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North American Universities and the 1965 Indonesian Massacre: Indonesian Guilt and Western Responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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The last century has been, unfortunately, a century of holocausts. The documentary “The Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both Indonesians and Americans — of one of the greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, the social functions of first suppressing the most excruciating victim memories, and then painfully beginning to recover them.
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References
Notes
1 An earlier version of this essay was a talk delivered March 27, 2014, as the F.R. Scott Memorial Lecture at Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec.
2 T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 176.
3 Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness: a poem for the year 2000 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 137.
4 Chris Hedges, “The Act of Killing.”
5 Peter Dale Scott, Minding the Darkness: a poem for the year 2000 (New York: New Directions, 2000), 212-14; excerpting from Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “My Apologies, in the Name of Experience,” Indonesia, Volume 61 (April 1996), 1-14. I think that the translator merits credit.
6 Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with guns: authoritarian development and U.S.-Indonesian relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 189. He quotes Howard Federspiel, the US State Department's intelligence staffer for Indonesia, as saying, “No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered” (Ibid., citing Federspiel quote in Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents Say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesians,” States News Service, May 19, 1990.
7 Bradley Simpson, in Errol Morris, “The Forgotten Mass Killings That Should Have Stopped the Vietnam War.”
8 New York Times, June 19, 1966.
9 Jonah Weiner, “The Weird Genius of ‘The Act of Killing’,” New Yorker Culture Desk, July 16, 2013.
10 Cf. General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's military role in Vietnam (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 173: “The fact that the United States had committed its power in Vietnam was undoubtedly a major factor in the success of the countercoup.”
11 Errol Morris, “The Murders of Gonzago.”
12 Jussi Hanhimäki, The flawed architect: Henry Kissinger and American foreign policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 401.
13 For the coup, see e.g. Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs (Vancouver, B.C.) 58.2 (Summer 1985); Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, editor, Violence and the state in Suharto's Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2001); Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and its Discontents: U.S. Double-Mindedness About Massacre,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: Ending the Culture of Impunity (London: Zed Press, 2004). Simpson is quite dismissive of myself and other authors who have studied U.S. involvement in the coup itself (as opposed to its consequences), with this passing comment: “American historians in particular have spilled much ink on the question of Washington's involvement in these events” (Simpson, Economists with Guns, 173; cf. 311n2).
14 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 6.
15 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 8.
16 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 26.
17 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 29.
18 Benedict Anderson, Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 15, No. 4, April 15, 2013. Anderson recalls the comparable killer from Niger Oumarou Ganda, aka Edward G. Robinson, “the master actor of gangsters in the Hollywood of that era.”
19 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 149.
20 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 28.
21 Simpson, Economists with Guns, 85.
22 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: wealth, empire, and the future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xii-xiv.
23 David Webster, Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a decolonizing world (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 91. Subroto attended McGill on a fellowship from the CIA-funded World University Service (John Simons, the Executive Director of the WUS, was “a full-fledged CIA agent” (Karen M. Paget, “From Cooperation to Covert Action: The United States Government and Students, 1940-1952,” in Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds. The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: the state-private network [London and New York: Routledge, 2006], 77). The WUS cannot be simply dismissed as no more than a CIA asset: In the 1970s, for example, it helped relocate in other countries numbers of Chilean academics who had fled from the Pinochet regime.
24 Naomi Verbong Roland, “Funding Transatlantic Exchange between the Arts and Politics”, Transatlanitc Perspectives, 12 September 2012 (updated 4 October 2012). Cf. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 134-43; Jason Epstein, “The CIA and the Intellectuals”, New York Review of Books, 20 April 1967.
25 Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967”; citing former U.S. Military Attaché Willis G. Ethel.
26 Damien Kingsbury, Power Politics and the Indonesian Military (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 199.
27 Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). A parallel “McGill Mafia” of religious scholars worked to channel traditional Muslim energy into economic development. McGill graduate Abdul Mukti Ali, who became Suharto's Minister of Religion, “called on local religious leaders (ulamas) to transform themselves into ‘heavenly technocrats’…. Technocrats trained at the planning bureau and American universities underpinned one part of the New Order's structure of power; religious scholars trained at McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies underpinned another” (Webster, Fire and the Full Moon, 160).
28 Parmar, Foundations of the American Century.
29 Wikipedia, “Bob Hasan.”
30 Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi, ed., Deforestation, environment, and sustainable development: a comparative analysis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 10; citing Schwartzman and Kingston, 1997, 27-28.
31 In contrast most of the Indonesianists at Cornell, such as George Kahin, Ben Anderson, and Ruth McVey, adopted a more critical view. As a result these academics became in time increasingly alienated from both Jakarta and Washington.
32 See Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet's Economists : the Chicago School of Economics in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
33 Frank C. Child, “Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour,” The New Republic (December 4, 1961), 14–16. After ensuing protests from Diem the MSU program was shut down in 1962.
34 Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.”
35 Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967;” citing 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.
36 Guy J. Pauker, Communist Prospects in Indonesia (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, November 1964, RM-5753-PR).
37 Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
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