Not long ago, I worked with a group fighting for East Timor’s independence. It was a rare time I actually had something to do with the political process instead of just watched. I organized demonstrations and painted signs and argued in meetings with UN officials. I fervently wanted East Timor’s independence from Indonesia. It was in 1998 and 1999.

Once upon a time, East Timor was part of a global Marxist National Liberation Movement that threatened to communize third-world countries into hammer-and-sickle republics based on an outdated German philosophy that failed every time it was ever tried. The real game of course was the Soviet Union’s power politics to gather up client states to checkmate the U.S. as millions of people lost their freedom.

Having spent some time in Indonesia, I gradually came to the conclusion that the National Liberation Movement that had engulfed Timor Leste over the 1970s and 1980s and had gradually burned out was probably nothing to worry about, any more than radical Islam was.

Some place just don’t absorb ideology well at all, they’re already too waterlogged with past ideologies to be able to do anything but just sop them up and dissipate them and watch them disappear in the great oneness of existence. Indonesia – and East Timor – is one of those places.

So in the wake of the great Asian currency meltdown that laid Indonesia low and resulted in the ejection of its 33 year dictator, Soeharto, and above all the great democratic revolution of 1998 in Indonesia, which I witnessed from the universities and the street barricades and the Chinatown and the Hotel Indonesia and the vast 1960s Sukarno-designed public spaces and the embassy row amid black-lit palm trees, cold drinks and pink stucco buildings … I followed by supporting East Timor’s independence.

It was nothing but a mistake.

The old National Liberation Movement types no longer had a Soviet Union to support them, but they hadn’t changed. Instead, the Mozambique-educated and bred leaders who took power in East Timor, just used the United Nations as their Soviet Sugar Daddy. They tried to change but they could not – at heart they were Marxists who could not change.

So they set up rules, regulations, bureaucrats, and all the other hallmarkes of communist societies. They had TONS of money from the UN to make their fiefdoms, otherwise unsustainable otherwise, come to life with all that UN patronage.

How wrong we all were.

Today East Timor is nothing but a gang-warfare empire where the spoils are the only prize and the fighting goes on. It, sadly, makes me change heart about whether this place really should be independent instead of still part of Indonesia. Some nations, if the only ideas they can come up with are inspired by Marx, really don’t deserve to be nations, because they arent sustainable. Communism fails everywhere it is tried and can only be supported by expropriating from others until there is nothing left to steal. Sad, but true. I was too idealistic and thought the Marxism of the East Timorese who took power could be overlooked – they had “changed.” But Marxists cannot change – unless they intend to be non-Marxists. The system is inherently unreformable.

Via Pajamas Media, Global Voices has an excellent, first-rate roundup of several blogs from East Timor talking about how pessimistic that situation is in East Timor. Read it here.