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.

Two Incidents Involving Cats

 One cold, raw afternoon in November, I was walking home through the back streets when I saw a black cat cross from right to left in front of me. Inevitably at such a time I think of Jeff Beck's version of 'I Ain't Superstitious'. The cat went through the thin metal bars of a tall gate into an alley, & I hurried to see if I could get a closer look at it, to check it was completely black; because if it isn't completely black, it doesn't count. I got to the gate, and the cat was standing still in the alley looking at me. It was black all over except for a small downward-pointing triangle of white hair at the top of its chest, as if it was wearing a shirt which was open at the neck. I interpreted this to mean either no bad luck at all, or if it was bad luck, to be tinged with hope. That is the first incident.

The second incident happened another afternoon when I was at home. I heard that sudden, short mixture of yowls which means two cats are fighting. I looked out of my bedroom window into the back garden and saw the following scene play out: one cat, older and heavier, was sat upright on the right, vibing out a younger rival, not directly but by seeming to be oblivious of its existence. It was as if he was saying in cat to the other "This garden isn't big enough for both of us, and I'm not leaving, so draw your own conclusions." As far as the older cat was concerned, he had already won; it was just a case of the younger confirming this by withdrawing, of rectifying the incorrect fact of his presence. They didn't seem to have made physical contact, so I assumed the yowling had just been them threatening each other. The younger cat did indeed withdraw, but in a way so slow that it is difficult to describe. There is a hole in the hedge frequented by cats and some foxes; they have worn a little path in the grass. The younger cat was heading for this hole. But it didn't just walk very slowly; it advanced one paw, then looked round at the older cat - who ignored it - then waited 30 seconds or a minute; then advanced the next paw, looked round at the older cat, then waited, and so on. I watched, fascinated to see how it would end.  The older cat continued to ignore its rival as if it wasn't there. You can imagine with four paws, and a noticeable wait every time it moved one, the younger cat took a considerable time finally to cover the few yards to the hole in the hedge and disappear. I was puzzled how to account for this behaviour. I could understand it retreating slowly to stop the other cat chasing it, but this was far slower than needed for that.  Was the defeated cat trying to preserve some dignity in its own eyes ? I thought, "It doesn't matter how slowly you retreat, you're still retreating."

Against Suella Braverman's Ideas

 

Suella Braverman recently gave two speeches, one in Washington and one at the Conservative Party conference.

In these speeches and elsewhere she put forward several ideas I disagree with.

There is no such thing as a simple homogenous British identity. What constitutes ‘Britishness’ or ‘British values’ are subjects of permanent dispute, and are evolving, not fixed. There is a British national character, as every nation has a character, but it is complex, multifaceted and difficult to define: perhaps a national character is best described as a cluster of competing and complementary ideas, some more prominent than others, like a word cloud. Whatever Britishness may be, the Home Secretary does not get to define it and insist that the rest of us comply with that definition. That is overreach, & that is the power she is trying to assume. She unfortunately has the power while in office as Home Secretary to oversee who is and is not British when it comes to people applying for citizenship, but she emphatically does not have the power to decide who is and is not British over we who are already citizens.

Suella Braverman may disapprove of my way of life or my opinions. As long as I am not breaking the law, these matters are none of her business, and the same applies to all other British citizens in the UK, of every religion and ethnicity. A key British value which Suella Braverman is transgressing is our saying “Live and let live”.

I am a proud Briton, and a patriot. I dispute the right of Suella Braverman to decide who is or is not properly British – the absurdity is evident as soon as you write it down – and who is or is not patriotic. It contradicts our most basic British traditions of freedom to claim that the government can decide what Britishness is, and enforce that decision on the populace. The National Conservatives and others on the Right are trying to co-opt the terms ‘British’, ‘Britishness’, ‘British values’, ‘patriotism’, and co-opt the ideas behind the terms. We should not let them. They are trying to appropriate these very important ideas, which are held in common by all British people, to increase their own political power. We should dispute and fight this. We should not abandon those terms to them.

It is only a brittle and incomplete sort of patriot who cannot stand to hear anything bad about their country. If I research, think and write about the bad things the rulers and people of this country have done in the past – like, to take one example, the centuries of our misrule in Ireland – this does not mean that I ‘hate Britain’. It means that I am sufficiently adult to understand that a nation or group of nations with a long history will have done in that time both good and bad things. This is a blindingly obvious point, and a true patriot understands and embraces it. On the contrary, the National Conservatives seem to hate Britain because they are constantly promulgating a highly negative, distorted caricature of it.

Suella Braverman and others on the Right refer negatively over and over again to people living parallel lives in our society. It is a favourite theme. But all sorts of groups lead parallel lives in our society, perhaps it is an inherent feature of any society. The very rich lead parallel lives to the rest of us, but Suella Braverman is not proposing to confiscate their wealth to end this. The very poor lead parallel lives, but she is not proposing to increase their income. The homeless lead parallel lives, but she is not proposing to house them. It is only the alleged parallel lives of some immigrants which she is against, making sweeping assertions about them and offering little to no evidence. The logic that whole communities are a threat to the rest of us and must be monitored, integrated, controlled and re-educated leads to what the Chinese government is doing to the Uighurs.

In practical terms, what is ‘integration’ ? How much integration is enough ? Who is integrated in the first place i.e. what is it exactly that the people who it is claimed need to integrate need to integrate with ? Do different people or groups need to integrate more, or less ? Who decides all these things? ‘Integration’ and ‘integrate’ are words Suella Braverman is throwing about as if they are clear and clearly understood. They are not.

We should not cede the right to define Britishness to a tiny, paranoid, power mad fringe of the Right, which nevertheless has a considerable foothold in our current governing Party and in our national media. They are very noisy and claim on the basis of no evidence to speak for the majority of us. This is false. We must resist.