[rayiner]

Conflict over language and religion predates capitalism by thousands of years. If a conflict looks similar to those pre-capitalism conflicts, and the situation in Indonesia does, it’s probably linguistic and religious conflict, not capitalistic. (You also seem very confused about what “capitalism” means. “Capitalism” doesn’t just mean business or profit seeking. Feudal lords and mercantilists made a profit. Capitalism by definition requires voluntary exchanges, which don’t happen in master-slave relationships. Again, slavery and serfdom predate capitalism by thousands of years. This is a definitional aspect of capitalism. Indeed, Adam Smith’s wealth of nations was expressly a critique of the then-prevalent system of mercantilism.)

[_bfhp]

My point was that lot of leftists/anarchists will say that economic forces, including before the capitalist market economies, can create situations where ideological extremist groups will gain power. They will appear out of nowhere and anyone can say "this looks like social animus just happened to win here", but the underlying cause was some group's will to extract resources from a place or population.

I don't know the history and the geopolitics at all but ideas like "Western powers destabilized Indonesia and East Timor to ensure profitable trade situations for them" are not mutually exclusive with "Indonesia and East Timor are in linguistic and religious conflict"