Posted on 01/27/2008 3:11:35 PM PST by NormsRevenge
It was actually ‘land reform’ (as I recall many liberals called Ho Chi Minh an “agricultural reformist”, so much nicer than “Communist” don’t you think?) that caused the problems for the Communists in the first place.
Thinking they were on the verge of victory under Sukarno’s rule they started “actions” in the villages, seizing the lands belonging to “landlords” or “capitalists”, in effect anyone with a half decent landholding saw their property being stolen by cadres sent down from Jakarta. Very quickly people began to resist the Communists, by 1965 there were extensive networks of anti-Communist resistance fighting the land grabs by the Reds.
Following the abortive coup of September 1965 the Army under Suharto was able to mobilise these anti-Communist forces and the Communists were utterly routed.
It was not the army but local people who exterminated the Communists, local people very unhappy about having their land stolen by political apparatchiks.
I think "up to a million" is pretty damned bad. If that's the best you can do.....
FWIW, I had a friend in college who is Indonesian of Chinese descent. He remembers being hidden under the floorboards of his house several times, when his parents thought Suharto's thugs were coming.
They were lucky enough to be quite wealthy, and survived because they lived in a walled compound, and had a well-armed private army to protect them.
A hell of a lot of other folks weren't so lucky. They weren't communists, but they were Chinese.
Same as always ... horrible exploitation by rich landowners, and vast political corruption, and violence used to keep the uppity ones down. We all know that Communism relies on lies and oppression, but flourishes because communists aren't the first in the area to use lies, corruption, and oppression.
Communism works because it exploits legitimate grievances. That's why it's popular in the poorer areas of Mexico, for example.
Forgive me for my ignorance, but why was Suharto targeting the ethnic Chinese? Were they grouped with the Communists?
Communism was a convenient excuse -- the real issues appear to be more class- and ethnically-based. There's a lot of backstory, including racial tensions and Indonesia's colonial history.
Wiki offers the following discussion on Chinese Indonesians. As always, there were a lot of reasons, not least of which was that the Chinese were fairly dominant in the Indonesian economy.
Yeah, that’d work. Like it takes so many millions of petro dollars to wire up a suicide jacket.
It’s the ideology that breeds the malcontents. Life is always about dealing with injustice. There will never be a fully and completely just and equal society or culture or community.
Only those living on their knees with their sucks grafted to the propaganda spigot of the socialist utopianists swallow that kind of silliness.
The Chinese did suffer disproportionately under the anti-Communist purges but unfortunately they were disproportionately represented in the Communist party, as they were in Malaya a decade earlier. It was very foolish for such an industrious hardworking people to get invoved with such an ideology but perhaps they thought in a Communist society aligned with China they might get a fairer deal. Sad that as usual they became the scapegoats for legitimate anger as they were in 1998, the Chinese are the Jews of SE Asia. I am glad to say their position is much better nowadays and hopefully that will continue.
It wasn’t only the Chinese who were victims however, by the time Suharto came to power there was a nascent multi-sided civil war already raging in central and east Java and in Bali. Chinese, Balinese, Madurese, Javanese, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, rural, urban, Communist, Islamist etc they were all at each other’s throats due to Sukarno’s misrule.
Suharto and the Army exploited this chaos and united the disparate groups to fight the Communists, it was an awful time but once order was restored Indonesia had a much more peaceful and prosperous future compared to the nightmare a Communist takeover would have been.
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