You do not take sides. You do not want your view obstructed by barricades. You want to show that behind every barricade, whether it be that group over there or this one here, perches the dirty and repugnant. There are schemes and tools of destruction at the ready. You want to stress that your role ('I am an intellectual', you say) is to oppose this. You want to underline clear thinking, unbiased standards of good, and listening to one's conscience.

One hundred years ago, a nineteen year old man fired his semi-automatic pistol at a husband and wife on a street corner in Sarajevo.

We are probably going to live as a society exhausted by lies. This year, 2014, is the year of the most brutal elections-brutal in the form of words-in the history of Indonesia since 1945. In this bitter process, we are almost constantly bombarded with 'facts' uttered only to be turned around, rebuttals made with no intention of finding out what is true, and, slowly but surely, the spread of mutual distrust-even hatred. And with this: the loss of serious conversation.

Sa'aman killed Corporal Paijan. He killed his own father. Pramoedya Ananta Toer's novel Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerilla Family) relates this dramatic story: a guerilla fighter in the Indonesian revolution is arrested by the Dutch and is awaiting his death sentence. He is resigned to it. Sa'aman has such conviction in the purpose of his fight that he thinks it just that he sentenced his own father to death: Corporal Paijan was fighting on the other side, for the occupying army. "Revolution demands everything" Sa'aman says.

"That's how amazing revolution is. I sacrificed my humanity. I forced myself to be cruel and to murder so that people on this earth where I tread will never again have to do this kind of thing"

How can one pass judgment, when there is no one left who has not sinned? When the measurement of what is and what is not sin trades places? When the dirty and the pure become sheer possibility-and increasingly, people do not know what will happen with history?

He is called 'The Tank Man': a man in a white shirt standing alone in the middle of the road blocking four tanks moving on Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

It was June 5, 1989.

Who was he? No one knows. He might have been an ordinary person suddenly unable to restrain his anger at seeing the army return after killing dozens of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square just 40 hours before. Perhaps he wanted to yell: "You're coming back! Aren't there enough victims?"