Suharto’s regime reflected a symbiosis of heroic nationalism and international capitalism, which aimed to bring the great dream of industrial capitalism (modernisation) into reality. This mutual reliance, which can also be found in many other Asian countries, reflects to a degree ‘Asian modernism’ — an idealistic ideology; a belief not only in absolutism, functional specialisation, calculability, exactness, metropolitanism, market mechanisms and social engineering, but also in violence in ‘fabricating’ progress. This is why the great dream of Western industrial capitalism resulted in nightmares in most Asian countries.