Massacres Killed Indonesia’s Hopes for National Liberation and Socialism.
(Worth reading historic perspective by Vincent Bevin in Jacobian on anti-communist purge in Indonesia-f.sheikh).
“This is not really what you asked, but I think the real legacy of our “anti-communist crusade,” as I put it, is not so much domestic as it defined our geopolitical position, our relation to the rest of the world. And for that, it was everything. I think Odd Arne Westad is right to say that much of the global system was hammered out in “Cold War” conflicts, and this is probably the most extensive and robust global system in planetary history.”
What inspired you to write this book?VB
I arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2017, to cover all of Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. First, it became very clear right away that the ghosts of the 1965 massacre lurked right below the surface no matter where I looked. It totally reshaped everything but was never spoken about candidly. And second, when I would tell people outside the region about what happened, they would invariably react with shock and interest. The mass killings in Indonesia were maybe the biggest “victory” for the West in the entire Cold War. It was, in fact, far more important for Washington to win here than in Vietnam. The United States assisted in the intentional murder of approximately 1 million innocent people. And third, I found out there were lots of unexpected connections to countries like Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala that I know well and where I could really add something. So I felt I had no choice.
How exactly was the conflict in Indonesia more important than the Vietnam War?VB
Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world by population. Within the “domino theory,” it was by far the biggest domino — it had nearly three times as many people as Vietnam. In the early 1960s, everyone in the US foreign-policy establishment recognized it was more important than Vietnam as a foreign-policy issue, as Sukarno was a founding leader of the Third World movement. The Vietnam War dominated US domestic politics for many years, but geopolitically, it achieved exactly nothing. Indonesia 1965–66 changed everything.BF
The event at the heart of your book is a mass extermination campaign directed against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), at the time the largest communist party outside of China and the Soviet Union. How was the party so successful and seen as such a threat to the United States’ interests?VB
The PKI was the oldest communist party in Asia, founded before the Chinese Communist Party, and from the beginning, it was committed to collaboration with “national-bourgeois” forces. They were two-stage revolutionaries that only wanted to transition to socialism way in the future, after the full development of capitalism. It was very moderate compared to what English speakers think of when they hear “communist” today.
In China, the Comintern actually instructed Mao to collaborate with the Nationalists because Moscow wanted the Chinese to replicate the success Indonesian communists had working with Muslim groups. It didn’t work out so well for Mao, but the PKI stayed more or less on this path throughout its entire existence. After Sukarno and revolutionary forces expelled the Dutch in 1949, the PKI became one part of a new, independent multiparty democracy.
President Sukarno, the country’s independence hero and founding father, was not a communist. But he was a left-leaning anti-imperialist, governing in coalition with a lot of different forces. The Indonesian communists did not have weapons and didn’t even contemplate the possibility of armed struggle. Even American officials noted at the time that they were simply a really well-run organization — they had very popular cultural programs and peasant organizations and a huge feminist base, and they didn’t suffer from rampant corruption like everybody else. But they got more and more votes, which did not please Washington — so the United States tried two stop them in two ways, which both failed.
First, they started pumping cash into a more conservative Muslim party. Then, in 1958, CIA pilots bombed Indonesia, killing civilians, in an attempt to break up the country. That year, British intelligence noted that the PKI would get first place in elections. But despite the Communists’ protests, there weren’t any more elections, and PKI stuck to supporting Sukarno as, at the other end of the political spectrum, there was the US-trained and US-supplied military waiting in the wings.BF
Part of the story you are telling here is about how a generation dreamed of a better world. Can you talk a bit about what inspired this generation and the significance of these dreams today.