Volume 12 | Issue 50 | Number 2 | Article ID 4234 | Dec 14, 2014 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus North American Universities and the 1965 Indonesian Massacre: Indonesian Guilt and Western Responsibility 北米の 大学と1965年インドネシア大虐殺 インドネシアの罪と西洋の責任 Peter Dale Scott The last century has been, unfortunately, a But if we want to address the problems of century of holocausts. The documentary “The violence and injustice, we have to seek out and Act of Killing” revives the memory — for both deal with those crucial events of global Indonesians and Americans — of one of the significance, above all those in which we are greatest: the Indonesian mass slaughter of involved – both directly and indirectly - and 1965, whose memory, for a half century, has from which we can learn. If we are willing to been perhaps the most effectively suppressed. face the truth. It is, in fact, virtually impossible to consider the film, or the massacre itself, without also “The Act of Killing” is about one of those considering, as did my poem Coming to Jakarta, crucial events, a half century ago and its the social functions of first suppressing the reverberations down to the present. The film’s most excruciating victim memories, and then director, Josh Oppenheimer, has depicted not painfully beginning to recover them. just the horror of the 1965 pogrom, but the weird craziness of today’s violent contemporary world. Chris Hedges has captured this craziness in his film review: Oppenheimer, in the film’s strangest but most psychologically astute device, persuades the killers to re-enact some of the mass murders they carried out. They don costumes—they fancy themselves to be the stars of their own life movies—and what comes out in the Anwar Congo illustrates how he used to costumed scenes of torture and kill using a strand of piano wire. Final Cut killing is the vast disconnect for Real Aps, Piraya Film AS and Novaya between the image they have of Zemlya LTD, 2012. themselves, much of it inspired by Hollywood gangster films, and the tawdry, savage and appalling T.S. Eliot wrote, “human kind/ Cannot bear crimes they committed.… The very much reality,”2 and I myself have called killers stage a scene at the end of civilization “a great conspiracy/ of organized the film in which actors playing denial.”3 There is in truth so much violence and their murdered victims hang a injustice in the world that to stay sane most of medal around the neck of [Anwar] us have to ignore or suppress a good deal of it. Congo [the film’s protagonist] 1 12 | 50 | 2 APJ | JF —who is dressed in a long, black its narrow world culture robe and standing in front of a they bathed in the blood of waterfall—and thank him for their brothers saving the country and “killing me right up through 1966 and sending me to heaven.” This bizarre fantasy’s background music, specified by Congo, is the And because Java was no longer theme from the movie “Born 4 in the belly of European Free.” power the slaughter reached an unlimited scale There is a natural tendency for western viewers to blame this appetite for violence carried to bizarre extremes on the Indonesians. Indonesians themselves have done this. I quote without colonization my country in my poetic trilogy from the great Indonesian would have ceaselessly spilled novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had the blood of its sons and earlier been imprisoned by the Dutch from daughters 1947-49. He was not killed in the great slaughter of 1965, however, he was imprisoned for fourteen years in its aftermath. One of the cultural integrity a bogey conditions of his imprisonment was that he for the countries stuffed with write a confession of his culpability, and here is capital part of what he wrote: by which free peoples are enslaved I myself am Javanese the unemployed become murderers with uniforms and badges of I was educated to Javanese ideals rank guided by the Mahabharata vast forests are torn apart at whose climax they bathe It is necessary that I emphasize in the blood of their own brothers the problem of power while other peoples who that tends to turn people into have managed to slip their bandits shackles above all if they have held it for are the nations that rule the world decades Even in the belly of Dutch and without ever knowing power Verlichting Java still glorified Aufklaerung remain in thrall 2 12 | 50 | 2 APJ | JF astute film-maker, Professor Simpson is quoted as saying: everything that has happened will live on for centuries Once more -- my apologies. 