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Documents confirm USA's greater role in Indonesia's 1965 Massacre (The Atlantic)

P

Piecake

Member
In Indonesia in October 1965, General Suharto responded to the kidnapping and murder of six high-ranking military officers by accusing the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) of organizing a brutal coup attempt. Over the months that followed, he oversaw the systematic extermination of up to a million Indonesians for affiliation with the party, or simply for being accused of harboring leftist sympathies. He then took power and ruled as dictator, with U.S. support, until 1998.

This week, the non-profit National Security Archive, along with the National Declassification Center, published a batch of U.S. diplomatic cables covering that dark period. While the newly declassified documents further illustrated the horror of Indonesia's 1965 mass murder, they also confirmed that U.S. authorities backed Suharto's purge. Perhaps even more striking: As the documents show, U.S. officials knew most of his victims were entirely innocent. U.S. embassy officials even received updates on the executions and offered help to suppress media coverage. While crucial documents that could provide insight into U.S. and Indonesian activities at the time are still lacking, the broad outlines of the atrocity and America's role are there for anyone who cares to look them up.

Roosa added that a major problem with framing the events of 1965 is that it's often claimed the United States simply ”stood by," as the bloodbath occurred, which is incorrect. ”It's easy for American commentators to fall into that approach, but the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI."

It should not be entirely surprising that Washington would tolerate the deaths of so many civilians to further its Cold War goals. In Vietnam, the U.S. military may have killed up to 2 million civilians. But Indonesia was different: the PKI was a legal, unarmed party, operating openly in Indonesia's political system. It had gained influence through elections and community outreach, but was nevertheless treated like an insurgency.

More documents revealing what happened in Indonesia in 1965 are likely to come, Simpson tells me. But they're unlikely to offer a complete picture of what both governments were up to in 1965—they won't for instance, include information from the U.S. military and the CIA. The Indonesian government has offered practically nothing. ”Literally no Indonesian official records are publicly available anywhere, so we're really reliant on Western archives," Simpson said.

This is because much of Indonesia's political elite still relies on Suharto's original—and false—narrative for their legitimacy. The country's powerful military leaders fight any investigations that might lay blame on them. Suharto's government produced a crude, wildly inaccurate propaganda film depicting Communists torturing and killing military officers while communist women perform a wild dance.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/

Documentary on the massacre - The Act of Killing Trailer (youtube link)
 
2

2blackcats

Member
Gross.

Not as bad as some of the other atrocities the US is complicit in but it's up there.

The bully of the western world.
 
N

NervousXtian

Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
I always tell people the USA has no standing to tell other countries how to create democracy or how to behave.

We created this country by fucking over people for the last 200+ years.
 
HighResTomato

HighResTomato

Member
2blackcats said:
Do threads like this always garner so few replies? (bump)
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It involves crimes against brown people.

ThriftyFirmAdder-max-1mb.gif
 
D

Dingens

Member
2blackcats said:
Gross.

Not as bad as some of the other atrocities the US is complicit in but it's up there.

The bully of the western world.
Click to expand...

by everything that has been uncovered during the last 30 years, it sounds more like the entire western world is/was the bully.
The one thing that's always ignore when people talk about the "spread of communism", was that it seems like communism/socialism spread quite naturally, often times, like in this case, through democratic means, whereas "the west" apparently always referred to shady as fuck methods to stop it/push back.
And then they have the audacity to call themselves the "free world". Free, only if you conform to the prescribed economic model.

Honestly I'd love some to read some comparable fuckery from the eastern blocks, but so far, I can't shake the feeling that "we" have been the bad guy all along.
(I'm talking about foreign affairs fuckery, not internal one btw)
 
S

Shoeless

Member
At least America's role hasn't spanned centuries. The East India Company is still one of the most terrifying examples of "corporate activity" in global and business history.
 
