Harm Stevens (curator Rijksmuseum) answers a question of Histori Bersama during the online press conference of Tuesday 11 January 2022. The question was: “Harm Stevens, you once said that Rijksmuseum is not ready to take a position, does that mean that the starting point of ‘Revolusi’ is that the occupation of Indonesia was neither good nor bad.”
Interestingly, Stevens changed the question to the starting point of the war itself. His answer is basically that he is aware that the museum is not a neutral place and that, during 1945-1949, many bad things happened. Yet then he started talking about “complex history” and “nuances”. After which we commented: “When it comes to an occupation and severe human rights violations there is only ONE morally acceptable perspective: that the occupation was wrong. With multi-perspectives/nuances you are softening it.”
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