If I gave you a hundred tries, you’d probably not guess whom German state media is accusing of being closeted “white supremacists” now.
Of course, as far as they’re concerned, everyone right of Pol Pot with the right skin tone is a Nazi, beginning with the homegrown “Nazis” of the AfD.
(The AfD earned the slur by meekly suggesting that importing millions of Third World migrants who are virtually all guaranteed to end up on the generous public dole and who are trained to hate their host countries in Europe isn’t optimal public policy.)
Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’
Anyway, the “white supremacy” media-fueled hysteria has found a new and quite unorthodox outlet: Indonesians.
Yes, Indonesians — as in, the native population of the Pacific islands who are not remotely white in any conceivable way.
The entire theory of rampant “white supremacy” in Indonesia is predicated on a single act of terror committed by a 17-year-old brown Indonesian with the most tenuous of evidence linking him to “white supremacist” ideology.
Via German state media DW (emphasis added):
At the scene of a November 2025 bomb attack on a school in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, security forces found a toy gun owned by the 17-year-old suspected attacker. Written on the gun were the names of Western far-right extremists, such as Brenton Tarrant and Alexandre Bissonnette.
Nearly 100 people were injured in the Jakarta attack, including the suspect. Police say he acted alone but was inspired by online extremist content.
Indonesia's counterterrorism agency has warned that more teens are being exposed to far‑right ideology through gaming communities. Authorities report rising online radicalization and plan new measures, including tighter social media rules for minors.
There you get to the heart of the matter, as these things always boil down to: internet censorship, and trying to sell it to the Indonesian authorities without offending Muslim sensibilities by doing it under the auspices of combating “white supremacy” because demonizing white people, of course, is always politically correct and expedient for achieving whatever political objective.
Via E-International Relations (emphasis added):
In the aftermath, it has been widely reported in local media that Indonesian policymakers are contemplating the imposition of greater regulation over online video games, with this interpreted variously as implying some form of restriction, or even a ban, on particular games. After receiving updates on the investigation from National Police Chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, President Prabowo Subianto requested that his cabinet explore options on how to tackle the supposed negative impacts that online games have on youth. PUBG (previously PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), an immensely popular game developed by South Korea’s Krafton Inc., has been singled out by minister of the state secretariat Prasetyo Hadi. Beyond PUBG, however, there remains no information about what other games may be considered for restrictions. In what shape this regulatory move will materialise, if at all, remains unclear…
It should be added that this is not the first occasion in which Indonesian authorities have contemplated banning a battle royale-style game like PUBG on similar grounds. In mid-2024, reports circulated that Indonesia’s minister of tourism and creative economy, Sandiaga Uno, threatened to prohibit Free Fire, another highly popular video game. While it seems that this ban did not materialise, the stated rationale for its consideration included vague claims about the game’s “negative effects” on children and alleged cases where the game caused “child violence”.
Related: MSNBC News Actor, Race Scholar ‘Confront the First Amendment’s Dark History’
I’ve been to Indonesia.
Indonesians are fun-loving, happy-go-lucky people.
They’re family people.
They’re friendly people.
What they’re definitely not — and it’s insane this proposition even has to be presented for consideration — is aspirational midwives to the Fourth Reich modeling themselves after 20th-century European dictators.
For one thing, Southeast Asians, in general, barely know who Hitler is.
They have some vague idea, of course, from the thirty-minute lecture they got in primary school that they didn’t pay close attention to, that he was a bad guy from a while ago who did a lot of bad things.
Even if they know who Hitler or the Nazis were, as I learned teaching in the region, they’re lamentably short on the specifics.
And they’ve definitely not absorbed the “racial superiority of Aryans” mythology.
This stuff is so far beyond the scope of their interest that the irrelevance of this Western obsession with “white supremacy” is impossible to exaggerate.
Aside from not being white themselves, there’s nothing in the cultural, demographic, or religious milieu of Indonesia whatsoever that would segue into a “white supremacist” ideology.
While the country is largely Muslim, it’s certainly not on the radical end of the spectrum among Islamic countries, relatively speaking. Sure, there is some religious extremism of the Islamic flavor, but it’s not a serious problem for internal security — again, relatively speaking — and it’s certainly not a major exporter of extremist ideology. And even if it were a major exporter of extremist ideology, that ideology would most definitely not be “white supremacist.”
But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good moral panic in the service of empowering the state to censor what people are allowed to see online.
