The Mass Killings in Indonesia, 1965-6.

There are many great books but few about which I would say "You have to read this." Readers familiar with this blog will know that one such for me is Camus' 'The Fall'. I want to discuss a book which falls into this rare category as far as I'm concerned: I read it last year and it has had a large and permanent impact on my thinking. I wonder if any of you have come across it or read it - it's called 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevins, and its central point is about something I knew about but didn't realise the extent of, that is the mass killing of communists and people labelled communist in Indonesia in 1965-6. Are you aware of that ? 

Vincent Bevins

I finally read the book because one of the things I have been concentrating on for a while is the Cold War, which is in effect world history 1945-90. I've had my eye on 'The Jakarta Method' ever since it was published. The author has an interesting perspective, which I don't entirely agree with. He is not a crude anti-US Imperialism person in the mould of John Pilger or Oliver Stone, where whatever happens it is always the fault of the evil, conniving US government. [I wrote this before John Pilger's recent death.] To me, such people are the inverse of blind patriots, and wrong for the same reason: they have an existing, over-simplified schema of how the world works, to which every fact and occurrence must be fitted. This is not Bevins' position: he is fully aware of the crimes of the USSR and Mao. He is what I would call a third world-ist, or developing world-ist, or a non-aligned-ist; in that he is against the Big Powers, and for the developing world countries. This leads him to be pro-Castro and speak favourably of Che Guevara, a place I cannot follow him to. So I don't completely accept his perspective, but the central event he is highlighting is an undoubted fact, that is the murder of at a minimum 500 000 communists and people labelled communist in Indonesia at the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966; in which the precise extent of US government involvement is disputed, but the facts are not disputed that the US government approved of the killings, benefited from them, and backed the people who carried them out as the government of Indonesia for years afterward, with Suharto as their leader. Which makes the US government morally guilty. And the people killed were no threat to the US government or people, nobody thinks they were, they just didn't like them so they killed them. (The US government, UK government and Australian government were all involved in spreading black propaganda against the Communists.)

It's amazing to me that although I knew about the killings I did not know about the extent of them or the US government's involvement. I was already fully aware of the US government's practice in the Cold War of installing corrupt dictators to block - as they saw it - Communist advances: Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah. My point here is that I am fairly well informed about the US government's crimes during the Cold War and the extent of the killings in Indonesia was news to me. No one seriously disputes that the killings took place. Nobody knows how many were killed but the lowest figure of 500 000 is undisputed and the highest estimate is 2 000 000. 500 000 ! It unquestionably ranks with the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide. This thing happened. Half a million people were deliberately killed. No one disputes this. So why isn't it common knowledge ? Why isn't it as rightly familiar as those other great crimes of the 20th century ?

It seems to me that the US government and people have done with the Indonesian mass killings what we have done with our brutal campaign against the Mau Mau in Kenya: it is not that the truth is suppressed, it's not that we have forgotten, it's that we never remembered in the first place, it was not worth remembering and we just didn't remember. We did it but didn't register that we did it. (I know that the UK government has officially acknowledged our crimes in Kenya, but if you said 'Mau Mau' or 'Kenyan Emergency' to virtually anyone in England, you'd get a blank stare.)

To find out more about UK government crimes during what we call the Kenyan Emergency, this is highly recommended

Over the years I've done a great deal of reading and watching about the Vietnam war. I've watched documentary series, individual documentaries and read memoirs of American participants. As part of the endless re-hashing of the late '60s (of which I am just as guilty as anyone else), people go on and on and on about the Vietnam war. I know terrible crimes were committed during that war, such as the heavy bombing of Laos. But I honestly think now that part of the obsession with the Vietnam war is a psychological phenomenon I don't the name of if it has one- perhaps a form of displacement activity: which is, you concentrate absolutely on a lesser thing to block out the awareness of a bigger thing. So, in all accounts of Vietnam from an American perspective I read or watch now, part of my reaction is - "You are aware that your government possibly organised and was unquestionably involved in the massacre of 500 000 innocent people slightly to the south in Indonesia in 1965-6 ?" I'll give you two analogies: imagine reading an account of Wehrmacht operations in Russia in 1942-3, and you gradually become more and more aware that the author does not mention and apparently has no idea that the Holocaust is taking place at the same time; imagine reading an account of Soviet economic development in the 1930s, its successes and failures, and the author does not mention and apparently has no idea of the existence of the Gulags, the Purges, or show trials. The account in short is partial and highly distorted. That's how I feel hearing about the Vietnam war now.

Robert Kennedy as a senator drew exactly the same parallels as me when as a solitary voice he publicly condemned the Indonesian killings in January 1966. He said: "We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100 000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims ?" (This was his phase after JFK's assassination: before that he was as you may well know a determined and ruthless Cold Warrior.)

I was recently reading a jolly account by a man who was a US diplomat at the time of why they were defeated in Vietnam, called 'The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War' by Norman Hannah. His theory was a perfectly good one, and really could be summarised in a couple of pages, which another man who wrote the introduction actually did do. But looking back on reading it now, between every line is "You're so cheerful and reasonable. But you don't seem to be aware and certainly don't mention that the government for which you worked at the very least approved of, certainly knew about and did nothing to prevent the killing of 500 000 people for no good reason slightly to the south of where you are talking about - former Indochina - at exactly the time you are talking about." It must have slipped his mind. I've just checked in the index: there is no reference to Indonesia, Sukarno or Suharto. Hannah as a diplomat had an overview of south-east Asia. He must have known about the mass killings in Indonesia. They weren't secret.

Final thought: there's a video on YouTube of Tobias Wolff interviewing Tim O'Brien, both writers, both veterans of Vietnam. During the questions at the end, a very nice and concerned woman asks Tim O'Brien if he thinks treatment for veterans with PTSD has improved over the years, if they are doing enough about it. His response is approx. "It seems to me that we talk a lot about the trauma we've suffered, but we don't talk much about the trauma we've inflicted." The audience response is not anger, and they're not really even stunned: it just takes them a few seconds to process a thought which is obviously right but they'd never heard before and had never crossed their minds before.