E

emag

Member
Kthulhu said:
Basically. You'd think we'd learn, but some people think we still should be the world police, despite the overwhelming evidence we suck at it.
Click to expand...

The US wasn't acting in a "world police" capacity in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, or in Iraq. Instead, we were waging war for our own gain.

Contrast that to our intervention in Bosnia where we acted to save lives rather than pillage or install a pro-US head of state.
 
R

Regulus Tera

Romanes Eunt Domus
2blackcats said:
Do threads like this always garner so few replies? (bump)
Click to expand...
The news of this came out at the beginning of the week so the fact that it's only now getting traction should tell you everything.
Shoeless said:
At least America's role hasn't spanned centuries. The East India Company is still one of the most terrifying examples of "corporate activity" in global and business history.
Click to expand...
The United States government committed genocide against the indigenous people of North America so I'm not sure what this "hasn't spanned centuries" thing is all about.
 
2

2blackcats

Member
Dingens said:
by everything that has been uncovered during the last 30 years, it sounds more like the entire western world is/was the bully.
The one thing that's always ignore when people talk about the "spread of communism", was that it seems like communism/socialism spread quite naturally, often times, like in this case, through democratic means, whereas "the west" apparently always referred to shady as fuck methods to stop it/push back.
And then they have the audacity to call themselves the "free world". Free, only if you conform to the prescribed economic model.

Honestly I'd love some to read some comparable fuckery from the eastern blocks, but so far, I can't shake the feeling that "we" have been the bad guy all along.
(I'm talking about foreign affairs fuckery, not internal one btw)
Click to expand...

Very well put.

I imagine a history book from 200 hundred years in the future would be a sobering read if we could get one. (that's if capitalism doesn't prevent us from reaching 200 years in the future.)
 
P

Piecake

Member
Dingens said:
by everything that has been uncovered during the last 30 years, it sounds more like the entire western world is/was the bully.
The one thing that's always ignore when people talk about the "spread of communism", was that it seems like communism/socialism spread quite naturally, often times, like in this case, through democratic means, whereas "the west" apparently always referred to shady as fuck methods to stop it/push back.
And then they have the audacity to call themselves the "free world". Free, only if you conform to the prescribed economic model.
Click to expand...

The craziest one that I have come accross is the Mau Mau Rebellion against the British in Kenya

Help us sue the British government for torture. That was the request Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, received in 2008. The idea was both legally improbable and professionally risky. Improbable because the case, then being assembled by human rights lawyers in London, would attempt to hold Britain accountable for atrocities perpetrated 50 years earlier, in pre-independence Kenya. Risky because investigating those misdeeds had already earned Elkins heaps of abuse.

Elkins had come to prominence in 2005 with a book that exhumed one of the nastiest chapters of British imperial history: the suppression of Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Her study, Britain's Gulag, chronicled how the British had battled this anticolonial uprising by confining some 1.5 million Kenyans to a network of detention camps and heavily patrolled villages. It was a tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups.

What she didn't know was that the lawsuit would expose a secret: a vast colonial archive that had been hidden for half a century. The files within would be a reminder to historians of just how far a government would go to sanitise its past. And the story Elkins would tell about those papers would once again plunge her into controversy.
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In the British and Kenyan archives, meanwhile, Elkins encountered another oddity. Many documents relating to the detention camps were either absent or still classified as confidential 50 years after the war. She discovered that the British had torched documents before their 1963 withdrawal from Kenya. The scale of the cleansing had been enormous. For example, three departments had maintained files for each of the reported 80,000 detainees. At a minimum, there should have been 240,000 files in the archives. She found a few hundred.

But some important records escaped the purges. One day in the spring of 1998, after months of often frustrating searches, she discovered a baby-blue folder that would become central to both her book and the Mau Mau lawsuit. Stamped ”secret", it revealed a system for breaking recalcitrant detainees by isolating them, torturing them and forcing them to work. This was called the ”dilution technique". Britain's Colonial Office had endorsed it. And, as Elkins would eventually learn, Gavaghan had developed the technique and put it into practice.

Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – ”Britain's gulag", as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.

”I've come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic," Elkins wrote in Britain's Gulag. ”Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated." After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered ”a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead".
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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau

I mean, jesus. The British government actively covered up such a monumental atrocity and barely anyone but the people who were involved or affected by it knew about it? That's just insane to think about.

Radiolab did a really good episode on it as well

http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/
 
Z

z1ggy

Member
And yet the US dares to tell the rest of the world how we should behave

But thats ok, no empire last forever.
 
V

Valhelm

contribute something
Unsurprising. While we might not have fought as dirty as the Soviets did at home, American actions during the Cold War are plainly more aggressive and brutal than anything the USSR did.

Not only did we absolutely destroy the countries of Vietnam and Korea in our efforts to destroy socialist governments, but our interference in Latin America and other parts of Asia is really unimaginably bloody. Most countries in the third world that weren't part of the Soviet sphere have spent time under the domination of anticommunist dictators, who violently pursued American policy aims in exchange for American protection and support.

It wasn't just Suharto in Indonesia, but also Ubico in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Pinochet in Chile, Mohammed Reza Shah in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fujimori in Peru, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Andino in Honduras and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Most colonial governments in Africa and the South African apartheid regime stayed afloat thanks to Washington bucks and Washington bullets.

We need to understand this history, because there's thick continuity between these authoritarian regimes and many of today's governments. Our own government is still doing horrible things in other countries, because our foreign policy has no concerns other than ensuring that America and our economic interests dominate all others.
 
S

Soul_Pie

Member
We can add Indonesia to the long list of countries to have had their politics meddled in by America.

They hate us for our freedom, though
 
P

Piecake

Member
Valhelm said:
Unsurprising. While we might not have fought as dirty as the Soviets did at home, American actions during the Cold War are plainly more aggressive and brutal than anything the USSR did.

Not only did we absolutely destroy the countries of Vietnam and Korea in our efforts to destroy socialist governments, but our interference in Latin America and other parts of Asia is really unimaginably bloody. Most countries in the third world that weren't part of the Soviet sphere have spent time under the domination of anticommunist dictators, who violently pursued American policy aims in exchange for American protection and support.

It wasn't just Suharto in Indonesia, but also Ubico in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Pinochet in Chile, Mohammed Reza Shah in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fujimori in Peru, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Andino in Honduras and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Most colonial governments in Africa and the South African apartheid regime stayed afloat thanks to Washington bucks and Washington bullets.

We need to understand this history, because there's thick continuity between these authoritarian regimes and many of today's governments. Our own government is still doing horrible things in other countries, because our foreign policy has no concerns other than ensuring that America and our economic interests dominate all others.
Click to expand...

While the United States' motives might not have been pure, I think the intervention in Korea has generally worked out for the best, mostly because the North Korean regime is just that fucking awful.

The North Korean government controlling the whole peninsula? Yikes. I can't imagine that anyone would rather have that scenario today than the one that we have now.
 
Z

z1ggy

Member
The empire spend on its miltary like the world was at war

bi_graphics_millitary-budget-compare-chart-2.png


Fascism through the mask of freedom and democracy
 
T

Toxi

Banned
Valhelm said:
It wasn't just Suharto in Indonesia, but also Ubico in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Pinochet in Chile, Mohammed Reza Shah in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fujimori in Peru, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Andino in Honduras and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Most colonial governments in Africa and the South African apartheid regime stayed afloat thanks to Washington bucks and Washington bullets.
Click to expand...
Also Videla in Argentina. Thanks Kissinger.
 
K

kirblar

Member
Valhelm said:
Unsurprising. While we might not have fought as dirty as the Soviets did at home, American actions during the Cold War are plainly more aggressive and brutal than anything the USSR did.

