Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: How about Suharto [Indonesian dictator]—he’s called a “moderate” too. Suharto, yeah—that’s the most extreme case I’ve ever seen, in fact, I’m glad you mention it. This is a really astonishing one, actually. For example, there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor a couple years ago about the great business opportunities in Indonesia, and it said: after the Indonesian government stopped a Communist revolt in 1965, the West was very eager to do business with Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto.”22 Well, who’s Indonesia’s “new moderate leader, Suharto”? Suharto is the guy who, no doubt with the backing of the United States, carried out a military coup in 1965 after which the Indonesian army slaughtered about 500,000 people within four months. Nobody knows the exact numbers—I mean, they gave 500,000, pick your number; it was mostly landless peasants.23 Well, that was very much welcomed in the West, the American media just loved it. For instance, James Reston, the New York Times’s liberal columnist, had a column I remember called, “A Gleam of Light in Asia”—things are really looking up. U.S. News and World Report had a story called, “Hope Where There Once Was None.”