The United States of Amnesia & the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia
August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A.O. Scott’s July 18 New York Times review of The Act of Killing provides a telling example of how people in the U.S. are injected with a daily dose of amnesia-inducing lies, cover-ups, and distortions that blind them to the real history and nature of this country.
The Act of Killing (a newly released independent film) exposes some of the horrors that took place in the period of massacres of at least 500,000 and possibly a million or even more communists in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966. During that time, so many communists and others were slaughtered and dumped in rivers that rivers in parts of Indonesia were clogged with dead bodies.
For background on the making of the film, see the July 19 interview with the director, Joshua Oppenheimer, at Democracy Now! (“The Act of Killing”: New Film Shows U.S.-Backed Indonesian Death Squad Leaders Re-enacting Massacres.)
For more on the massacres in Indonesia see “Indonesia: U.S. Role in 1965 Massacres: Confessions from the U.S. State Department,” (August 26, 2001) at revcom.us.
This orgy of sadistic bloodshed was set in motion and overall orchestrated by the United States. In 1965, the U.S., through the CIA and the Indonesian army, overthrew the nationalist coalition government led by Sukarno (in which the Communist Party of Indonesia played a prominent role.1 The coup brought to power a fascist military junta headed by General Suharto.
The CIA and U.S. embassy personnel provided the Indonesian military with names of communists, union leaders, intellectuals, and others to be killed. The more than two million members of the Indonesian Communist Party were, in the words of one of the perpetrators of the massacres, “exterminated.” U.S. embassy officials crossed names of communists and others off the lists they provided to the Indonesian army as they were killed. A former State Department official said of his role, “I may have blood on my hands, but sometimes that’s a good thing.”
And yet, nowhere in his movie review does A.O. Scott acknowledge that the perpetrators of the massacres were orchestrated by the United States. It’s not possible that someone like Scott, let alone his editors, could be oblivious to that fact. The New York Times itself obliquely acknowledged this at the time and since—writing in 1990, for example, that leading up to the massacres, “[T]here is no question that a list of names was provided to the Indonesians” by a U.S. embassy officer. And the Times acknowledged that the political section chief at the embassy told an interviewer “We knew where the names were going.’’ (July 12, 1990)
So even viewers who see the film or hear about it and are appalled by what they learn about one of the most bloody, sadistic, genocidal massacres in human history, can come away from their morning New York Times injected with a dose of amnesia that covers up the fact that their government was behind these crimes.
* The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) held and promoted dangerously harmful illusions about the nature of democratic forms of capitalist dictatorship and the possibility of achieving socialism without a revolution. However, in the context of a global clash between imperialism and oppressed people rising up around the world and confronting socialist China, U.S. imperialism and its Indonesian underlings saw the PKI as an intolerable threat. [back]
Editors’ note: Readers are encouraged to print copies of this article and pass them out at showings of The Act of Killing, and to correspond on your experiences.
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