5 It was an extraordinarily rapid genocide and the Johnson administration knew about the Pramoedya’s analysis has great merit: the events as they unfolded, and they Javanese culture in its dances and shadow made a very deliberate decision to plays indeed draws on a cultural tradition intervene on the side of the honoring bloodshed, warriors, and their génocidaires. The documentary instruments. He faults this tradition for never record is clear-cut. And Kai Bird in having experienced an 18th Century his biography of the Bundy Enlightenment Verlichting( in Dutch, brothers has McGeorge Bundy Aufklaerung in German) to temper its traditions saying, basically, “I have a clear with reason. conscience. We knew what we were doing. We did what we were doing because we thought it was the right thing to do, and I sleep easy at night knowing that we But if it can be said that if Indonesia played the role that we did.”7 represented traditional culture without modern Enlightenment, Washington represented ruthless modern Enlightenment withoutThe Bundys were not alone. In June 1966, after culture. Washington assisted and paid for the the slaughter was over, the New York Times violence because it acted in a spirit of amoral commented on it with the headline, “A Gleam of Staatsraison, or untrammeled calculation for Light in Asia.” TheTimes ’ leading political state purposes, without any cultural restraints. journalist, James Reston, compared the The record is now clear that American officials discouraging news from Vietnam with "the welcomed the violence, and provided needed more hopeful developments in Asia," chiefly assistance to help carry it out and legitimate it. what he called "the savage transformation of Historian Bradley Simpson, in his important Indonesia from a pro-Chinese policy under book Economists with Guns, supplies much Sukarno to a defiantly anti-Communist policy conclusive evidence for what he calls this under General Suharto.” He added that “disgraceful performance.”6 The film itself has been faulted for not Washington is being careful not to exploring Washington’s role in the killings. I am claim any credit for this change in glad it did not: it is urgent that North the sixth most populous and one of Americans know what happened on the ground the richest nations in the world, in Indonesia in 1965, and the truth, if it is to but this does not mean that reach this audience, can only be revealed a Washington had nothing to do with little at a time. But for Americans in particular, it. There was a great deal more it is important to come to terms with the contact between the anti- American role in coup and killings. Communist forces in that country and at least one very high official In an excellent on-line essay by Errol Morris, in Washington before and during one of the film’s producers and himself an the Indonesian massacre than is 3 12 | 50 | 2 APJ | JF generally realized.8 Simpson told Errol Morris, What were the Bundys and Reston celebrating? [The U.S. Government’s] covert As Jonathan Weiner points out, it was a process operations accelerated in the whereby summer of 1964 in ways that connect with the expansion of the war in Vietnam. Johnson’s decision paramilitary groups and assorted to sign off on expanded covert thugs deputized by the country’s operations in Indonesia takes place soon-to-be dictator, General right around the time of the Gulf of Suharto, executed at least half a Tonkin incident. [In Washington] million people [probably in fact They were looking at all this as a more than a million]. Starving piece.11 prisoners were dumped into rivers alongside corpses; women were molested and raped; victims were American policies for both countries were shot, beheaded with swords, and reviewed at an important conference of March dismembered while still alive; 1965 in Baguio, the Philippines. thousands more, spared death, were forced [like Pramoedya] into In the 1970s Washington used the techniques concentration camps and prisons.9 that overthrew Sukarno to assist a similar army coup against President Allende. In this coup a CIA-backed psychological warfare group I ask you to consider seriously, however, the explicitly used the ominous words Djakarta se fact that the irrationality and madness behind acerca -- Jakarta is coming – to terrorize, what was depicted in the film “The Act of destabilize, and polarize Chile, which once had Killing” were not confined to Indonesia. been South America’s most stable and progressive democracy. Washington’s support To understand Reston’s remarks, we have to for the Indonesian regime was made clear remember that this was the era not only of the again in 1975, when “Suharto managed to gain Cold War but also of the Sino-Soviet split. All Washington’s backing” for his invasion of East three of the world’s greatest powers feared Timor, resulting in a “decades-long blood- each other; and, perhaps rightly, all three bath.”12 regarded Indonesia, whose Communist Party (the PKI) was the largest outside theHow Academic Modernization Theory Communist bloc, as a country whose allegiance Paved the Way for the Killings would be an important factor in determining the Cold War’s outcome.