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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Forgotten Holocaust: The 1965-66 Massacre Against Indonesia’s Communists</h1>By Nikos Mottas – Sep 30, 2021</div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p><img src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vbV2AhOBXXE/X3W1NbdB5XI/AAAAAAAAIsY/9Sqc01cXSXMuqEENH3aO77rk59PNEbXgACLcBGAsYHQ/w368-h246/suharto%2Bimperialists.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="367" height="246"><br></p><p>Without
any doubt, the WWII Holocaust and the 1915 Armenian genocide consist
the two largest mass slaughters of the 20th century. They are crimes
which must never be erased from the collective memory of the peoples, no
matter how many decades will pass.</p>
<p>However, there are also less known sides of History, the “forgotten”
holocausts to which the bourgeois historiography has given little
importance, either by downgrading them as insignificant details of world
history or by distorting their true dimensions.</p>
<p>A major example of such a “forgotten” holocaust is the mass slaughter
of the communists in Indonesia by Suharto’s dictatorship during the
1965-66.</p>
<p>The criminal called General Suharto was the man who, with the
tolerance and silence of the US and British governments, was responsible
for one of the most barbaric bloodshed of the previous century: the
mass slaughter of more than 1,000,000 people, mostly communists, members
and supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia [1].</p>
<p>If we want to have a comprehensive image of the social and political
conditions that led to the 1965-66 massacre, we must refer to the
historical background of developments in Indonesia after the end of
Second World War. These developments are related to the role of the
British and Dutch imperialists, the conditions under which the
independence of the Republic of Indonesia took place, the formation of
the class struggle in the country and, of course, the position of
Indonesia in the post-WWII imperialist plans which led to the active
involvement of the US in the domestic political processes.</p>
<p>In the mid of 1960s, the sharpening of the intra-bourgeois
contradictions (with the steady interference of US-British governments)
led to a series of military coups and counter-coups that ultimately
resulted in the overthrow of the elected president Sukarno. In the
morning of October 2, 1965, numerous military vehicles were patrolling
at the streets of Jakarta in order to capture the insurgents and lead
them to prison. A day earlier, a failed coup attempt had been organised
by the commander of the presidential guard Colonel Untung. From his
side, in a message transmitted via radio, the Colonel had justified the
coup attempt by arguing that its role was to prevent a conspiracy
planned by the CIA and army officials to overthrow President Sukarno.</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/manufacturing-consent-for-war-70-years-of-cia-coups-assassinations-false-flag-operations-and-mass-murder/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: Manufacturing Consent for War: 70 Years of CIA Coups, Assassinations, False Flag Operations and Mass Murder</a></p>
<p>The army crushed the failed coup’s insurgents, with a general called
Suharto playing a decisive role. This man would subsequently override
Sukarno’s leadership thus becoming the new powerful leader of the
country. Suharto and his imperialist allies pointed the Communist Party
of Indonesia as the source of the failed coup—after all, the
well-organised and popular Communist Party had played a leading role in
the anticolonial struggle and had significant influence in Sukarno’s
policies.</p>
<img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ocOZirrFXW8/Wc_Tjvh43ZI/AAAAAAAADbs/mBeAcFV2qko5PyYLLPZdAk8rhqWY6tDOACLcBGAs/s640/anticommunist%2Bmassacre%2Bin%2BIndonesia.jpg" alt="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="452" height="268">Indonesian
Army massacred thousands of communists and Communist Party supporters
and sympathisers after overthrowing the Sukarno government in 1965. File
photo.