Not only did we absolutely destroy the countries of Vietnam and Korea in our efforts to destroy socialist governments, but our interference in Latin America and other parts of Asia is really unimaginably bloody. Most countries in the third world that weren't part of the Soviet sphere have spent time under the domination of anticommunist dictators, who violently pursued American policy aims in exchange for American protection and support.

It wasn't just Suharto in Indonesia, but also Ubico in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Pinochet in Chile, Mohammed Reza Shah in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fujimori in Peru, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Andino in Honduras and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Most colonial governments in Africa and the South African apartheid regime stayed afloat thanks to Washington bucks and Washington bullets.

We need to understand this history, because there's thick continuity between these authoritarian regimes and many of today's governments. Our own government is still doing horrible things in other countries, because our foreign policy has no concerns other than ensuring that America and our economic interests dominate all others.
Click to expand...
I would agree w/ the general point that US foreign policy of the time was over-aggressive and unintentionally self-destructive, but trying to lump the Korean war in there is utterly ridiculous. There are wars that aren't worth fighting because of the cost, but the same applies to peace. Letting NK roll over was not an option (especially considering what would become of the two countries down the line.)
Piecake said:
While the United States' motives might not have been pure, I think the intervention in Korea has generally worked out for the best, mostly because the North Korean regime is just that fucking awful.

The North Korean government controlling the whole peninsula? Yikes. I can't imagine that anyone would rather have that scenario today than the one that we have now.
Click to expand...
Get out of my head, Piecake! :)
 
F

Fancyarcher

Member
Kthulhu said:
Basically. You'd think we'd learn, but some people think we still should be the world police, despite the overwhelming evidence we suck at it.
Click to expand...

Aren't a lot of people in the states against us being world police, just because they'd rather we not get involved with major conflicts right now? At least Trump seem to partially run on isolationism, even though he obviously wasn't going to do shit about it, since the government makes a lot of its bread and butter, via country intervention
 
J

Jacob

Member
kirblar said:
I would agree w/ the general point that US foreign policy of the time was over-aggressive and unintentionally self-destructive, but trying to lump the Korean war in there is utterly ridiculous. There are wars that aren't worth fighting because of the cost, but the same applies to peace. Letting NK roll over was not an option (especially considering what would become of the two countries down the line.)
Click to expand...

Do you think that killing 20% of the population of Jeju in 1948 was necessary to stop the Soviets from taking over the whole country, or do you just not know very much about the history of Korea in the Cold War?

Edit: not disagreeing with the point that the Kims ruling the entirety of Korea would've been a worse outcome than what actually happened. Just questioning the idea that this eventual outcome (which was not predestined to happen) makes the US and South Korean strongmen immune from criticism.
 
S

Shoeless

Member
Regulus Tera said:
The United States government committed genocide against the indigenous people of North America so I'm not sure what this "hasn't spanned centuries" thing is all about.
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Fair enough. I was thinking strictly in terms of "other countries," but you're right, technically most Americans aren't even actually local to America, so I guess that counts.
 
M

MarionCB

Member
Just one of the reasons people laugh bitterly when Pompeo said the CIA will be "more vicious." The US has never been "good", or an ally of democracy; often it has been its enemy, as in this case and many others.
 
A

Angelus Errare

Banned
Kthulhu said:
Basically. You'd think we'd learn, but some people think we still should be the world police, despite the overwhelming evidence we suck at it.
Click to expand...

I mean when you think about it, America is just doing American policing on the world stage.

Maybe we should get a country whose police force isn't fucking terrible to be the world police.
 
T

theignoramus

Member
I remember hearing and reading about this from a Noam Chomsky lecture. A right wing propagandist I was arguing with at the time swore up and down that Chomsky was fabricating the level of US involvement in the massacre.
 
P

Piecake

Member
theignoramus said:
I remember hearing and reading about this from a Noam Chomsky lecture. A right wing propagandist I was arguing with at the time swore up and down that Chomsky was fabricating the level of US involvement in the massacre.
Click to expand...

