Party was involved in the murders remains unclear, though what is not unclear is that this was simply a pretext, and that the mass murder was the way in which Suharto created the conditions of fear and raw power that sustained his regime for 37 years until 1998.
         Every year, Suharto memorialized the dead generals with a giant ceremony at their giant statue and reminded everyone of the history, in which the bloodthirsty Communists, who the military under his command valiantly defeated but who were always ready to rise up again unless there was sustained vigilance, ended their threat to the sacred Indonesian nation. The Communists, until 1965 a major political power, were never a force again, but Suharto strictly controlled historical writing and did things like make school children watch a four hour movie every year on the anniversary of the killing of the generals, about the evils of the Communists (and their women, who supposedly castrated the dead bodies - that part apparently not in the movie - and then danced on the bodies - in the movie).
         The moral of the story: bad spellers are Communists, which I have allways suspicted inyway.