<p>The rise of General Suharto—a man who had the support of the US
imperialists—in Indonesia’s leadership led to unprecedented violent
persecutions against communists, including mass killings, executions,
tortures and every kind of barbaric act. Even the CIA had admitted in a
subsequent report that the 1965-66 events were “one of the worst mass
murders of the 20th century” [2]. Of course, both the CIA and the
British intelligence services played an active role in the massacre by
supporting the Suharto regime. Information about the role of the
governments of the United States, Britain and Australia in the
anticommunist holocaust of Indonesia were unveiled years later.</p>
<p>On May 17, 1990, based on testimonies by personnel who had worked at
the US embassy in Jakarta during the 1960s, an article by the States
News Service of Washington DC reported that the US embassy had provided
Suharto regime lists with over 5,000 names of communists and supporters
of the Communist Party [3].</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/former-cia-director-mike-pompeo-was-reportedly-obsessed-with-killing-assange/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was Reportedly Obsessed with Killing Assange</a></p>
<p>The role of the imperialists in the Indonesia massacre has been
confirmed by academics and researchers. For example, Professor Brad
Simpson of Princeton University and author of <em>Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968</em>,
has said that the US and British governments did “everything in their
power” to ensure that the Indonesian army could carry out the mass
killings [4]. The massacre against the communists in Indonesia was
followed by an organised plan for the entry of foreign monopoly capital
in the country. According to the documentary <em>The New Rulers of the World</em>
(2001) by Australian journalist and researcher John Pilger, the
dictatorial regime of Suharto proceeded to business deals with known
monopoly and banking groups such as General Motors, Daimler-Benz, Chase
Manhtattan Bank, Siemens, Standard Oil, etc.</p>
<p><strong>Imperialism tries to erase its bloody past in order to safeguard its future</strong><br><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OpflbnRGQbA/Wc_UHUY1uKI/AAAAAAAADb0/xk92rkK_wiEqwG0quch9uiQY2-1bt74OQCLcBGAs/s320/Suharto%2BNixon%2B1970.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="320" height="233"></p><p>The
massacre of the communists in Indonesia by the authoritarian Suharto
regime, with the support and tolerance of the US-British imperialists,
consists one of the darkest pages of the 20th century. It consists a
deliberately “forgotten” holocaust that the bourgeois propaganda tries
to downgrade as a “collateral damage” of the Cold War. They try to
downgrade the historical significance of the 1965-66 massacre of
Indonesia’s communists because it is one more example that exposes
imperialist brutality.</p>
<p>Imperialism tries to erase its bloody past in order to safeguard its
future. For that reason, the imperialists distort history in every
possible way. Because they know the actual power that the working class,
the proletariat in every country, has. That is why the working people,
the people, must know their history and fight against distortion and
oblivion, in order to have a powerful weapon in the struggle against the
big enemy of humanity which is the rotten exploitative system that
generates barbarity, poverty and wars.</p>
<p><strong>NOTES:</strong><br>
[1] The Communist Party of Indonesia, the first one established in Asia
(1920), reached during the 1960s a significant party strength with
approximately 3,000,000 members, especially in the Java region. However,
opportunist political choices by its leadership led to the subsequent
weakening of the party ties with broader masses. Despite its
organisational strength and the extraordinary large number of its
members, the CPI could not avoid the trap that had been set by both its
domestic enemies and their imperialist allies.</p>
<p>[2] Blumenthal, T.L.H. McCormack (Ed.), <em>The Legacy of Nuremberg: Civilising Infuence or Institutionalised Vengeance?</em> International Humanitarian Law Services, Martinus Nijhoff.</p>
<p>[3] <em>CIA Tie Asserted in Indonesia Purge</em>, The New York Times, July 12, 1990.</p>
<p>[4] <em>The 1965-1966 Indonesian Killings Revisited</em>, Conference at the National University of Singapore, 17-19 June 2009.</p>
<p><em>Featured image: General Suharto, who became the president of
Indonesia after overthrowing the government of President Sukarno in 1965
and massacring thousands of communists, with US President Richard Nixon
at the White House, May 1970. The US actively supported the 1965 coup.
Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation</em></p>
<p>(<a href="http://www.idcommunism.com/2017/09/the-forgotten-holocaust-1965-66.html?fbclid=IwAR2zN7yjGqkUYU2E-FQrv5kszT7rIy8C4RWgCWowRJbDh0m3oIsb8CIbPi0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">In Defense of Communism</a>)</p>
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