Posted on 10/17/2017 4:57:19 PM PDT by Ennis85
The US knew people were being "delivered for slaughter" during a political purge in Indonesia during the 1960s, declassified documents reveal. At least 500,000 people were killed between 1965 and 1966, after the army and local Muslim militia went on a rampage following an attempted coup. It was one of the worst massacres of the 20th century, but, at the time, Washington remained silent. But these newly released memos reveal they had detailed knowledge of events.
The documents show US staff describing them in telegrams as "slaughter" and at times "indiscriminate killings", exposing an intimate knowledge of the Indonesian army's operations to "completely clean up" the Communist Party and leftist groups. It is thought as many as three million could have lost their lives within a year.
The violence - which was a taboo topic in Indonesia for almost 50 years and remains extremely sensitive even today - was unleashed after communists were accused of killing six generals at the end of September 1965, Rebecca Henschke reports from Jakarta. It was the peak of the Cold War, and the struggle for power between the Communists, the military and Islamist groups was in full swing.
Five decades later, the contents of the US telegrams are chilling. According to one from US embassy staff in East Java, dated 28 December 1965, "victims are taken out of populous areas before being killed and bodies are buried rather than thrown in river" as they had been previously. The telegram says prisoners suspected of being communists are also "being delivered to civilians for slaughter". Another document compiled by the US embassy's first secretary, dated 17 December 1965, was a detailed list of the communist leaders across the country and whether they had been arrested or killed.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
They mean Democrat President Lyndon Johnson. Total putz.
LBJ was president. How many people would have communist killed? You would never find out.
Sukarno. Thought he was a good guy.
500k Comunists dead vs 20-50m dead from a Communists revolution if they had won. Sounds like an appropriate trade off.
Hollywood even made a movie about it, The Year of Living Dangerously, sympathetic to the commies, of course.
Secret? I remember hearing about this back in 1966!
Maybe this setback to the worldwide march of Communism is what drew Obama’s mother to Indonesia, to help re-ignite the revolution.
She was raised as a Communist by her parents.
“We would like to focus on what went wrong as a society that we were able to conduct such violence and such killings in such large numbers in such a short time.”
Dude...you’re muzzies.
Wasn’t annexation of half of Papua a pay off to fight Communist?
“completely clean up” the Communist Party and leftist groups.
He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, when I said it was communists...
This is no surprise. And the massacres were well known at the time, but there was no access there to the foreign press. It was a dictatorship before and after.
Indonesia was its own country, non-aligned, with no US forces or ability to influence their internal policy.
“I had a fairly high up fellow at a government research facility tell me this had little to do with “communists” and everything to do with a purge of Chinese.”
This is not unlikely, and besides that it is not contradictory. A lot of the overseas Chinese were tempted to go with Mao. It does not seem that way today, but at the time this was so. The Malayan insurgency of 1948-1960 was conducted by Communist Chinese, and opposed by the Muslim Malays. Part of the appeal of communism was a promise to protect the Chinese from the natives. Even Lee Kwan Yew’s (father of an independent Singapore) political party was labor-leftist in those days.
Overseas Chinese switched en masse to anticommunism in the course of the 1960’s. A great deal has been forgotten.
“(barf alert)”
Screw that. “PRIDE ALERT!!!”. I’m damn PROUD of our country, LBJ or whoever, for dealing with the Communists in Indonesia. And did anyone bother to try to figure out just where HALF A MILLION Communists came from? Did they just get converted after a Friday afternoon at the mosque? I think not...more likely they had some ‘help’ identifying their ‘Inner Socialist’...help from our enemy.
As far as I can tell, the ONLY REASON the Left has an issue with this, as with every other country we saved from the Sickle is that they have NO CLUE as to the stakes involved with the Cold War - either that, or the Left understood the stakes, but simply wanted to LOSE THE COLD WAR (which I’m sure was the case and still have no reason to doubt it).
Overseas Chinese switched en masse to anticommunism in the course of the 1960’s. A great deal has been forgotten.
What started as an anti-Communist purge turned into an ethnic cleansing exercise against Indonesian ethnic Chinese, who were wealthier and occupied the merchant class, who were feared of being close to Communist China.
We already had a Southeast Asia communist problem that had our full attention. It was called Vietnam or has the author of the article forgotten?
Indonesia was a leftist state under Sukarno, with close ties to the Soviet Union and China. There was a large communist party in Indonesia. The official policy was anti-western, anti-colonialist, and economic policy was socialist, or to the degree such could be imposed on such a complex state. Indonesia was getting Soviet military aid and advisors.
Indonesia also supported communist insurgents in Borneo (fighting British interests), etc.
So no surprise about having a large number of communists. They were the main supporters of Sukarno. When Sukarno fell in a coup the other organized forces in Indonesia had to eliminate them.
Indonesian history and politics is very complex.
It wasn’t battlefield fighting. It was a lot of arrests and a mass murder. It’s a little bit flawed logic to commit a mass murder to prevent a communist murder.
No matter what the motives, anyone who arrests and murders someone based on their politics is no good. Thank god for the 2nd amendment.
And this is the Indonesia that produced Obama.
The U.S. was engaged in Vietnam, a war that liberals increasingly despised & were turning the youth against it who ion turn were demonstrating against it. Johnson sure as heck didn’t want to start another war in Indonesia. But this also means that England knew what was going on as well. Unless their diplomats were blind they surely communicated what was happening in Indonesia to their government. Matter of fact diplomats from various countries that had Embassies there had to have relayed the very same information. Just the BBC trying to make America as the only silent government.
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