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With regard to Cary Fraser's query about why Acheson distinguished between British and other colonialisms, and the quote about the Dutch and French, a comparison which provides him with his answer, and with the caveat that Acheson's Asian horizon stopped at the Equator, it is worth comparing the cases in 1948 of Indonesia, where the US reached an independent and anti-colonial posture, and Malaya, where the US accepted a 'colonial' viewpoint in a cold war context. In Indonesia, the US, along with Australia, became impatient with Dutch intransigence and good faith, and by early 1948 they composed the majority prepared to support the nationalist movement in the UN Good Offices Committee on Indonesia. But the US had not resolved the dilemma of choosing between colonialism and European security, and its massive Marshall Plan aid to the Netherlands was seen by the Indonesians as a betrayal. The US commitment to Indonesia's independence did not firm up until after the suppression of the Communist revolt at Madiun in September 1948, which contrasted with the trend in China. In Malaya, as A J Stockwell has shown in his chapter in 'Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires', US diplomats were persuaded to see the widespread violence through the eyes of the British colonial regime through 'unusually frank' briefings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. When London, concerned about the threat to its image of 'progressive colonialism', reluctantly agreed to ban the Malayan Communist Party in July 1948, it did so not on the evidence available of MCP responsibility or world (ie Russian) Communist policy but in order to 'restore confidence in the colonial regime' which was under fire from British businessmen and Malay politicians. American diplomats were so taken in that they refused to accept that the British lacked hard evidence that the communists were behind the violence. Nevertheless, Washington held to the view that it would not pull Britain's colonial chestnuts out of the fire through Malaya's subsequent Emergency and Indonesia's 'confrontation' of Malaysia. Garry Woodard Melbourne University
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