I honestly don't know much about it besides this piece, but based on this article it seems that Chomsky did fabricated it considering that these documents were only declassified this week.

Sure, depending on what he said he was right, but if these documents are the only real evidence of significant US involvement, then he was, at the time, making a guess based on little to no concrete evidence.
 
E

Eylos

Banned
Valhelm said:
Unsurprising. While we might not have fought as dirty as the Soviets did at home, American actions during the Cold War are plainly more aggressive and brutal than anything the USSR did.

Not only did we absolutely destroy the countries of Vietnam and Korea in our efforts to destroy socialist governments, but our interference in Latin America and other parts of Asia is really unimaginably bloody. Most countries in the third world that weren't part of the Soviet sphere have spent time under the domination of anticommunist dictators, who violently pursued American policy aims in exchange for American protection and support.

It wasn't just Suharto in Indonesia, but also Ubico in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Pinochet in Chile, Mohammed Reza Shah in Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Fujimori in Peru, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Andino in Honduras and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Most colonial governments in Africa and the South African apartheid regime stayed afloat thanks to Washington bucks and Washington bullets.

We need to understand this history, because there's thick continuity between these authoritarian regimes and many of today's governments. Our own government is still doing horrible things in other countries, because our foreign policy has no concerns other than ensuring that America and our economic interests dominate all others.
Click to expand...

Brazil dictatorship is in that list, there was a plan from the USA elaborated by JFK to invade Brazil If the coup failed or if the president started a civil war. Nevertheless the CIA helped the coup.


"Operation Brother Sam was the codename given to Kennedy's plan to "prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba". Kennedy believed Goulart was getting too friendly with anti-American Radicalists in the Brazilian government.[42] Declassified transcripts of communications between Lincoln Gordon and the US government show that, predicting an all-out civil war, and with the opportunity to get rid of a left wing government in Brazil, Johnson authorized logistical materials to be in place and a US Navy fleet led by an aircraft carrier to support the coup against Goulart. These included ammunition, motor oil, gasoline, aviation gasoline and other materials to help in a potential civil war in US Navy tankers sailing from Aruba. About 110 tons of ammunition and CS gas were made ready in New Jersey for a potential airlift to Viracopos Airport in Campinas. Potential support was also made available in the form of an "aircraft carrier (USS Forrestal) and two guided missile destroyers (expected arrive in area by April 10), (and) four destroyers", which sailed to Brazil under the guise of a military exercise.[43]"


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d'état
 
T

theignoramus

Member
Piecake said:
I honestly don't know much about it besides this piece, but based on this article it seems that Chomsky did fabricated it considering that these documents were only declassified this week.

Sure, depending on what he said he was right, but if these documents are the only real evidence of significant US involvement, then he was, at the time, making a guess based on little to no concrete evidence.
Click to expand...

Chomsky doesnt fabricate these type of facts. Thats why he's probably one of the most knowledgable men on the planet with regard to US foreign policy over the last 60 years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/05/21/us-officials-lists-aided-indonesian-bloodbath-in-60s/ff6d37c3-8eed-486f-908c-3eeafc19aab2/?utm_term=.d1d26ac62d0d
 
H

Heshinsi

"playing" dumb? unpossible
emag said:
The US wasn't acting in a "world police" capacity in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, or in Iraq. Instead, we were waging war for our own gain.

Contrast that to our intervention in Bosnia where we acted to save lives rather than pillage or install a pro-US head of state.
Click to expand...
Intervention in Bosnia didn’t happen until images of dead white Muslims began being broadcasted live on the nightly news. The US and other western nations dragged their fucking feet until it became too much for even them to ignore. The UN’s pathetic “safe heaven” bullshit doesn’t even register in how absolutely worthless that was. Now you’ve got a similar situation happening in Myanmar, yet because it isn’t in Europe, no one can be bothered to do something about it.
 
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