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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
In a September 2014 address to the nation, President Obama attacked ISIL (or ISIS) as “terrorists… unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children.” But of course such terrorism in the last half-century is hardly “unique.” Nor is it unprecedented. Still less is it confined to America's foes. In fact the first major Muslim extermination campaign against civilians killed without trial for their “Westernness,” occurred a half century ago, on a far, far vaster scale, and with active American support and encouragement.
1 “President Obama: ‘We Will Degrade and Ultimately Destroy ISIL,‘” The White House Blog, September 10, 2014.
2 Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 208. Contemporary estimates are discussed by Robert Cribb, and compacted into an assessment of “as low as 200,000 or as high as one million” (Robert Cribb, “Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966,” Asian Survey, July/August 2002, 559). Wikipedia suggests that the present consensus estimate of deaths is 500,000.
3 For details, see Nathaniel Mehr, Constructive Bloodbath in Indonesia: The United States, Great Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-1966 (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Press, 2009), 49-53, 100.
4 International Institute of Social History “1965: The Forgotten Holocaust of Indonesia,” commemorative event of October 2005. A better word is needed for a campaign of mass political killing, a term analogous to genocide but explicitly highlighting the political goals. No such term currently exists. I propose the term “policide” (the killing of many) but will also use the awkwardly suitable term “Holocaust” in this essay: Stalin's campaign against the kulaks can also be called a policide, but hardly a Holocaust. Estimates of the number killed in Stalin's campaign vary widely, but even so it appears that the primary effort was to deport rather than kill them.
5 Isabel Hilton, “Our bloody coup in Indonesia,” Guardian, July 31, 2001. Cf. Matthew Jones, Conflict and confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, and the creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mehr, Constructive Bloodbath in Indonesia.
6 My essay, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” was officially banned in Suharto's Indonesia. (Jonathon Green, Encyclopedia of Censorship [New York: Facts on File, 2005], 278).
7 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 260.
8 Guy J. Pauker, “The Role of the Military in Indonesia,” in John H. Johnson, ed., The role of the military in underdeveloped countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 221-23 (“strike”); William Kintner and Joseph Kornfeder, The New Frontier of War [London: Frederick Muller, 1963], pp. 233, 237-8 (“liquidating”). Other examples in Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, 239-264; Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development,” in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years' Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1975), pp. 227-32.
9 Church Committee Hearings, p. 941; cf. p. 955.
10 Armando Siahaan, “Historian Claims West Backed Post-Coup Mass Killings in '65,” Jakarta Globe, January 9, 2009,
11 Declassified Documents Quarterly Catalogue, 1982, 001786 [DOS Memo for President of July 17, 1964; italics in original].
12 Michael Wines, “C.I.A. Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge,” New York Times, July 12, 1990.
13 Jessica T. Mathews, “The Road from Westphalia,” New York Review of Books,“ March 19, 2015.
14 Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 99, 139.
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